Effects of COVID-19 on the Federal Research and Development Enterprise by the @CRS4Congress, Daniel Morgan, and John F. Sargent Jr. April 10, 2020. COVID-19 Professional Reading

Effects of COVID-19 on the Federal Research and Development Enterprise by the Congressional Research Service, Daniel Morgan, and John F. Sargent Jr. April 10, 2020. COVID-19 Professional Reading

Written while still in the early phases of the uneven and partial COVID-19 shutdown across the United State, this report outlines many of impacts of the pandemic on Federal research. The report provides a good overview of the likely areas of impact. As the report notes: 

As the scientific, government, and public understanding of COVID-19 has grown, the national response has evolved, and it is likely to continue to evolve. The scope, scale, and dynamism of responses by the federal government, state and local governments, and the private sector are too great to catalog fully in this report. Rather, the report highlights key effects and issues of concern and provides examples of agency actions (p. 1).

Also, it was clear from the outset that many Federally funded research efforts would pivot to COVID-19 research: 

Even for continuing R&D projects, there may be efficiency and quality impacts, additional costs, and challenges such as the closure of suppliers and service providers. Some resources dedicated to ongoing R&D are also being redirected toward work focused on COVID-19 (unpaged).

Since many Federally funded research efforts take place with partners in academia, the impact of COVID-19 would be mitigated (or exacerbated) by the uneven response of many academic institutions: 

University decisions about essential research functions may be informed by local conditions, federal funding agency directives, ethical considerations about the well-being of human subjects and animals in discontinued or scaled-back research, and each university’s own risk management decision making (p. 3).

Likewise, differences in disciplines are important differentiators of impact: 

These factors may affect different disciplines differently; for example, research in mathematics, computer science, and theoretical physics may be more amenable to remote working than research in agricultural science, geology, or microbiology (p. 4).

The report also outlines some of the measures and actions that the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations (CARES) Act identifies for Federally supported research activities, such as providing no-cost extensions to Federal grants. A specific action that Congress may consider is: 

establishing a post-pandemic task force on the federal R&D enterprise to

examine lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and recommend policy

changes to improve the national response of the R&D community in the event of

future pandemics (p. 14).

One can wish … 

Recommended reading in conjunction with What Happens to the Continuity and Future of the Research Enterprise?:  Report of a CNI Executive Roundtable Series Held April 2020. See review here.

• Read: July 5,  2020 | Find Online

• See my complete 2020 Reading list on Goodreads.

What Happens to the Continuity and Future of the Research Enterprise?: Report of a @cni_org Executive Roundtable Series Held April 2020. COVID-19 Professional Reading

What Happens to the Continuity and Future of the Research Enterprise?:  Report of a CNI Executive Roundtable Series Held April 2020. COVID-19 Professional Reading

The annual CNI Spring 2020 membership meeting cancelled, originally scheduled for San Diego, was cancelled due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. In its place, CNI convened four sessions in April 2020 to bring together CNI participants to discuss the topic “What Happens to the Continuity and Future of the Research Enterprise?”

Much of the discussion of the impact of COVID-19 on libraries and universities has, rightfully, focused on how it affects pedagogy and students. These discussions brought together key campus players from Offices of Research, Libraries, and IT/Research Computing to focus on how the global pandemic will transform the research enterprise of higher education. 

In the sciences, much of the impact, from the start, was on lack of access to laboratories and research equipment, however, as was noted by participants, 

It is important to understand, and we will have more to say about this later in the report, that libraries (along with museums and archives) can reasonably be considered to be the laboratories of many humanists and a substantial number of social scientists (p.3).

In the first weeks after the start of the COVID-19 crisis, institutions reacted in a variety of ways. In those first weeks of confusion, different parts of the same institution often had varying responses and it was noted that:

The extent of library autonomy with regard to broader institutional policies or regulations from various governmental jurisdictions has been an important factor in determining the extent to which a facility may be open and/or able to provide services or access to resources (p. 4). 

With the closure of most libraries as the crisis deepened, a variety of responses evolved to provide researchers with access to the information now locked in hundreds of millions of volumes in quarentied library stacks. These responses ranged from more liberal access from publishers to certain content to the controversial National Emergency Digital Library from the Internet Archive. For those at top tier institutions, 

Many participants discussed the importance of the HathiTrust Digital Library Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS) for access to at least a portion of their collections that otherwise would have only been available in print form (for more information on this program see here). Some of the collection's limitations were also noted: the relative lack of newer material, the availability of only a portion of an institution's physical collections (most commonly estimated as less that 50%, though we really need better data on this), and the concern about discontinuing access once normal operations resume (and questions surrounding the definition of “normal operations”) (p. 4). 

In the same vein, there seemed to be an openness around a dramatic rethinking of many assumptions about library collections: “There is certainly some recalibration about copyright, fair use, and new ideas like controlled digital lending that are taking place in light of the current emergency and public priorities” (p. 12). 

With most library staff moved to a telework environment, many institutions attempted to pivot staff unable to perform regular, place-based tasks to work that would facilitate improvements and access to existing digital collections: 

At least a few campuses are seriously recalibrating the extent of investment in digitizing special collections; additionally, some campuses with library staff working from home but unable to do their usual jobs are re-assigning them to enhance access to digitized special collections through transcription work, for example (p. 6)

Importantly, participants noted that there would unlikely be a return to the “old normal” any time soon, if ever. In the research environment, the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to accelerate changes that have been underway in the research environment for the past three decades and see these changes more evenly distributed across disciplines outside of the sciences. The role of research support enterprises (libraries, IT/Computing, and offices of research) will be key to these changes and these areas need to actively engage with these changes: 

We need to collectively envision what a maximally resilient, highly distributed, low-density, and network-based research enterprise might look like. Until we develop that vision we cannot exploit it as a way to enhance resilience in our current enterprise, and we cannot begin to explore questions about what parts of this vision are desirable, and which are problematic and counterproductive (p. 14)

• June 14, 2020 | Find Online

• See my complete 2020 Reading list on Goodreads.

Digital Libraries for Open Knowledge: 23rd International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, TPDL 2019 Oslo, Norway / COVID-19 Professional Reading

Digital Libraries for Open Knowledge: 23rd International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, TPDL 2019 Oslo, Norway, September 9–12, 2019, Proceedings. Editors Antoine Doucet; @antoine_isaac; @koraljkagolub; @traalberg; Adam Jatowt. ISSN 1611-3349 (electronic). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30760-8.  421 pp. COVID-19 Professional Reading.

The "Theory and Practice in Digital Libraries" (TPDL) conference brings together researchers, developers, and data experts in the field of digital libraries. This year’s theme was “Connecting with Communities.” Digital libraries and repositories store, manage, represent, and disseminate rich and heterogeneous data that are often of enormous cultural, scientific, educational, artistic, and social value. Serving as digital ecosystems they provide unparalleled opportunities for novel knowledge extraction and discovery. This year’s conference, TPDL 2019, was held 9-12 September 2019 in Oslo, Norway.

I attended the 2019 TDLP and presented, on behalf of my co-authors, the poster session, “The Biodiversity Heritage Library: Unveiling a World of Knowledge About Life on Earth.” Martin R. Kalfatovic, Grace Costantino, and Constance A. Rinaldo. 

The meeting was very informative with many excellent presentations. Papers of note at the meeting included: 

• Coner: A Collaborative Approach for Long-Tail Named Entity Recognition in Scientific Publications / Daniel Vliegenthart, Sepideh Mesbah, Christoph Lofi, Akiko Aizawa, and Alessandro Bozzon

• The OpenAIRE Research Community Dashboard: On Blending Scientific Workflows and Scientific Publishing / Miriam Baglioni, Alessia Bardi, Argiro Kokogiannaki, Paolo Manghi, Katerina Iatropoulou, Pedro Principe, André Vieira, Lars Holm Nielsen, Harry Dimitropoulos, Ioannis Foufoulas, Natalia Manola, Claudio Atzori, Sandro La Bruzzo, Emma Lazzeri, Michele Artini, Michele De Bonis, and Andrea Dell’Amico

• A Framework for Citing Nanopublications / Erika Fabris, Tobias Kuhn , and Gianmaria Silvello

• Who is Mona L.? Identifying Mentions of Artworks in Historical Archives / Nitisha Jain and Ralf Krestel

• Gatekeeper: Quantifying the Impacts of Service to the Scientific Community / Spyke Krepsha and Dongwon Lee

• Can Language Inference Support Metadata Generation? / José María González Pinto, Janus Wawrzinek, Suma Kori, and Wolf-Tilo Balke

• The CSO Classifier: Ontology-Driven Detection of Research Topics in Scholarly Articles / Angelo A. Salatin, Francesco Osborne, Thiviyan Thanapalasingam, and Enrico Motta

• Non-Parametric Subject Prediction / Shenghui Wang, Rob Koopman, and Gwenn Englebienne

Overall, an excellent meeting (and proceedings) that covers current trends and research in digital libraries.

• Read: June 14, 2020 | Find Online

• See my complete 2020 Reading list on Goodreads.