Report on the Workshop on Explainability in Information Retrieval (WExIR) at SIGIR 2025

The first Workshop on Explainability in Information Retrieval (WExIR) took place at SIGIR 2025 in Padua, Italy. As chairs, we hoped to engage the sub-community working on transparency, interpretability and explainability in information retrieval, to identify the main challenges and an initial roadmap for research. The workshop was a success, not only in number of participants, but especially in the level of engagement from the whole room. Apart from keynotes and regular presentations and posters, we had two interactive panels with a `hot seat' for anyone from the audience to join as well as two plenary discussion sessions. We worked on a shared document throughout the whole workshop to collect a shared research agenda. This report presents a summary of those notes. We plan to follow-up with the community in 2026 with another edition of the workshop, a survey paper, and the preparation of a special issue on the topic. Date: 17 July 2025. Website: https://xirworkshop.github.io.