CNI is a supporting organization for The International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL); we are pleased to share the following details for TPDL 2022. Please note, the call for proposals has been issued. Thank you!

-Paige Pope, CNI Communications Coordinator

TPDL 2022, Padua, Italy, 20–23 September 2022 Website: http://tpdl2022.dei.unipd.it/

There's an interesting report that's come out recently, titled National Strategic Overview for Research and Development Infrastructure, authored by a subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council. I would note that this is very much a perspective from agencies that are involved in scientific research and development activities. My thanks once again to the amazing Gary Price for bringing this to my attention. One very interesting point here is that alongside the expected observational, experimental and computational infrastructure, the report calls out what it characterizes as "knowledge infrastructure" quite explicitly at the same level of importance.

This is a revision of an earlier document from August, I believe.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/NSTC-NSO-RDI-_REV_FINAL-10-2021.pdf

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

CNI Executive Director Clifford Lynch will be speaking at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference on Oct. 27th in Philadelphia to report on a series of CNI Executive Roundtables with members tracking how the research enterprise has been impacted and reshaped as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. We hope you can join Cliff to hear about what we’ve learned as a result of these conversations, and how the resilience of the research enterprise can be improved in the face of future disruptions.

Session Title: “How The Pandemic Has Changed Research: CNI Findings” Date: Wednesday, Oct. 27 Time: 8:00-8:45am ET Location: 105AB, 100 Level

Additional conference information is available at http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference

-Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI

Conferences (and related events such as institutional colloquia) have been a key part of scholarly knowledge diffusion for centuries. Prior to the pandemic, practices in these areas have seemed to be quite stable; the pandemic of course forced abrupt and discontinuous change. CNI has been trying to at least anecdotally track some of the developments here, driven by a very strong sense that some of the pandemic-driven changes will be permanent and that the implications of what's happening are poorly understood and mapped. I've touched on this in my December 2020 address at the CNI virtual meeting, for example, and these issues have also come up in our Executive Roundtable explorations of developments in the research enterprise during the pandemic.

Given all of this, I was absolutely thrilled to see the report that Ithaka S+R released today on the future of scholarly meetings, see

COVID-19 and the Future of the Annual Meeting - Ithaka S+R

In February 2020, the Biogen conference in Boston, Massachusetts, became one of the first superspreader events in the United States—one now linked to perhaps 300,000 cases of COVID-19. By mid-March, in-person conferences, a staple of scholarly communication and community, came to an abrupt halt. For the many professional societies for whom a conference is a core offering, the necessity of charting a new path for their annual meeting was among the most difficult organizational challenges created ...

and the Sloan funded follow-on study described at

The OECD is running a very interesting online workshop (free but registration required) looking at trends in scientific productivity and how the greater adoption of AI technologies might reshape these trends. See

Unsurprisingly, the times are best for European participants; those in the US will need to get up early to participate.

There will be a report from this workshop, and the web site states that the discussions will be recorded though it's not clear when or how those recordings will be available.

The Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) is now accepting proposals for the 2022 Library Publishing Forum. CNI is pleased to serve as a Strategic Affiliate of the sponsoring organization, the Library Publishing Coalition. More information is available below and at the event website: https://librarypublishing.org/program/

Thank you,

-Paige Pope, CNI Communications Coordinator

———

A collection of interesting reading (and viewing) for your consideration.

The Biden administration has reconstituted the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (with a stellar series of appointments); the Council held its first meeting on September 28-29, 2021 Video and summaries are available here, along with information on their planned second meeting on October 18-19. See

Today (October 5, 2021) the US House of Representatives held a hearing on balancing open science and national security in the research enterprise, which is closely related to the "science nationalism" themes that we have been following. Statements and video can be found here:

I wanted to share the announcement for this free webinar. Lisa Janicke Hinchcliffe of UIUC has been doing a lot of work on reader privacy over the past few years with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and IMLS. On October 13, 2021 she's going to moderate a presentation by Danielle Cooper of Ithaka S+R summarizing some of Ithaka's recent work in this area. This is very closely related to a series of concerns that CNI has been exploring and examining for many years, and should be a fascinating look at how thinking in the community is evolving.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Licensing Privacy: Views from Library Leadership October 13, 2021 01:00 PM in Central Time (US and Canada)

As an additional reminder, we are now accepting proposals for project briefings to be presented during CNI’s Fall 2021 Membership Meeting. The virtual event will take place online Dec. 6-9; the in-person event will take place Dec. 13-14 in Washington, DC, at the JW Marriott Hotel.

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

Live (synchronous) time slots will be reserved for topics that would particularly benefit from interactive discussion. Speakers may request to present a live (synchronous) project briefing (either virtually Dec. 6-9 or in-person Dec. 13-14), though a very small number of proposals will be selected for synchronous or in-person presentation; the great majority of project briefings will be pre-recorded. If the in-person event shifts to virtual due to public health considerations, in-person project briefings scheduled for Dec. 13-14 will move to virtual synchronous sessions on Dec. 13-15. Once accepted, speakers who are selected for live sessions will be contacted regarding the schedule.

We strongly urge all those presenting synchronous project briefings (virtual or in person) to grant CNI permission to record and make their session subsequently available.

Today, in partnership with the Association of Research Libraries and EDUCAUSE, we published the final report from our study of the impact of emerging technologies on research libraries, titled "Crest or Trough? How Research Libraries Used Emerging Technologies to Survive the Pandemic", authored by ARL Visiting Program Officer Scout Calvert of Michigan State University.

This initiative has followed a rather extraordinary trajectory, beginning well prior to the pandemic with a series of interviews with a wide range of experts to identify key technologies for further examination. In the past few months, Scout was able to reconnect with a number of these interviewees to reflect on how universities and their research libraries have been navigating the pandemic (with some particularly interesting observations about innovation practices and investments), and on how the impacts and priorities related to various emerging technologies might change. The current report summarizes these conversations, and then abstracts out a series of socio-technical thematic areas, concluding with some considerations for continued technology adoption.

You can download this report from

Crest or Trough? How Research Libraries Used Emerging Technologies to Survive the Pandemic, So Far — Association of Research Libraries

The final deliverable of the ARL, CNI, and EDUCAUSE joint initiative to advance research libraries’ impact in a world shaped by emerging technologies, this report returns to 11 participants in interviews conducted for the initiative, to find out how their perspectives have changed in the year and a half since the initiative began, given the disruption to research and learning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In these new conversations, the interviewees retain optimism for the same transformative...

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has been funding a major initiative to examine and transform monuments and memorials (see https://mellon.org/initiatives/monuments/ )

On September 29, 2021 they hosted a fascinating webinar (see https://monumentalconversations.splashthat.com/MellonEventsPage ) to mark the release of one important component of this initiative, the Monument Landscape Audit, which was conducted in partnership with an organization called Monument Lab (a very interesting organization in its own right, see the website at monumentlab.com) . My understanding is that a video recording of the webinar will be available shortly, and it's well worth watching.

The Mellon announcement on the report can be found at https://mellon.org/news-blog/articles/national-monument-audit/ and the Monument Lab announcement is at

National Monument Audit - Monument Lab

The National Monument Audit, produced by Monument Lab in partnership with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, assesses the current monument landscape across the United States.

One of the fundamental problems with open access scholarly publishing has been ensuring the preservation of these materials. There are both structural (eg roles and responsibility questions) and funding challenges here which have long been familiar to those looking at large scale digital preservation strategies.

The Keepers Registry effort, which started at EDINA and is now hosted at the International ISSN Center in Paris, has been a vital observation mechanism for tracking progress on digital preservation of serials broadly, but has also tried to focus some particular attention on the open access issues. (Disclosure: I've long been involved with the Keepers work, and am very proud to serve on their Technical Advisory Board. I think this is an incredibly important strategic program, and I urge all CNI members to support it. For more information, you can find several presentations on their work at recent CNI meetings on our web site.)

Given this context, I'm delighted to share an announcement and a link to a project to focus effort on these at-risk open access publications. This is an extraordinary collaboration among the Keepers Registry, DOAJ, the Internet Archive, CLOCKSS and PKP. See

JASPER preservation service – DOAJ

As a reminder, we are now accepting proposals for project briefings to be presented during CNI’s Fall 2021 Membership Meeting. The virtual event will take place online Dec. 6-9; the in-person event will take place Dec. 13-14 in Washington, DC, at the JW Marriott Hotel.

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

Live (synchronous) time slots will be reserved for topics that would particularly benefit from interactive discussion. Speakers may request to present a live (synchronous) project briefing (either virtually Dec. 6-9 or in-person Dec. 13-14), though a very small number of proposals will be selected for synchronous or in-person presentation; the great majority of project briefings will be pre-recorded. If the in-person event shifts to virtual due to public health considerations, in-person project briefings scheduled for Dec. 13-14 will move to virtual synchronous sessions on Dec. 13-15. Once accepted, speakers who are selected for live sessions will be contacted regarding the schedule.

We strongly urge all those presenting synchronous project briefings (virtual or in person) to grant CNI permission to record and make their session subsequently available.

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has produced a rather interesting PDF FAQ on post-quantum cryptography, which can be found at

I'm sorry for not catching this and sharing it more promptly. There is also some press coverage here:

NSA: We 'don't know when or even if' a quantum computer will ever be able to break today's public-key encryption

Then again, it would say that

Here's an interesting preprint (I am somewhat unclear where it stands in the publication process and if it's been through peer review, though it appears like it may come out in a UK Royal Society venue) which looks at publication patterns by discipline during the pandemic. There's been a lot of anecdote about what's happening here, but this is one of the few data-based presentations I've seen. My thanks to the amazing Gary Price for bring this to my attention. See

[2109.06591] The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on academic productivity

'Publish or perish' is an expression describing the pressure on academics to consistently publish research to ensure a successful career in academia. With a global pandemic that has changed the world, how has it changed academic productivity? Here we show that academics are posting just as many publications on the arXiv pre-print server as if there were no pandemic: 168,630 were posted in 2020, a +12.6% change from 2019 and $+1.4σ$ deviation above the predicted 162,577 $\pm$ 4,393. However, some...

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

The US Copyright Office, in partnership with the Patent and Trademark Office, is convening (apparently both via Zoom and in person), a session on the interactions between copyright law and machine learning/artificial Intelligence. This is an interesting and very poorly understood or explored area, and the discussions should be very timely. I don't know if these are going to be recorded for subsequent viewing. Information on the session, which is free but requires advanced registration, can be found at

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Some of you may have attended a virtual workshop hosted by the US National Academies in November 2020 which introduced a draft toolkit for fostering open science practices. This September, the Academies are holding a launch event for the report of that workshop, which will also include case studies following on from the workshop exploring ways in which the toolkit can be used.

Information on the event and the background work can be found here:

Developing a Toolkit for Fostering Open Science Practices: A Workshop

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science hosted a public release of Developing a Toolkit for Fostering Open Science Practices: Proceedings of a Workshop on Thursday, September 30, 2021 from 3:30-4:30 pm EDT. A recording of the session can be accessed below. The publication summarizes the presentations and discussion of the virtual workshop held on November 5, 2020 that explored the information and resource needs of researc...

There's no charge, but you do need to register in advance for the event.

Proposals are now being accepted for project briefings to be presented during CNI’s Fall 2021 Membership Meeting. At this time, we expect to hold BOTH a virtual event and an in-person event, each independently of one another, and designed to complement each other. The virtual event will take place online Dec. 6-9; the in-person event will take place Dec. 13-14 in Washington, DC, at the JW Marriott Hotel.

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

Live (synchronous) time slots will be reserved for topics that would particularly benefit from interactive discussion. Speakers may request to present a live (synchronous) project briefing (either virtually Dec. 6-9 or in-person Dec. 13-14), though a very small number of proposals will be selected for synchronous or in-person presentation; the great majority of project briefings will be pre-recorded. If the in-person event shifts to virtual due to public health considerations, in-person project briefings scheduled for Dec. 13-14 will move to virtual synchronous sessions on Dec. 13-15. Once accepted, speakers who are selected for live sessions will be contacted regarding the schedule.

We strongly urge all those presenting synchronous project briefings (virtual or in person) grant CNI permission to record and make their session subsequently available.

The August 31, 2021 Wall Street Journal carried an article on the strategic Cloudlab initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. See

This is an important development that we highlighted in our most recent Executive Roundtable on Research Continuity, see

CNI is pleased to be a cooperating organization for the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) again this year.

JCDL 2021 will be online, Sept. 27-30, 2021.

Registration is open: https://2021.jcdl.org/registration/

Advanced registration ends Sept. 20