CGScholar
The CGScholar Project is an ongoing investigation into how social media architectures can be reimagined for scholarly communication and knowledge exchange. Begun in 2009 and developed at the University of Illinois Research Park, CGScholar prototypes a digital ecosystem that combines publishing, community interaction, and peer review within a single environment.
Funded in part by the U.S. Department of Education, Illinois Ventures, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, CGScholar has been used in diverse settings—from universities and research institutes to schools and non-governmental organizations. Through these applications, we study how knowledge can be produced collaboratively, validated democratically, and distributed sustainably. CGScholar serves as the Lab’s living test environment for exploring new models of academic authorship, feedback, and value exchange, anchoring our broader effort to design equitable digital knowledge infrastructures.
We aim to synthesize these use cases to build a platform that can become a trusted marketplace for knowledge work, one that rigorously democratizes the process of knowledge-making, rewards participants, and offers a secure basis for the sustainable creation and distribution of digital knowledge artifacts.
Our premise has been that media platforms—pre-digital and now also digital—have often not been designed to structure and facilitate a rigorous, democratic, and a sustainable knowledge economy. The Common Ground Media Lab seeks to leverage our own platform – CGScholar – to explore alternatives based on extended dialogue, reflexive feedback, and formal knowledge ontologies. We are developing AI-informed measures of knowledge artifacts, knowledge actors, and digital knowledge communities. We aim to build a trusted marketplace for knowledge work, that rewards participants and sustains knowledge production.
With 27,000 published works and 200,000 users, we have come a long way since our first web app twenty years ago. But we still only see this as the beginning.
As a not-for-profit, we are fundamentally guided by mission: to support the building of better societies and informed citizenries through rigorous and inclusive social knowledge practices, offering in-person and online scholarly communication spaces.