I posted links to this workshop earlier (and mentioned it in my opening plenary talk at the December CNI in-person meeting earlier this week), but wanted to make sure that the link are widely available, as there is a great deal of interesting material here. The OECD team is making the video from the session available; the first few days are already up and the remaining session should be soon. I am told there will also be written synthesis report in 2022. See

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

My apologies for being late in sharing this important development; I've been immersed in the December CNI virtual and in person meetings.

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has recently announced that it is launching a commission on the future of digital work in the humanities, building on the 2005-2006 work of an earlier commission chaired by John Unsworth (currently of the University of Virginia) that produced the report "Our Cultural Commonwealth" , see

The new commission, " Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship", which is being funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, is described here. It has a stellar composition, which includes many members of the CNI community, and has important continuity with its predecessor commission.

In preparation for the 2022 Horizon Report, EDUCAUSE seeks submissions of projects that illustrate the technologies and practices selected by the expert panel. Please consider submitting projects or programs that fit the criteria described in Kathe Pelletier’s message below. The deadline for submissions is December 22.

Disclosure: CNI leadership has participated in various aspects of the Horizon Report project over the years.

-Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI

Begin forwarded message: Proposals are currently being accepted for exemplars that will be highlighted in the 2022 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report | Teaching and Learning Edition. If your institution is working with any of the six technologies and practices listed below, we encourage you to submit your projects and initiatives. The six emerging technologies and practices selected by the expert panel for 2022 are:

The 17th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC) will be held June 13-16, 2022. After an abbreviated IDCC 2021 virtual meeting in conjunction with the 17th Plenary of the Research Data Alliance, IDCC in 2022 plans to return to its full menu of papers, keynotes, workshops, and posters. CNI is once again delighted to be collaborating on this conference.

Details about paper submission, meeting format, and registration should be available in early 2022, and I will share them with the CNI community. You can also track conference announcements on the web page at https://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc2022 .

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

There's a flood of interesting reports coming out lately. Here are a few that I wanted to share with the CNI community. Forgive me for aggregating a diverse set of materials in one announcement.

1. Digital Science has come out with their 2021 edition of their annual "State of Open Data" report. See

2. Our colleagues at the Knowledge Exchange (a consortium of European research funders) has recently issued "The Art of Publishing Reproducible Research Outputs - Supporting Emerging Practices through Technological and Cultural Innovation", at

An interesting research report has just been released by the Research on Research Institute (RORI) and the COVID-19 Rapid Review Initiative looking at the scholarly communications practices surrounding the dissemination of COVID-19 related research released during the pandemic. There's a press release and high level summary here:

The report proper can be obtained here

Yuzhou Bai and Roger Schonfeld of Ithaka S+R have just published a tremendous research report on what they call "research cores" -- the terminology here isn't well standardized, and I've often seem the term "core instrumentation facilities" instead -- which are shared scientific instrumentation facilities and related services that are commonplace at major research intensive institutions. Their work does a great service in illuminating many aspects of this essential research infrastructure component, and connects very directly to the work that CNI has done in our roundtables about the evolution of the research enterprise and research resilience (see https://www.cni.org/go/future-research-enterprise-june-2021 )

The Ithaka report, titled "What is a Research Core? A Primer on a Critical Component of the Research Enterprise", is at

What Is a Research Core? - Ithaka S+R

As clusters of state-of-the-art instruments and research enablement services, research cores are not only the cornerstone of research activities at university campuses but also critical assets that provide competitive differentiation for their host institutions. However, these research cores are highly expensive for academic institutions to manage. Despite the growing recognition and impact of these research cores, there are few studies that describe the business models for sustaining and fundin...

This is well worth your time; it's a great contribution to our understanding of the research infrastructure. I invite you to consider some of the broader issues here around research data management and research resilience in the context of this work, and to also have it in mind as you see the closing in-person CNI December 2021 plenary session (or watch the video which we'll make available after the meeting) on the Carnegie Mellon CloudLab initiative.

The Pew Research Project on the future of the internet has produced another major report, this time on the future of digital spaces and their role in democracy. The questions here were shared with a very large base of interested people and experts, and comments were also invited from the broader public; the focus was developments between now and 2035. The range of opinions (from very optimistic to very pessimistic) is fascinating. It's a long report, and many readers may be satisfied with the executive summary and highlights, but I think it sheds light on several very important issues.

See

The Future of Digital Spaces and Their Role in Democracy | Pew Research Center

Many experts say public online spaces will significantly improve by 2035 if reformers, big technology firms, governments and activists tackle the problems created by misinformation, disinformation and toxic discourse. Others expect continuing troubles as digital tools and forums are used to exploit people’s frailties, stoke their rage and drive them apart.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

EDUCAUSE is re-broadcasting the fantastic plenary talk that Vice President Susan Grajek gave at the October 2021 Annual Meeting summarizing the top 10 IT issues for 2022 report. I've already shared links for the report itself, but her synthesis is very much worth watching if you missed it at the meeting. My understanding is that this is free for people at EDUCAUSE member institutions (and I think nearly all CNI member institutions are EDUCAUSE members) and that there's a fee otherwise. If you can't make the "live" rebroadcast, you'll get a link to the recording of the session. See

Also, the most recent EDUCAUSE quick poll is on the issue of XR technologies (a horrible term, "extended reality" which is intended to encompass both "virtual reality" and "augmented reality"). The results are quite interesting. One of the things that seems to be notably missing here is stewardship and preservation issues around XR materials, and the roles of libraries in this work (though I know there are at least a few research libraries that are active in this area). See

The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program was set up in 1991 as part of the High Performance Computing Act legislation and has been doing very important work ever since. This includes the National Coordination Office for federal high performance computing and communications efforts, which has been led by several members of the CNI community over the years, including Dr. Donald Lindberg (the founding director as a dual appointment during his tenure as National Library of Medicine Director), Sally Howe, George Strawn, and Chris Greer.

See www.nitrd.gov for much more information; I particularly invite you to note the breadth of the areas where NITRD is coordinating federal agency activities. On the NCO, see https://www.nitrd.gov/about/#NITRD-NATIONAL-COORDINATION-OFFICE-NCO

A few days ago, NITRD celebrated its 30th anniversary with a very nice hour long webcast, which can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73-1CRqnzAI

Every year, NITRD publishes a supplement to the President's budget which summarizes investments in high performance computing and communication. This year, they've also included an additional document covering Cybersecurity R&D investments and implementation. See

As part of its work in understanding research support services, our colleagues at Ithaka S+R have released a major report titled "Big Data Infrastructure at the Crossroads" a few days ago. See

Big Data Infrastructure at the Crossroads - Ithaka S+R

Ithaka S+R’s Research Support Services program explores current trends and support needs in academic research. Our most recent project in this program, “Supporting Big Data Research,” focused specifically on the rapidly emerging use of big data in research across disciplines and fields. As part of our study, we partnered with librarians from more than 20 colleges and universities, who then conducted over 200 interviews with faculty. These interviews provided insights into the research methodolog...

From the Executive Summary:

Ithaka S+R’s Research Support Services program explores current trends and support needs in academic research. Our most recent project in this program, “Supporting Big Data Research,” focused specifically on the rapidly emerging use of big data in research across disciplines and fields. As part of our study, we partnered with librarians from more than 20 colleges and universities, who then conducted over 200 interviews with faculty. These interviews provided insights into the research methodologies and support needs of researchers working across a wide range of disciplines.

Meeting Roadmap A Guide to the Fall 2021 Coalition for Networked Information Membership Meeting

The Fall 2021 CNI Membership Meeting (https://www.cni.org/mm/fall-2021) will be comprised of both an online and (at last!) an in-person component, each independent of the other, and designed to be complementary: the virtual event (https://cnifall21mtg.sched.com) will be held online Dec. 7–9, and the in-person event (https://cnifall21inperson.sched.com) will take place the following week in Washington, DC, on Dec. 13–14. Both events offer a wide range of presentations that advance and report on CNI's programs, showcase projects underway at member institutions, and highlight important national and international developments. Here is the "roadmap" to the meeting, which includes both events and an extensive series of live synchronous, in-person, and pre-recorded sessions, including plenaries, invited sessions, and project briefings focusing on current issues in digital information.

Only a small number of virtual sessions will take place live; the vast majority of project briefings will be pre-recorded. Curated playlists of pre-recorded project briefings corresponding to CNI's core program area themes will be available on-demand beginning Nov. 30, to be explored at your leisure. In addition, for the virtual event, we offer an expanded line-up of invited sessions and project briefings on topics we feel are particularly timely and/or strategic for the community as a whole; these will be live, to take place online Dec. 7–9. Unless the presenters have requested otherwise, all sessions will be recorded and subsequently available to the public; this includes the pre-recorded sessions.

The Executive Roundtable sessions (by prior application) will be online, and will take place in conjunction with the virtual event on December 6 and 10.

Hi Cliff,

The message below intended for you was sent to the CNI-ANNOUNCE email list queue by John Chodacki chodacki@gmail.com.

— Angelo

I wanted to (somewhat belatedly) share information about the availability of a substantial OCLC Research study on Research Information Management practices in the US. It documents a fascinating picture: while in much of Europe, for example, these practices are fairly mature and fairly centralized at a national level, the US has taken a very different and highly decentralized path. The report is in two volumes. The first provides a broad overview of findings and recommendations, while the second includes five in-depth case studies. See

Research Information Management in the United States

The Research Information Management in the United States two-part report series provides a first-of-its-kind documentation of RIM practices at US research universities that presents a thorough examination of RIM practices, goals, stakeholders, and system components.

My thanks to OCLC for taking a much-needed and timely systematic look at this area. I also note that Rebecca Bryant, the lead author on the study, has told me that she'll be highlighting elements of the report as well as some additional material that couldn't be included in the published report in her postings on the OCLC Research Blog at

www.hangingtogether.org

The National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) has issued a broad call for input on eight emerging technologies as part of the work on a study called for by the 2020 COMPETE Act. Full information here:

My thanks to the indispensable Gary Price for bringing this call to my attention.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

FORCE11 is holding its annual conference virtually this year, focusing on the future of scholarly communication. There is no fee (donations requested) but registration is required. For more information see

This meeting is normally highly international and it starts very early in North American timezones. I do not know if the sessions are being recorded, or what arrangements will be made to provide access to them.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Today, November 4, is World Digital Preservation Day. One of the wonderful things that the Digital Preservation Coalition does to mark this day every year is to release their list of "Digitally Endangered Species". Here's their latest announcement. Well worth reading -- and well worth your time to think about contributions to future lists!

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Today the DPC has released The BitList: the Global List of Digitally Endangered Species 2021:

I wanted to share the list of speakers and presentations for CNI's upcoming December 2021 Virtual and In-Person meetings. There may be a small number of last minute changes but this should provide a very good sense of how rich and diverse the programs are. I expect that we will be making available a schedule for the two events around the end of this week or the beginning of next week.

The virtual meeting will run December 7-9; on December 7 and 8 it will run from about 1-530pm Eastern, and on December 9 we'll have a closing session from about 1-2pm Eastern.

The in-person meeting will take place in Washington DC from about noon Eastern on December 13 to 330pm on December 14. Let me remind you yet again the for the in-person meeting, you MUST register in advance so that we can verify attendees are fully vaccinated as part of the registration process; we will NOT be able to accommodate walk-up or last minute registrations.

You can find a list of contributed project briefings here

Yesterday (November 1, 2021) Roger Schonfeld of Ithaka S+R published a valuable piece titled "Is Scientific Communication Fit for Purpose?" on the Scholarly Kitchen site. See

There is a lot to consider here, against the backdrop of various polls and surveys reflecting erosion in public trust in science, and the way that innovations in scientific communication (such as broad adoption of unrefereed preprints for distribution in biomedicine and public health, which were long resisted) have co-existed uneasily with journalism intended for the general public, and indeed with decision-making by public officials during the pandemic. One almost wonders if we are going to see a split in public opinion or scientific communication processes between low-stakes (things that don't really have much impact on the public, at least in the near term, such as most physics, mathematics, astrophysics, etc) and high-stakes (public health, climate change, some kinds of environmental science, biomedicine) that can reshape public policy going forward.

In any event, I think Roger has done a real service in summarizing the issues here in a succinct, high level survey, and I hope it can serve as the basis for some badly needed discussions.

Last week EDUCAUSE Vice President Susan Grajek did a fantastic presentation at the EDUCAUSE annual meeting to roll out the 2022 edition of the top 10 IT issues report. Today the report proper has been released, and can be found at

As always, it's interesting reading, and this year's version is particularly striking in that the focus is on organizational transformation and institutional communities; technology is framed very much in service and support of these broader contexts.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI