I don't seem to be doing well about sharing a lot of material with the CNI-announce list in a timely way, but here I'll try to catch up with a number of very diverse items that may be of interest to readers.  This is not only ecelctic, but long, which is a measure of how far behind I've gotten. Also look forward to more in the coming days as I (hopefully) dig out.

First off, the Association of Research Libraries has produced a very useful high-level discussion of controlled unclassified information and related policy issues in the US. This has very close connections to the Executive Roundtable report on "Science Nationalism" that CNI produced after our December 202 virtual member meeting, which can be found on our website. (Disclosure: I helped out a bit on this paper.) For the ARL report, see:

https://www.arl.org/news/arl-publishes-issue-brief-on-new-us-federal-compliance-rules-for-sensitive-information/

At the end of April (!) Europeana hosted an interesting webinar, "Not in Public Ownership, but Available for Public Use" which considered what might be done with digital copies of (presumably out of copyright) artwork that is being deaccessioned by museums. This caught my attention because I've been arguing for at least 20 years that museums in the United States should be legally required to place high quality digital copies of out-of-copyright works in the public domain before they deaccession them. At least in the US it would seem that we have a legal and regulatory framework to make this possible (presumably through states Attorneys General), and it's shocking to me that organizations like AAMD haven't mandated this as part of their deaccessioning guidelines as well, particularly in light of the ghastly spate of deaccessioning that is currently taking place. The Europeana presentation, by Bernadine Brocker Wieder, looks at some additional dimensions of this issue,
including the possible role of Nonfungible Tokens (NFT), a discussion I found quite confusing. But interesting viewing. See

https://pro.europeana.eu/event/not-in-public-ownership-but-available-for-public


Our colleagues at JISC have recently put out a white paper on open access monographs. This seems to be an emerging objective for various funders, particularly in Europe. They've shared a blog post that gives some very helpful background as well as pointers to the white paper and some earlier publications.

https://research.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2021/05/18/investing-in-the-open-access-book-infrastructure-a-call-for-action/

The Society of American Archivists (SAA) has made a recording of a recent discussion "The Future of Archives: Collecting in Time of Crisis" available for viewing. This is an issue that I think is emerging to be of central importance. We've explored aspects of this at CNI meetings, looking at projects like Documenting the Now  and the work to capture the Occupy Wall Street movement.  This is a very complex multidimensional challenge without straightforward answers. I hope that we'll explore these issues in more detail in future CNI events. See

https://www.crowdcast.io/e/future-of-archives/register



The US National Academies is holding a three part series "The Revolution in Intelligence Affairs" in conjunction with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The first session, on Technological Drivers, took place on April 28, and the recording is available. There's a lot of interesting material in here that I suspect many, perhaps most, CNI-announce readers are unaware of -- for example, the "GEOINT singularity" as space-based earth imaging expands, or the interactions between machine learning and counterintelligence. Links are here, as well as information about the upcoming second and third parts of the series.

https://www.nationalacademies.org/event/04-28-2021/the-revolution-in-intelligence-affairs-technological-drivers

I'll also just mention the National Academies report on the impact of the pandemic on women in STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine), which was released some time ago. It's really bad news. See

https://www.nap.edu/catalog/26061/the-impact-of-covid-19-on-the-careers-of-women-in-academic-sciences-engineering-and-medicine

which also includes a pointer to video of a webinar of the announcement event (which I watched; it's grim viewing).

There's a very interesting emerging initiative from NSF called the "Internet of Samples"  which deals with cyberinfrastructure to deal with the management and sharing of materials samples. I hope to get a report on this for a future CNI event. A good short summary with pointers to the key materials is at

https://bids.berkeley.edu/news/internet-samples-isamples-toward-interdisciplinary-cyberinfrastructure-material-samples


Finally, a very interesting recent proposal for a National Discovery Cloud from the Community Computing Consortium; the work has been led by Ian Foster, who has done a great deal of important and visionary work that will be familiar to  many CNI-announce readers. This is a potentially important set of ideas about research and public cyberinfrastructure that I again hope we can explore at CNI in future. The paper is not long, and is well worth reading. See

https://cra.org/crn/2021/05/national-discovery-cloud/


Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI