The Rebus Foundation is thrilled to announce that we have received new funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the continued development of Rebus Ink, a tool designed as a centralized hub for researchers in the arts, humanities, and social sciences to work with large sets of written and audiovisual content. Rebus Ink supports scholars to create and manage coherent workflows that better enable them to build connections and draw insights from their collected sources.
Our research and engagement with scholars, librarians and other members of the scholarly research ecosystem have indicated that there is a clear need for better tools to help scholars manage their digital materials, and we’re excited to continue working with them to solve the challenges they face. By providing a platform driven by the needs of scholars, and underpinned by the shared values of the open scholarly research movement, we can make it easier for researchers to get more value out of the digital materials that are vital to their scholarship.
Further, we are committed to undertaking our work while following open standards, prioritizing user privacy and control, and practising transparency as an organisation. At Rebus, how we go about doing our work is as important as what we choose to do. We seek to be advocates for innovative digital research and publishing practices, and behave as good actors in the scholarly research ecosystem, working closely with individual researchers, as well as libraries, aggregators, and publishers who share our values and vision of an open future.
With new funding secured for the next two years, we are also pleased to be expanding our team. We will be adding a new product manager and a business development manager to join us as we launch and grow Rebus Ink, and explore ways to ensure its long term viability as a vital piece of open research infrastructure.
This grant marks the third award from The Mellon Foundation in support of Rebus Ink, which began in 2017 with a prototype of a monograph reader and personal library, and a published whitepaper exploring the scholarly publishing ecosystem through the eyes of researchers, librarians and publishers: An Open Approach to Scholarly Reading.
We are deeply grateful to The Mellon Foundation for their continued investment in innovative, mission-driven solutions to the challenges facing scholars, librarians and publishers in the humanities, in the pursuit of more equitable and just knowledge systems worldwide.