Last week we held what I think was a very successful fall meeting in Washington DC. I used the opening plenary session to survey events of the last year and to introduce the 2009-2010 CNI Program Plan, which was distributed at the meeting. The Program Plan is also available online, linked from our home page at http://www.cni.org. We'll be mailing printed copies to member representatives in the new year, and can make additional copies available on request.

We took video of my opening talk, of Bernie Frisher's wonderful closing plenary, and a few selected breakout sessions. We'll be putting these online over the next few weeks, and we'll put out an announcement to CNI-announce when they are ready. We're also accumulating presentation materials from the breakout sessions and putting that online as quickly as possible; this should be complete early in the new year. I also used a substantial part of  last Thursday's CNI Conversation audio event to reflect on some of the developments from our Fall Meeting, and also from the Fifth International Data Curation Conference, which was held in London in early December. The recording of the CNI Conversation is now available through our web site as well.

I  want to provide a few pointers and citations to things that I mentioned in my opening talk, as I've gotten a few questions about them, and also give visibility to some other related materials.

Elinor Ostrom shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics, which recognized her work in understanding the economics and governance of commons of various kinds. Of particular interest to many in the CNI community would be the 2006 book that she co-edited with Charlotte Hess titled Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice.

The Obama Administration Office of Science and Technology Policy  call for comments on public access to federally-funded research can be found at http://www.ostp.gov/cs/public_access/public_access_forum

"2 Papers a minute published in biology, 5 in science as a whole"; I got this from  Professor Douglas Kell's opening keynote at the International Digital Curation Conference in London on December 3, 2009. There were a wealth of great sessions at the IDCC meeting, and you can find links to the video captures and the presentation materials here http://www.netvibes.com/idcc2009#Completed_Sessions and http://www.netvibes.com/idcc2009#Programme. I particularly reccomend Professor Ed Seidel's superb plenary session on the second day, and Graham Pryor's best-paper talk on data sharing in the biological sciences, which was largely based on a set of very detailed subdisciplinary case studies comissioned by the UK Research Information Network and the British Library; these can be found at

http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/using-and-accessing-information-resources/disciplinary-case-studies-life-sciences  and are well worth reading to understand some of the barriers to implementing data sharing policies.

Some of the very interesting recent developments in citizen science are covered in the excellent recent report by Liz Lyon of UKOLN titled Open Science at Web Scale: Optimising Participation and Predictive Potential which is available for download at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/documents/opensciencerpt.aspx .

On the importance of special collections: the ARL/CNI Fall Forum, "An Age of Discovery: Distinctive Collections in the Digital Age" was held on October 13-14, 2009. This was a superb event. You can find links to audio records of the talks and to presentations at  http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/fallforumproceedings/forum09proceedings.shtml.  Several outstanding papers from this conference, including a somewhat expanded version of my own opening remarks addressing why I believe that special and distinctive collections are of such strategic importance to the agenda of the Coalition, have just been published as the December 2009 issue of Research Library Issues  and can be found at http://arl.tizrapublisher.com/view/9ishf/prvp3/default; they are also linked to the talks in the proceedings page.

With best wishes for the holiday season and the new year.

Clifford Lynch

Director, CNI