Designed as a Trinity platform and launched in 2019 with a commitment to diamond open access, Harvard Data Science Review (HDSR) unites the strengths of a premier research journal, a cutting-edge educational publication, and a popular magazine to provide a crossroads at which fundamental data science research and education intersect and interact directly with societally important applications. This eight-year experimentation offers initial evidence that such a model can be intellectually viable, societally impactful, and financially sustainable, because it better captures the intellectual, pedagogical, and economic values created by the three Cs that define scholarly publication. That is, statistically speaking, a scholarly publication is where the content is timely and of the highest quality, created by an ever-expanding community of the best minds — authors, reviewers, and editors — committed to a shared culture of rigorous pursuit and critical thinking. Extending beyond the page into podcasts, conferences, and online programs, it offers a versatile and agile model for scholarly publications in the age of AI, especially as our global society undergoes an “AGI realignment” (Meng, HDSR Spring Editorial, 2026): of the roles, functions, and interactions of Academia, Government, and Industry. With respect to the more commonly known AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), the talk ends with a provocation: the scholarly publishing community sits on a hidden treasure for building AGI. Deciding whether to offer this treasure likely takes more than scholarly debate, since its consequences could be lauded (e.g., supporting open access) or dreaded (e.g., given existing fears about AI).
