Carl Lagoze and Pamela Moss will pioneer new collaborative research infrastructures that transcend limits of conventional publishing

The way we share information is evolving at breakneck speeds. The internet offers seemingly boundless possibilities for knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Academic research, however, often remains bogged down, presenting results in conventional, static research papers. By the time of formal publication, the findings can be out of date, and duplication and redundancy abounds.

Dr. Pamela Moss (U-M School of Education) and Dr. Carl Lagoze (U-M School of Information) are working with colleagues to address this problem with a new type of collaborative research framework – a so-called “living research synthesis infrastructure,” or LRSI.

Moss and Lagoze envision an LRSI as a “dynamic socio-technical environment” where a network of researchers and other educational professionals can partner over time on research initiatives. Through this environment, they hope to pioneer a digital collaboration method that transcends methodological, theoretical, disciplinary, professional and contextual boundaries.

The concept will provide an architecture far more nimble than traditional research papers, and will enable participants to share data that can be continuously updated as more research becomes available.

“In the context of research, knowledge infrastructure is the foundation for the basic pursuits through which we develop knowledge about the world,” says Lagoze. “Before and at the onset of the digital age, the typical object of this infrastructure was the scholarly book or article, an artifact fixed in ink or bits. Yet, the digital context enables a transformation into a new type of scholarly object, one that is dynamic, collaborative and evolving.”

The duo received a $999,969 Lyle Spencer Research Award for the project “Prototyping and Evaluating a Living Research Synthesis Infrastructure,” funded by the Spencer Foundation.

- UMSI News Service