Another reminder that the submission deadline for CNI’s spring 2021 virtual membership meeting is fast approaching!

Proposals are now being accepted for project briefings to be presented during CNI’s Spring 2021 Membership Meeting (virtual). The meeting will take place online March 15-26, 2021. Anyone may propose a project briefing, including groups/individuals from non-member institutions and organizations.

Project briefings address issues of interest to the membership, as outlined in CNI’s Program Plan . The 30-minute to one-hour sessions focus on a timely topic or on a specific institutional/organizational project related to digital information; they can also explore parallel developments across institutions. A limited number of project briefings will be accepted.

March 15-16 from noon-5:00 pm EDT will be devoted to live project briefings. For the spring 2021 virtual meeting, we are only scheduling a very small number of live (synchronous) project briefings; we expect the great majority of project briefings will be pre-recorded. Once accepted, speakers who are selected for live sessions will be contacted regarding the schedule. More details are on the project briefing proposals page .

The next annual Digital Data in Biodiversity conference will take place virtually June 7-9, 2021. You can find conference information at

Registration is open. I've attended most of the meetings in this series, and have found them to be extremely informative.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

There's a very interesting report that has come out recently titled "Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Working Practices of Analytical Facilities", coming out of the Central European Research Infrastructure Consortium which helps to shed light on some of the questions raised by the ongoing work that CNI has been doing on developments in research resilience.

You can find a summary of the paper, and a link to download the full report, at

Paper: Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Working Practices of Analytical Facilities II - Ceric

COVID-19 has a substantial impact on the operations of analytical facilities that serve external users.At the end of April 2020, only a third of the surveyed research infrastructures (RIs) reported that they maintained such user access activities; however, several had set up specific COVID-19 services and responded to travel limitations with a strong shift towards remote...> Find out more

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

There are several new resources from the Learning Spaces Collaboratory: the links (see below) in the Spaces that Anticipate the Future series focus on two projects that highlight inclusivity and creating community. The second is a fascinating discussion around "the importance of the affective interactions with spaces on campus and how they shape learning.”

Both of these topics reflect discussions that have been taking place online, led by Jeanne Narum of the Learning Spaces Collaboratory; I have learned much from participating in these conversations and I’ll continue to share the products of them as they emerge.

—Joan Lippincott, Associate Executive Director Emerita, CNI

Our colleagues at JISC in the UK released a new document outlining their strategy for research and innovation in the coming years. Well worth reading. See

https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/8275/1/research-and-innovation-strategy.pdf

for a direct link to the document,

As part of the CNI Fall 2020 Member meeting, we hosted a (virtual) Executive Roundtable titled "International Tensions and "Science Nationalism" in a Networked World". This looked quite broadly at issues around the security and integrity of the US higher education research enterprise, the challenges that universities are facing, and also some of the possible implications of these developments on the evolution of the global scholarly communications system. So far, it appears that there will be considerable continuity of focus on these issues from the Trump administration to the new Biden administration.

The report is available at

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

I wanted to share this recent announcement from our colleague Brian Kelly at EDUCAUSE for a free virtual symposium dealing with Research Security, which is closely connected to some of the issues around Science Nationalism, which we discussed at the CNI Fall 2020 Executive Roundtables in December 2020 (a report on this roundtable will be available soon). It's also timely given the very recent release of the "Recommended Practices for Strengthening the Security and Integrity of America's Science and Technology Research Enterprise" from the US National Science and Technology Council (online at https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/NSTC-Research-Security-Best-Practices-Jan2021.pdf ; this was issued in mid-January towards the end of the Trump administration, and now has been moved over to the archived White House site as part of the administration change.)

Note as well as the invitation below, I've included two PDF attachments that were part of Brian's original posting.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

The submission deadline for CNI’s spring 2021 virtual membership meeting is fast approaching!

Proposals are now being accepted for project briefings to be presented during CNI’s Spring 2021 Membership Meeting (virtual). The meeting will take place online March 15-26, 2021. Anyone may propose a project briefing, including groups/individuals from non-member institutions and organizations.

Project briefings address issues of interest to the membership, as outlined in CNI’s Program Plan . The 30-minute to one-hour sessions focus on a timely topic or on a specific institutional/organizational project related to digital information; they can also explore parallel developments across institutions. A limited number of project briefings will be accepted.

March 15-16 from noon-5:00 pm EDT will be devoted to live project briefings. For the spring 2021 virtual meeting, we are only scheduling a very small number of live (synchronous) project briefings; we expect the great majority of project briefings will be pre-recorded. Once accepted, speakers who are selected for live sessions will be contacted regarding the schedule. More details are on the project briefing proposals page .

There was an important announcement from the Big Ten Academic Alliance, basically (as I read it) committing the member libraries to move towards managing the collections of the members as a single giant common collection. This is an incredibly complex undertaking (as is well documented in the announcement) but promises huge benefits to the participants and their user communities. See

This follows on a whole series of key strategic collaboration agreements from the Big Ten group, notably their work over the past couple of years on Special Collection interlibrary loan policy.

I hope that we will be able to explore these developments in more detail as part of an upcoming CNI meeting.

I'm just now catching up on a report issued by a federal cross-agency working group titled "Economic Analyses of Federal Scientific Collections: Methods for Documenting Costs and Benefits" in late November 2020. This may be valuable for stewards of other collections beyond federally-supported ones.

Some background on the development of the report , and a video introducing the report, are at:

and the report can be downloaded at

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has just issued a call for proposals for a $20 million center for open environmental data and science which I thought our community would find interesting. See

Page Not Found | NSF - U.S. National Science Foundation

The "synopsis of program" session early on in the document is particularly worth reading, positioning this solicitation in the context of a series of major NSF investments in data management and data intensive scientific projects on a large scale over the past decade and more.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

Proposals are now being accepted for project briefings to be presented during CNI’s Spring 2021 Membership Meeting (virtual). The meeting will take place online March 15-26, 2021. Anyone may propose a project briefing, including groups/individuals from non-member institutions and organizations.

Project briefings address issues of interest to the membership, as outlined in CNI’s Program Plan . The 30-minute to one-hour sessions focus on a timely topic or on a specific institutional/organizational project related to digital information; they can also explore parallel developments across institutions. A limited number of project briefings will be accepted.

March 15-16 from noon-5:00 pm EDT will be devoted to live project briefings. For the spring 2021 virtual meeting, we are only scheduling a very small number of live (synchronous) project briefings; we expect the great majority of project briefings will be pre-recorded. Once accepted, speakers who are selected for live sessions will be contacted regarding the schedule. More details are on the project briefing proposals page .

Proposals may be submitted via online form: https://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2021/project-briefing-proposals-s21 Deadline for submissions is February 12, 2021

I wanted to share some preliminary details of the CNI Virtual Spring 2021 Meeting for your calendar planning purposes. I expect to be able to offer considerably more detail, including dates for registration, executive roundtable participation proposals, breakout proposals and the like around the week of January 4, 2021.

For Spring 2021, largely in response to feedback from the last two meetings and other conversations with members of our community, we are going to a much more compact synchronous meeting format. We expect that the vast majority of the breakout sessions will be pre-recorded and viewable on demand by meeting participants (and subsequently publicly available). We expect that virtually all of the synchronous breakouts and plenary sessions will also be recorded for later viewing and public distribution.

Here's the rough schedule. All times are EASTERN.

March 15-16, noon-5pm: A small number (5-6) of synchronous (live) project briefings, spread across the two days.

On December 15, 2020, Professor Francine Berman received the Paul Evan Peters Award and gave the memorial lecture at the CNI Fall Virtual Member Meeting. Fran's talk was absolutely wonderful, and the video is now publicly available at

If you were not able to see this as part of the meeting, I strongly recommend it.

With best wishes for the New Year.

For those who weren't at my plenary talk Monday at the CNI Fall virtual member meeting, I just wanted to note a couple of specific announcements I made about CNI-related events.

Our spring 2021 meeting will be virtual. Plans for this will be announced in early January 2021.

The JISC/CNI meeting, which will be focused on the future of the research enterprise, will also move virtual and will take place July 7-9, 2021. Again, more details to come in January 2021.

We are hopeful that the scheduled Washington DC CNI Fall 2021 member meeting will take place in person in December 2021. It will likely be complemented by some type of virtual event. More on this in late summer 2021, if not before.

EDUCAUSE has just released a great QuickPoll looking at the state of academic research and research support services during the pandemic. Highly informative and highly recommended; this is a very valuable additional data point on the status and continuity of the research enterprise, and connects up with a number of other reports (including the CNI Executive Roundtable reports on Research Continuity) that I've been sharing with this list. See

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

About ten days ago, the journalist Richard Poynder shared a new ebook summarizing his current thinking about numerous issues related to open access, and I'm just now catching up with it (sorry). While there are certainly plenty of points that will be controversial in this (and I don't necessarily agree with all the conclusions), as with so much of his work I think it's extremely thought-provoking and well worth reading and carefully considering. The announcement, and a link to the ebook

Open and Shut?: Open Access: “Information wants to be free”?

(A print version of this eBook is available here ) Earlier this year I was invited to discuss with Georgia Institute of Technology libraria...

Clifford Lynch Director, CNi

On October 19-20, Carnegie Mellon hosted a 2020 AI and Data Reuse (AIDR) symposium; the following day, they hosted a closely related Open Science symposium. This was the second year for AIDR; I attended the 2019 symposium in person and it was excellent, but was only able to catch some of the 2020 presentations due to other conflicts.

You can now view the recordings of the Open Science Symposium and AIDR conference on the CMU Libraries YouTube page.

OSS: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbkhiRA2P3qJ49fZF3mqsshvcseFTc4uj AIDR: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbkhiRA2P3qJZmr1wjoSzY6c4NcxMVGrv

You can also find more information and slides for the talks if available on our Open Science Framework event pages. OSS: https://osf.io/hbt7c/ AIDR: https://osf.io/tchdq/

CNI is very pleased to be once again supporting the 2021 International Digital Curation Conference; see below for the call for papers and some initial information. I think that the topical focus this year is particularly timely and fruitful.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

16th International Digital Curation Conference, 19 April 2021, Edinburgh – Call for papers

There's a very interesting (and rather lengthy) book of essays out recently titled "The Future of Text". There are a number of essays contributed by members of the CNI community, and I think it may be of interest to many readers. My thanks to Keith Webster of CMU (one of the essay authors) for the pointer to this project.

For more information about the book, the contributors, the broader project and context, and a launch symposium, including pointers to recordings, see

The book is available for free download (as PDF or EPUB) at