Here's what I hope will be the last catch-up installment of material that I wanted to share with the CNI-announce list. Some of it has been out for a while, and I'm sorry to be slow disseminating it, but hopefully it will novel and interesting to many CNI-announce readers.

First, our colleagues at protocols.io are offering a webinar in collaboration with PLOS on their joint work to use peer-reviewed protocols in scholarly communication. It's at 9AM PDT on June 15. For more information and to register, see

Communicating reusable research with peer-reviewed protocols from PLOS ONE and protocols.io

Communicating reusable research with peer-reviewed protocols from PLOS ONE and protocols.io Register below for our up-coming webinar where PLOS, protocols....

The American Library Association has recently released a December 2020 white paper prepared by its Digital Content Working Group (DCWG), on which I serve, dealing with issues around e-book licensing and libraries. This is timely, given the range of developments in this area recently, including the recently passed Maryland state law about library e-content licensing and the Digital Public Library of American's (DPLA) announcement about its agreement to distributed Amazon-published e-books via its Simply-E platform, to name only two. See

which includes a link to the report proper at the bottom of the page.

On June 4, the Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities has issued a visioning paper addressing the future of research-intensive higher education that's an interesting read. There's also an accompanying video. My thanks to the indispensable Gary Price for a pointer to this work. See

Following up on some open questions about the trajectory of Chinese scholarly publishing that were discussed at our December 2020 Executive Roundtable on Science Nationalism (report available on the CNI web site, www.cni.org), a recent presentation at the Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting based in part on a recent report by Impact Science (Cactus Communications) added some new data points. For a brief summary of the session, plus links to the session video and to the Impact Science report, see

China 'pursuing national open science strategy' - Research Information

China is working on a master plan for the internationalisation of its domestic journals and plans to pursue an open science strategy at a national level

Finally, a pointer from an April online meeting. Over the past 14 months or so, I've been looking into what's going on with putting research instrumentation (think lab gear, or core shared research instruments) on the net to improve both resource sharing and research resilience. I've shared a few reports with CNI-announce over that period. There is work going on, but it's hard to find out about and often somewhat below the radar. Here's a collection from a very interesting online meeting I attended that addressed a number of these issues, with a focus that is primarily on life science research (and where there's thus a big commercial market) which provides a good sense of some developments. It's also interesting to see the extent to which ideas about FAIR data have pervaded thinking in commercial as well as academic circles some of this work. See

Finally, let me add that I'm grateful to receive other pointers to developments in this last area.

I hope that you find these pointers helpful.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI