The US National Science Foundation has just announced two webinars following up on a recent "Dear Colleague" letter (see https://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf23126 ). Here are some details from the announcement,. Note that the webinars will be recorded, and the recordings available following the sessions. Registration for the sessions:

(note that at least as of this writing, the link on the research-security page at NSF seems to be incorrect; the one above, from NSF's announcement email, works)

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

The UK Research and Innovation body (UKRI) has published a study it commissioned examining peer review processes (in the context of evaluating grant proposals, as opposed to peer review of publications), "Review of Peer Review". The announcement and a little background are at

Page not found – UKRI

and a direct link to the report is at

https://www.ukri.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/UKRI-060723-Review-of-peer-review-Final-report-revs-v2.pdf

The Pew Research Center's Project on the Future of the Internet has released a new canvassing of experts focused on view of the best and worst changes that are likely to develop in digital life (in the broadest sense) in the period up to 2035. As always, these collections of ideas are lengthy, very diverse, fascinating and thought-provoking.

You can find an introduction to the report and a series of links to help navigate an online version of the report here:

As AI Spreads, Experts Predict the Best and Worst Changes in Digital Life by 2035 | Pew Research Center

As they watch the splashy emergence of generative artificial intelligence and an array of other AI applications, experts participating in a new Pew Research Center canvassing say they have deep concerns about people's and society's overall well-being. At the same time, they expect to see great benefits in health care, scientific advances and education

There's a direct link to the PDF of the full report here

The proposal submission deadline for CNI’s Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series is this Wednesday, June 28.

Proposals may be submitted via online form: https://www.cni.org/resources/pbvs/submit-a-proposal

Anyone may propose a pre-recorded project briefing, including groups/individuals from non-member institutions and organizations. Full details, including submission guidelines, are available on CNI’s website: https://www.cni.org/resources/pbvs

Please contact me with any questions.

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has issued what it calls the "Public Access Plan 2.0". The document addresses new requirements for access to publications and research data, researcher responsibilities regarding research data, and research integrity. Essentially, this is an update to NSF policies keyed to the direction provided by the Office of Science and Technology August 2022 memo (the "Nelson Memo").

The plan is at

https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/2023-06/NSF23104.pdf

One confusing detail: the plan is dated February 21, 2023 but doesn't seem to have gotten any public circulation until quite recently. I don't know why.

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has very recently published its guidelines for agency research security practices. Basically, this document describes NSF's internal practices for research security analysis -- who conducts these activities, what resources are used, and how information is validated and shared both within and beyond NSF. This is well worth a look and I think helps substantially with transparency around NSF practices; it should go a considerable distance to addressing some long-standing concerns.

The announcement is here

NSF announces guidelines for agency research security analytics practice | NSF - U.S. National Science Foundation

The U.S. National Science Foundation recently released guidelines for research security analytics on the agency's research security website . Research security, defined as safeguarding of the U.S…

and the guidelines proper can be found at

Registration is now open for the virtual LD4 Linked Data 2023 Conference "Exploring Linked Data in GLAM: From Inspiration to Implementation". See

2023 LD4 Conference

The 2023 LD4 Conference will be held virtually July 10th - 14th. View the schedule. Login to Sched to see the session Zoom links.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Today, CNI is delighted to release the concluding report from Associate Director Emerita Joan Lippincott's extensive study of the recent past, present and future of a selected set of programs at CNI member institutions addressing digital scholarship (DS), data-intensive, and computation research and interconnections among them. The report can be found at

Drawing on interviews, profiles of 47 university library initiatives, and two online forums, the report examines trends in consultations, instructional activities, constituencies served, DEI, partnerships, facilities, external funding, and staffing related to a wide array of DS activities. Aspects of the relationship of DS programs to institutional priorities, organizational structure, sustainability, and next steps are analyzed.

This report is the culmination of a set of activities that included interviews, online forums, a session at the CNI spring 2023 membership meetings, and two webinars. All materials from the initiative (including links to the online webinars and the presentation at the spring CNI meeting) are available at

The proposal submission deadline for the next edition of CNI’s Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series has been extended to Wednesday, June 28.

Proposals may be submitted via online form: https://www.cni.org/resources/pbvs/submit-a-proposal

Videos should focus on a timely topic or on a project related to digital information. We especially invite briefings on recently published reports, and updates on new or ongoing projects, programs, or organizations that may have reported at CNI in the past. We recommend that these videos run no more than 15-20 minutes, though longer presentations may occasionally make sense; we leave this to the presenters’ discretion.

Anyone may propose a pre-recorded project briefing, including groups/individuals from non-member institutions and organizations.

We are now accepting proposals for the next edition of CNI’s Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series . Proposals may be submitted via online form: https://www.cni.org/resources/pbvs/submit-a-proposal

Videos should focus on a timely topic or on a project related to digital information. We especially invite briefings on recently published reports, and updates on new or ongoing projects, programs, or organizations that may have reported at CNI in the past. We recommend that these videos run no more than 15-20 minutes, though longer presentations may occasionally make sense; we leave this to the presenters’ discretion.

Anyone may propose a pre-recorded project briefing, including groups/individuals from non-member institutions and organizations.

Important Dates Deadline for submissions: June 20, 2023 Notification of acceptance: June 28, 2023 Video submission deadline for accepted proposals: July 20, 2023 Video collection release: August 2023

CNI has just made what I think will be an important connection with a multi-institutional group called the Ecosystem for Research Networking (ERN) which (among other projects) is developing a platform for the federation and network control of advanced scientific instrumentation. It's being piloted with cyro-electron microscopy. This is really important work that promises to change how core instrumentation facilities are utilized in future. It's very much in the spirt of, and perhaps a complement to, the CMU Cloud Lab program that CNI featured at its December 2021 Member Meeting. I wanted to make sure it was on the radar of the CNI community.

You can find general information about ERN here

and the platform and Cryo-EM pilot here

As part of the CNI initiative on Directions in Digital Scholarship: Support for Digital, Data-intensive, and Computational Research, recordings from two webinars are available at https://www.cni.org/events/cni-workshops/directions-in-digital-scholarship-support-for-digital-data-intensive-and-computational-research-in-academic-libraries/2023-directions-in-digital-scholarship-webinars

In the recent webinar on May 24, Jay Brodeur of McMaster University, Lauren Di Monte of Yale University, and Anne Cong-Huyen and Joe Bauer of University of Michigan, talked about what’s next with their digital scholarship programs, focusing on initiatives that are responsive to institutional priorities, are based on principles and broad trends, and often address organizational structures, policies and partnerships.

In the April 20 webinar, Joe Lucia of Temple University, Nicky Agate of University of Pennsylvania, and Olivia Wikle of University of Idaho provide perspectives on the evolution and current focus of the digital scholarship programs in their libraries, highlighting different focuses and perspectives.

All of the presenters provide thoughtful insights and viewpoints which illustrate the variety and range of library programs focusing on digital, data-intensive, and computational research.

We are now accepting proposals for the next edition of CNI’s Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series. More information about this year-round program is available on the CNI website , and the latest edition (May 2023 ) is now available.

Videos should focus on a timely topic or on a project related to digital information. We especially invite briefings on recently published reports, and updates on new or ongoing projects, programs, or organizations that may have reported at CNI in the past. We recommend that these videos run no more than 15-20 minutes, though longer presentations may occasionally make sense; we leave this to the presenters’ discretion.

Anyone may propose a pre-recorded project briefing, including groups/individuals from non-member institutions and organizations.

Videos will be available ON-DEMAND and released as a collection in August. Their availability will be announced on CNI’s listserv, website, and social media outlets.

Edition Guide Coalition for Networked Information Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series May 2023

The May 2023 edition of CNI’s Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series is ready for viewing. Read on for an overview of what awaits in the nine videos that cut across digital information, and click through to the project briefing pages for more session-specific details and video links.

Through Enriching Library and Archival Records with Ethnolinguistics Minority Language Identification , you’ll have the opportunity to meet Hugh Paterson III, CNI’s 2022 Paul Evan Peters Fellowship recipient and a PhD student in information science at the University of North Texas, and learn about his work.

Other briefings explore digital preservation and archiving:

CNI is pleased to be a cooperating organization for the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) again this year. See below for important program details & updates.

-Paige, CNI Communications Coordinator ———————————————————————

Rethinking Digital Records: Exploring new perspectives, challenges, and opportunities for libraries, archives, museums, and galleries

The annual ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) is the primary international event for the inter- and multi-disciplinary community of academics and practitioners in digital libraries coming from computer, information and social sciences, and other related disciplines. JCDL encompasses the many meanings of the term digital libraries, including notions of managing, operating, developing, curating, evaluating, or utilizing collections of data/information/knowledge in various domains.

I've mentioned the EU WorldFAIR project in the past; this is an effort to move from the very general FAIR principles to much more specific guidance for implementing these principles, which has to be considered in the context of application subdomains. WorldFAIR has convened a substantial number of disciplinary groups to examine implementing FAIR in these specific contexts, and is now starting to make the outcomes available through a series of webinars. My understanding is that they will record these webinars, and make the recordings available as well as offering real-time participation.

General information on the WorldFAIR project

The WorldFAIR Project - The WorldFAIR Project

WorldFAIR disciplinary and cross disciplinary case studies The core of the WorldFAIR project are the 11 case studies, which represent a wide range of sciences, communities and challenges, with global geographical coverage. Each of the case studies are described below, with links to the relevant items, documents, people, and organisations related to their work. Find out more

Calendar of Webinars and registration information

There's a very interesting (free) virtual symposium being hosted by the University of Illinois on Email Archiving from June 13-15, 2023. The talks range from coverage of technical issues in email archiving practice through broad consideration of the role of email archives in research. For more context on the symposium, details and a registration link, see

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

In this message I want to collect and share a number of recent developments in research security and science nationalism. I'll break this into three sections: US National Science Foundation (NSF) developments; NIST developments; and developments in international access to information resources. I hope these are helpful.

NSF

NSF now has a substantial page that collects many resources and pointers dealing with research security. This is at

Research Security | NSF - U.S. National Science Foundation

The JISC has recently released a very useful summary report dealing with questions of how one might optimize the UK Research Infrastructure Assets (with an emphasis on thinking about them as a collective resource). The report was funded by UKRI. I cannot help but feel that a similar discussion is badly needed in the United States, though the barriers to making progress in the US are even more formidable.

The report can be found at https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/9055/1/optimising-the-uks-university-research-infrastructure-assets.pdf

There's a summary and announcement at

Every year (with a hiatus during the pandemic) the Library of Congress convenes an invitational meeting on developments in storage architectures and technologies for large-scale digital collections and digital preservation applications. Once again this spring I was fortunate to be able to attend this meeting, which is a wonderful service to the cultural heritage and preservation communities nationally and internationally. Of particular interest at this meeting was the much-increased concern for the environmental impacts of various storage technologies and practices.

Among the emerging technologies talks, if you've not see Microsoft's Project Silica, this is worth a look. There was a very rich discussion of this project following the presentation, which, unfortunately, isn't captured here.

The materials from this meeting are now available and can be found at