The MIT Press has announced the launch of the Knowledge Futures Group (KFG), a first-of-its kind collaboration between a publisher and an academic lab to transform how research information is created and shared.
This joint initiative of the MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab seeks to redefine research publishing from a closed, sequential process, into an open, community-driven one. They aim to develop and deploy technologies that form part of a new open knowledge ecosystem, one that fully exploits the capabilities of the web to accelerate discovery and the transmission of knowledge.
The effort has thus far received $1.5 million for its initial year of operation, through the generous support of Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and a member of the MIT Media Lab's Advisory Council; smaller project-specific gifts from Siegel Family Endowment, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Protocol Labs; and several individual donors.
One of the KFG's first projects is PubPub, an open authoring and publishing platform developed by Travis Rich and Thariq Shihipar while they were graduate students at the Media Lab. The platform socialises the process of knowledge creation by integrating conversation, annotation, and versioning into a digital publication. The KFG is also incubating the Underlay, an open, distributed knowledge store conceived by Danny Hillis and Sam Klein, and being developed with Joel Gustafson. The Underlay is architected to capture, connect, and archive publicly available knowledge and its provenance.
The initiative will be based in close proximity to both the MIT Media Lab and MIT Press at the Cambridge Innovation Center in Kendall Square.
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