An alternative access method for the same information available from the CNI-ANNOUNCE listserv.
Report on Large Study of Impact of COVID-19 on Academic Researchers
Recently, a group called Frontiers has published the results of an online survey of some 25,000 international researchers on the the ways in which COVID-19 has impacted their research. The study was conducted in May-June 2020. See
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.621563/full
for a summary and a link to the full report, which can also be obtained directly at
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.621563/pdf
The Times Higher Education has a brief piece on this report recently, at
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/funding-concern-amid-covid-academics-push-research
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
Launching the Virtual CNI Fall Member Meeting, Nov. 10-Dec. 15, 2020
Next week, on Tuesday, November 10th, we’ll be launching the first-ever, virtual CNI fall member meeting. Unlike the spring 2020 meeting, where we moved (and largely re-conceptualized) an already-planned in-person meeting virtual on extremely short notice, the fall meeting has been planned from the beginning as a virtual meeting. While we’ve kept some things from our in-person fall meetings (for example, the Executive Roundtable and my annual plenary on December 14, and Francine Berman’s already-announced Paul Evan Peters Award lecture on December 15), much else has changed. We’ve tried to apply what we’ve learned from our experience with the spring virtual meeting, and also what other organizations have learned from their efforts to move events to virtual formats. We’ll undoubtedly make more mistakes, but hopefully at least new ones, and will again be following up this meeting with an evaluation form to be sure we catch as many as possible; please be understanding and generous as we all try to navigate this new environment.
Basically, we’ll have four weeks of project briefings, each built around a major theme, starting November 10th. The first three weeks will conclude with a summary discussion session that I’ll lead which will take place Mondays at 4:00 pm EST beginning on November 16th (there will not be a summary session for the 4th week, which will deal with responses to current crises and emerging developments). Recordings of the project briefings will be made available very quickly for registered participants from the session pages in Sched (https://cnifall2020virtualmembershipmeet.sched.com/) so that they can view as many as they wish before the week’s summary session; nearly all sessions will be recorded (except for those whose speakers have asked us not to) and videos will be made publicly available through our YouTube and Vimeo channels, as usual, though this may take a little more time. There will be fewer synchronous project briefings than we usually have during our in-person meetings because we don’t want concurrent sessions in the online setting, and attention in the new Zoom universe is a very scarce and contended-for resource; however, we’ll be supplementing live sessions with additional offerings of pre-recorded, view on-demand videos covering additional topics; some of these are updates on projects discussed at past CNI meetings.
For registered attendees: You will have access to all live project briefings and plenary sessions, as well as session videos, via Sched, https://cnifall2020virtualmembershipmeet.sched.com/. You will need a Sched account to view the meeting schedule, to see the video stream button for live and recorded sessions, and to create a personalized schedule and set up reminders. All registered attendees should have received an email invitation to the meeting Sched, with instructions and details.
If you have not received an invitation from Sched, please contact Beth Secrist (beth@cni.org) as soon as possible.
For registration inquiries, please contact Jackie Eudell (jackie@cni.org).
You can find more information about the meeting at https://www.cni.org/mm/fall-2020.
Final project briefing schedules for all four weeks have been posted to the meeting Sched, https://cnifall2020virtualmembershipmeet.sched.com/ (registered attendees only).
There are a few things we won’t be doing this year. We are not going to do a roadmap for the fall 2020 meeting; it doesn’t seem very useful given the way we’ve laid out the meeting (in the meeting evaluation we’ll ask about whether this was a good idea, and it’s a decision we are prepared to revisit in future). We are not going to issue a formal Program Plan update for 2020-2021 in the current environment; this would be an exercise in futility, as well as hubris. I will address both the current landscape and our programmatic foci in my December 14 plenary. And, alas, you are on your own for the reception and the Paul Evan Peters memorial shrimp on the evening of December 14; if you do celebrate, please take a moment to lift a glass to our community.
We’ll conclude the virtual fall member meeting on the two scheduled days of December 14 and 15. On December 14, we’ll hold the invitational executive roundtable from 12-2:30 Eastern (we may hold an additional round on December 16 or 17, depending on demand), and I’ll do my plenary talk at 3:00 pm EST on Dec. 14, with plenty of time for questions and conversation.
On December 15, we have several plenary events scheduled:
From 12:00-1:00 pm Eastern, we’ll have a panel of current CLIR fellows speaking to their work and their view of the current landscape. I’m very concerned that, in the current emergency, and with the migration of everything to virtual events that largely eliminate opportunities for serendipity and social networking, we are at risk of overlooking and failing the new and increasingly diverse group of emerging leaders joining our community. The CLIR fellows are one of the leading examples of such emerging leaders, and a group that CNI has long sought to support. We will be looking to do similar sessions in future meetings, highlighting additional CLIR fellows and perhaps others as well. In this connection, I want to also note that among our guests, we are once again being joined by both CLIR fellows and members of the current cadre of ARL Leadership and Career Development (LCDP) fellows, and I extend them a warm welcome.
From 1:30-2:30 Eastern, Oya Rieger, Roger Schonfeld, and Janet Radecki from Ithaka S+R will be discussing insights from their very recent work on the impact of COVID-19 on the research enterprise (see https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/the-impact-of-covid-19-on-the-research-enterprise). This is a centrally important topic for the CNI community. Ithaka’s work complements CNI’s work on research continuity and resilience (see https://www.cni.org/go/research-continuity-sept-2020-update), which we’ll be updating in late spring 2021.
From 3:00-4:30 Eastern, we’ll celebrate this year’s Paul Evan Peters Award recipient Francine Berman, and learn from her Paul Evan Peters Memorial Lecture.
We will be posting details of all of the December 14-15 events on the meeting website and Sched as they are finalized.
I hope to see many of you next week at the launch of our virtual fall meeting, and throughout the weeks that follow. Please be in touch with me, or Diane Goldenberg-Hart (diane@cni.org) if you have any questions or concerns.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
Major new JISC Report: Learning and Teaching Reimagined
Yesterday, the JISC in the UK , in collaboration with several other key UK higher education organizations, released a major new report “Learning and Teaching Reimagined” arguing for a future blended education model, in part as an outcome of the COVID-19 experience. There are several pages providing summaries and commentary on the report; all of these include pointers to the full report.
See
https://www.jisc.ac.uk/reports/learning-and-teaching-reimagined-a-new-dawn-for-higher-education
https://www.jisc.ac.uk/learning-and-teaching-reimagined
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
EDUCAUSE 2021 Top IT Issues and Scenarios
Every year, EDUCAUSE issues a top 10 IT issue list, usually in conjunction with their annual meeting. Last week, at the EDUCAUSE virtual meeting, Susan Grajek of EDUCAUSE presented an excellent summary of this years’, work, and the thinking behind it which actually involves scenarios rather than a simple list, and early this week, they released the full analysis, along with some commentary. Much of the focus is how the pandemic and efforts to recover from it interact with IT strategies.
See
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
Call for Proposals: HathiTrust Research Center funded collaborations for scholarship on marginalized textual communities
Members of the CNI community will be interested in this call for proposals for the HathiTrust Research Center for a special cycle on historically marginalized textual communities. Please see the details below.
-Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI
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The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) requests proposals for a special funded round of its Advanced Collaborative Support (ACS) program, in support of scholarship on historically marginalized textual communities. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, HTRC’s “Scholar-Curated Worksets for Analysis, Reuse & Dissemination (SCWAReD)” project offers funded collaborations between researchers and HTRC staff to solve challenging problems related to computational analysis of the HathiTrust corpus.
In this special cycle of ACS, we seek to collaborate with scholars to recover volumes in HathiTrust that tell the story of historically under-resourced and marginalized textual communities, and to identify gaps in the HathiTrust collection where such communities are not represented in the digital library.
The selected projects in this round will be awarded $30,000 to cover project costs, generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in addition to the HTRC staff time and compute resources typically given to awardees as part of the program. Funding can be used to cover staff and student effort, travel, materials and supplies, and other relevant project costs, as allowable by Mellon Foundation and Indiana University policies. See “Proposals” section in the full CFP for detailed budget information. Each awarded proposal will receive access to HTRC staff to collaborate on the proposed project during the award period. The staff consists of specialists in information science, computer science, cultural analytics, and HathiTrust. HTRC ACS support may include such activities as project scoping; navigating HTRC and HathiTrust tools, data, and collections; volume identification and workset/dataset creation; facilitating data access; and selecting, customizing, or running analysis tools.
Complete proposals will include the following:
- A cover sheet with basic project details (title, team members, contact information)
- Summary & rationale (<500 words)
- Project narrative (1500-2000 words)
- Work plan (a brief bulleted list of activities)
- A budget describing how you will use the $30,000 stipend
- Brief bio-sketch(es) for each project team member
Projects will be supported from January 2021 through August 2022.
Proposals are due November 30, 2020.
Applicants are encouraged to contact acs@hathitrust.org in advance of proposal submission to discuss eligibility, project details, prerequisites, and HTRC support.
The full CFP with links to a sample budget and justification can be found here: https://www.hathitrust.org/scwared_acs_cfp
NIH final policy for data management and sharing
In a milestone announcement, after extensive consultation with its communities, the US National Institutes of Health has release the final version of their policy for data management and sharing. This will replace the 2003 NIH data sharing policy, effective January 25, 2021. SEE
https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-21-013.html
NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins statement on the policy
Also an additional NIH perspective of interest
https://osp.od.nih.gov/2020/10/29/nih-releases-new-policy-data-management-and-sharing/
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNi
CNI Digital Scholarship Planning Webinar – Recordings Available
The 9-part CNI Digital Scholarship Planning webinar series has concluded and recordings of all presentations are available, linked from each session at
https://www.cni.org/events/cni-workshops/digital-scholarship-planning-2020-webinar-series This link will also lead you to a set of discussion questions developed for each session; if you have a digital scholarship planning group at your institution, these questions can be used to frame some of your planning meetings.
You also can go directly to these links for the recordings:
Presentations by a stellar roster of speakers include these topics:
– The Case for Developing Digital Scholarship Programs
– Supporting Digital Scholarship During the Pandemic
– Assessment
– Staffing
– Supporting Research
– Initiatives in Teaching & Learning
– Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
– Space and Place
– Reflections on Libraries and Digital Scholarship and Looking Ahead
Please share this announcement and the link to the recordings widely.
Thanks,
Joan
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Joan K. Lippincott, Ph.D.
Associate Executive Director Emerita
Coalition for Networked Information
Funded Research Opportunities at Library of Congress on Computing Cultural Heritage In The Cloud
I wanted to share this very interesting call for proposals from the Library of Congress with the CNI community. I hope that at some point in future we’ll be able to have a report on this work at a CNI meeting.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
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LC Labs is excited to share the following opportunity to fund four researchers to work with Library digital collections at scale
Apply for funds to do big data research with Library of Congress materials by November 30th at noon eastern time! The Library of Congress has issued a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) LCCIO20D0112 to find and recruit researchers as part of Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud, a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Library is seeking to award contracts to four researchers for experiments working with Library data at scale. Proposed budgets should not exceed $77,500. These experiments will take place between May 1, 2021 and January 31, 2022. See the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for Interested Researchers <https://labs.loc.gov/static/labs/work/experiments/LCCIO20D0112-BAA-CCH-FAQ.pdf> for more information. See the full posting at < https://beta.sam.gov/opp/2d03f173c442494091487ce4565833ee/view>.
The Library will host two online sessions to share information about this opportunity and answer questions about the Announcement. These sessions (known as Industry Days) will be held on 10/28/2020 at 1:00 pm Eastern Time and 10/29/2020 at 4:00 pm Eastern Time on Webex. Please email Loc-BAA@loc.gov by 10/26/2020 at noon EDT to register.
Through experimentation, research, and collaboration, LC Labs works to realize the Library’s vision that “all Americans are connected to the Library of Congress” by enabling the Library’s Digital Strategy. LC Labs is home to the Library of Congress Innovator in Residence Program; has nurtured experiments in machine learning and the use of collections as data; and incubated the Library’s popular crowdsourced transcription program By the People. Learn more and subscribe to our monthly newsletter at <http://labs.loc.gov/>.
Ithaka report on Impact of COVID-19 on the Research Enterprise
Today, Jane Radecki and Roger Schoenfeld of Ithaka S+R released a very interesting and wide-ranging study of the Impact of COVID-19 on the Research Enterprise. I’ve reproduced the Executive Summary below. This report echos many themes that we heard at our recent Executive Roundtables on Research Restart and Research Continuity (see https://www.cni.org/go/research-continuity-sept-2020-update) and goes into issues around funding and federal grants in depth. The report can be read online or downloaded as a PDF at:
https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/the-impacts-of-covid-19-on-the-research-enterprise/
Ithaka will discuss aspects of this work at the Fall CNI member meeting
My thanks to Ithaka for helping us to better understand these developments.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
From the Ithaka report:
The COVID-19 pandemic and associated disruptions have had a major impact on the US academic research enterprise. This report provides a landscape review of what is known about these impacts, from March through mid-October 2020, with an aim of identifying gaps that should be addressed. Our focus is on externally funded research, and therefore we emphasize STEM fields almost exclusively. As a result, we also focus on the largest research universities, which conduct an outsized share of this research and which are themselves quite reliant on the intellectual activity and revenues associated with it.
Our key findings include:
• The federal government provided substantial flexibility to universities in utilizing research funding at the beginning of the pandemic. In addition, there is little reason to anticipate substantial budget reductions among most major research funders. As a result of these factors, while universities face substantial declines to some revenue sources and risks to most others, externally funded scientific research is likely to be relatively stable. That said, the ways in which the academic research enterprise is interwoven with, and in some cases cross-subsidized by, instructional activities pose some risk to research support. There are substantial unanswered questions about how negative impacts to the business models of research universities will affect scientific research.
• Many traditional research activities were largely suspended in the spring into summer, other than COVID-19-related and other essential research. With federal flexibilities ending, universities scrambled to put in place necessary protections to allow laboratories and other research groups to safely resume their activities. Many but not all research activities have successfully restarted, even if not all are at full capacity. In parallel, the COVID-19 emergency led to substantial innovation in research collaboration and scholarly communication. It also demonstrated the limits of collaboration and communication infrastructure and services in the face of widespread attention to scientific progress and its politicization. There are substantial unanswered questions about the resiliency of the research enterprise and the permanence of the many adaptations to collaboration and scholarly communication that we have seen.
• The human impacts of the disruptions are vast. These include limitations and impediments facing international students and disruptions to researchers that differ by gender, caregiver status, and career level. There are substantial unanswered questions about international talent flows, the development of early career researchers, and setbacks in achieving gender equity.
As we write, the research enterprise is coming back to life after an unplanned and unprecedented stoppage. Given the uncertain nature of how the pandemic will proceed and what societal, economic, and educational changes will result, we expect other impacts to develop over the coming months and years.
• The federal government provided substantial flexibility to universities in utilizing research funding at the beginning of the pandemic. In addition, there is little reason to anticipate substantial budget reductions among most major research funders. As a result of these factors, while universities face substantial declines to some revenue sources and risks to most others, externally funded scientific research is likely to be relatively stable. That said, the ways in which the academic research enterprise is interwoven with, and in some cases cross-subsidized by, instructional activities pose some risk to research support. There are substantial unanswered questions about how negative impacts to the business models of research universities will affect scientific research.
• Many traditional research activities were largely suspended in the spring into summer, other than COVID-19-related and other essential research. With federal flexibilities ending, universities scrambled to put in place necessary protections to allow laboratories and other research groups to safely resume their activities. Many but not all research activities have successfully restarted, even if not all are at full capacity. In parallel, the COVID-19 emergency led to substantial innovation in research collaboration and scholarly communication. It also demonstrated the limits of collaboration and communication infrastructure and services in the face of widespread attention to scientific progress and its politicization. There are substantial unanswered questions about the resiliency of the research enterprise and the permanence of the many adaptations to collaboration and scholarly communication that we have seen.
• The human impacts of the disruptions are vast. These include limitations and impediments facing international students and disruptions to researchers that differ by gender, caregiver status, and career level. There are substantial unanswered questions about international talent flows, the development of early career researchers, and setbacks in achieving gender equity.
As we write, the research enterprise is coming back to life after an unplanned and unprecedented stoppage. Given the uncertain nature of how the pandemic will proceed and what societal, economic, and educational changes will result, we expect other impacts to develop over the coming months and years.
Report on Executive Roundtables on Research Continuity and Restart (September 2020)
In late September 2020 CNI conducted several follow-up virtual Executive Roundtable events to explore the state of restarting the research enterprise at our member institutions and discuss strategies and approaches for research continuity and resilience. This was a follow on from our April 2020 Roundtables on this topic and once again took a broad view of the research enterprise and how it is supported. The report from these September sessions is now available at
https://www.cni.org/go/research-continuity-sept-2020-update
I expect that there will be several sessions exploring aspects of this landscape as part of our Fall virtual CNI Membership meeting and we plan to convene another set of Executive Roundtables on this topic in late Spring 2021 to summarize the 2020-2021 situation and examine thinking for the 2021-2022 Academic year and beyond.
I’d be grateful if CNI-announce readers would share this report widely within their institutions where appropriate, since I think the topic is of broad interest, beyond the established CNI community.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI