Dear colleague,

Registration for R2R 2027 is open.

“Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?”

This line from Harold Pinter has stayed with me while we have been building the programme for the next Researcher to Reader Conference. At first, it sounds like a wonderful British wit. It also captures the mood of research remarkably well.

The known is expanding quickly. Access to knowledge is increasingly open to everyone. Artificial intelligence has changed how we search, summarise, translate, generate, recommend, review and use knowledge.

The unknown may be expanding even faster. The world has changed from order to disorder. Geopolitics is reshaping scientific collaboration, research security, funding and access to knowledge. Political review is pushing peer review to the margins. Increasingly, black-boxed technologies are changing how evidence is produced and consumed.

And then there is a third category: the questions still waiting to be asked.

R2R 2027 begins now by asking you “Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?”

On 23–24 February 2027, around 200 researchers, research managers, librarians, publishers, technologists and others who make the research system work will gather at BMA House in London.

For two days, we will examine how research can become better, how worthwhile ideas can travel faster, and how scholarly communication and research management can help accelerate progress.

Some of the questions running through this year’s programme are:

When machines become participants in scholarly communication, where should human judgement sit? How do provenance, attribution and trust work when both people and machines create, discover and evaluate knowledge?

How does responsibility travel through the research record? From editorial decisions and peer review to corrections, integrity signals and the evidence readers eventually encounter.

What infrastructure does research need now? What should be shared, what should remain distributed, who governs it, who funds it, and what the next generation of open research infrastructure has to say?

Who is the reader? A researcher, a practitioner, a policymaker, a curious citizen, an AI agent? Increasingly, the answer may be all of them. Research communication will have to become considerably more imaginative.

And what happens when research assessment moves upstream? Can the way we think about impact, evidence and value improve research design itself, before publication even enters the picture?

These questions connect sessions on human judgement and AI; research integrity and editorial transparency; open research infrastructure; communication and discovery; readers beyond academia; and new approaches to research assessment.

They will also connect the different formats that make R2R distinctive.

Our Collaborative Workshops will tackle concrete problems over three meetings. Participants will explore how corrections can travel reliably through the scholarly record; test portable signals of trust beyond peer review; prototype research communication for people and AI-mediated discovery; investigate who consumes Open Access research beyond academia; and examine how impact ambitions can shape evidence and research design.

A new format, the Plenary Lightning Talk, will bring crisp ten-minute ideas onto the main stage. Ten minutes is long enough to challenge an assumption, present some evidence and start an argument. It also gives PowerPoint rather less time to become comfortable.

Our formal Debate returns, alongside plenary presentations, roundtables and plenty of opportunities to challenge speakers and one another.

There will be coffee, lunch and our evening reception. A surprising amount of us still enjoy communicating in person.

R2R works best when people arrive ready to contribute, question, compare experiences and occasionally change their minds. Past participants have consistently told us how valuable they find that mixture of serious discussion and the R2R unusually open atmosphere. In the Open Science arena, R2R takes on the responsibility of opening minds and hearts.

Join us in London and see for yourself.

We continue to work hard to make R2R accessible to academics and people earlier in their careers. For R2R 2027, we are again offering academic rates, reduced rates for returning registrants and an early-bird discount.

The programme will continue to develop over the coming weeks, with further speakers and sessions to be announced.

The known will keep expanding. So will the unknown. But perhaps the most interesting territory is everything we have yet to think of asking.

I hope you will explore it with us in February.

With best wishes,

Tiberius Ignat
Conference Director
Researcher to Reader