Abstract Weed scientists face complex and difficult challenges. Within our discipline, we must increase the sustainability of current weed management approaches and help respond to invasive plants as a component of global change. There also are major challenges that we share with other agricultural disciplines, such as mounting comprehensive efforts to address the problems of current agriculture. We believe that any effective response to these challenges will require public work, i.e., projects in which a diverse group of people work together—across lines of difference (professional, cultural, etc.)—to produce broad-based, systemic innovations that meet complex challenges. We propose that weed scientists should join relevant public-work projects by practicing “public scholarship.” We define public scholarship as original, creative, peer-evaluated intellectual work that is fully integrated in a public-work project. By full integration we mean that the scholar's work serves to fuel the social (i.e., collect...