We are pleased to announce that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has funded a three-year project to continue the long running Scholarly Communication Institute, formerly held at the University of Virginia from 2003-2013. The new SCI will be hosted by Duke University Libraries in the Research Triangle region of North Carolina, in close coordination with partners from UNC Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, North Carolina Central University, and the Triangle Research Libraries Network.

The Triangle SCI is not a traditional conference, but rather a forum for teams of individuals from diverse backgrounds to define shared challenges, strategize creative solutions, and forge new collaborations, in a spirit of bold and open experimentation.

Each year the SCI will invite 3 to 5 Working Groups organized around a project or problem that concerns scholarly communications. Applicants will propose Working Groups of 3 to 8 individuals — scholars, information scientists, librarians, publishers, technologists, and others from both inside and outside academia (i.e., journalists, industry, non-profit organizations, museums, independent researchers) — who bring a wide range of perspectives. Over the course of four days, participants will work both within and across groups, to address individual and shared objectives under a broad organizing theme.

The theme for SCI 2014 is Scholarship and the Crowd.

The goal of the SCI is not to schedule breakthroughs, but to create conditions that favor them. It will bring diverse groups together and provide a combination of structured and unstructured time to brainstorm, organize, and jump-start ideas, to experiment and solve problems, workshop ideas, and even begin to build.

This will be an opportunity both to talk and to do.

Participants will have the freedom to set their own agenda, foster intellectual risk taking, engage in collaborative and creative speculation, bridge institutional divides, cultivate new networks, and discover common ground, all without fear of failure or the burden of having to produce immediate, concrete, sustainable deliverables.

The first Triangle SCI is planned for November 2014. A request for proposals and other information about the Institute can be found at trianglesci.org.