The Asilomar Report on Database Research
  The database research community is rightly proud of success in basic research, and its remarkable record of technology transfer. Now the field needs to radically broaden its research focus to attack the issues of capturing, storing, analyzing, and presenting the vast array of online data. The database research community should embrace a broader research agenda -- broadening the definition of database management to embrace all the content of the Web and other online data stores, and rethinking our fundamental assumptions in light of technology shifts. To accelerate this transition, we recommend changing the way research results are evaluated and presented. In particular, we advocate encouraging more speculative and long-range work, moving conferences to a poster format, and publishing all research literature on the Web. 
Phil Bernstein, Michael Brodie, Stefano Ceri, David DeWitt, Mike   Franklin, Hector Garcia-Molina, Jim Gray, Jerry Held, Joe...