 Thank you for joining us. Welcome, I'm Cliff Lynch, I'm the director of CNI and I will be talking today and hopefully answering a number of questions as well and hearing some comments from you. You've joined us for a webinar reporting on what we heard at the executive round table which we held in conjunction with the spring 2020 virtual member meeting. And I wanted to do this after the member meeting so that all of our members had an opportunity to join us for this, not just those who had chosen to participate in the virtual member meeting. So what I wanna do today is briefly tell you a little bit about the executive round table and then to summarize some of the major takeaways that I had from the conversations. I don't intend to talk more than about a half an hour maximum and while we are recording this, my comments, we will turn off the recording when we start the Q&A session so that we can talk a little more, frankly, as necessary. So for those of you who aren't familiar with executive round tables, these are meetings that we convene in conjunction with our spring and fall meetings. They typically run about three hours. We invite institutions to participate and CAP attendance typically at about 15 or 16 institutions in order to have a manageable discussion. Often institutions bring more than one rep off most usually the head of the library and CIO or some other senior IT person. Sometimes depending on the topic, the institutional representation may be a bit different. For example, we did one on university presses a few years ago and had press directors join us. Now, we publish reports from these sessions and in the reports, we try and summarize what we heard but one of the ground rules is that we do not attribute statements to particular institutions normally unless it's a very clear kind of public position of a given institution. So we had scheduled before we canceled the in-person spring CNI meeting, a session, an executive round table session on the acquisition new strategies for the acquisition of instructional materials. We did go ahead and hold that and we will be releasing the report from that probably tomorrow or if not on Monday. We will be doing a session next Tuesday which I invite you all to join us for on the findings of that set of round tables. We have already as of about a week ago published the report from the round table that is the topic of this session about research continuity. And I invite you to have a look at that. It goes into a lot more detail than I intend to go into in my introductory remarks. So let me tell you a little bit about that session. We held it in the 10 days or so between about April 15th and April 25th just to situate these conversations in time. We added this session after we made the decision to move virtual for the spring meeting and taking advantage of the additional flexibility that that accorded us to respond to urgent kinds of issues. And we felt that this wasn't urgent issue and one that certainly was on people's minds but wasn't gaining a lot of organized attention. The response totally confirmed that we had about 40 institutions that wanted to participate and during that 10 day period, we actually wound up doing four different convenings of interested institutions. We also were very fortunate that we not only had IT directors and library directors join us but also representatives from the Office of Research at many of the institutions that joined us. And that really gave a tremendous amount of depth and insight in the discussions that I think was really significant. I would say the kind of level of institutional participation and the caliber of the teams that turned out was really unprecedented in the history of our executive roundtables. So with that bit of background, let me talk a little bit about what we learned. So the first thing that I'll say is that many of our institutions had already done a fair amount of thinking about instructional continuity and instructional resilience and had been investing in that for a period of some years. Many of our institutions also already had in parallel with their face to face instructional activities entirely online courses of various kinds. So they already had some experience infrastructure and workflows in place to support the very rapid pivot to remote instruction that took place. Well, certainly many of our institutions did some level of disaster planning and that's really how I'd characterize it around research operations on campus. None of them really had well elaborated plans for research continuity in the face of something like the COVID-19 emergency. They certainly had plans to deal with situations where there was some kind of natural disaster or physical catastrophe on campus and they had to address things like animal welfare or hazardous materials or trying to shut down certain kinds of delicate equipment in an orderly fashion, but really nothing like this. So when you look at what happened at most campuses, it was fundamentally shut down pretty much everything except for COVID-19 related research and other research where human health was very directly implicated for some reason or another and grave harm would occur for discontinuing it. Otherwise basically closed down as much as possible, get people off campus shut down. So it was about shutting down rather than about continuity plans. Now people are talking about how to do a research restart and I'll have more to say about that in a little while. So the next thing I think is really important to recognize is that there was a massive misunderstanding among top institutional leadership and the public about what constitutes the research enterprise and what kind of a disruption occurred, what kind of a shutdown occurred to the research enterprise. There is a great tendency both in the popular press and even among top administrators to equate the research enterprise with things that happened in labs on campus. And in fact, if you look at it, the research enterprise is immensely broader than that. It involves not just activities that take place in physics and biological labs on campus. It involves shared facilities that operate nationally and internationally. It involves field work. It involves all kinds of things. It also reaches far beyond lab work and field work and beyond science. It includes the humanities, the social sciences. There's a sort of a edge case that has been terrifically challenged by what happens that deals with the performing arts. Under estimating the scope of the research enterprise and the variability of its resilience in the face of this crisis and the level of impact that has taken place on various disciplines and on various scholars is a grave, grave mistake. In fact, there are numerous areas of the research enterprise where really research went on relatively unhindered. Yes, relatively unhindered. The biggest challenges typically were challenges that had nothing to do with that specific discipline but were much more around working from home, sharing bad connectivity with multiple people, being interrupted, having to care for others and deal with children out of school and those sorts of things. They really weren't, in some cases, discipline specific at all. I think that one of the things that really came home here is the extent to which libraries, archives, special collections, museums and these kinds of memory institutions actually serve as the laboratories for, or part of the laboratories for a tremendous number of disciplines. So I think understanding that is really vital and I think it frames a challenge for libraries in particular in communicating with the top leadership on their campus about how significant the library role is in supporting the research enterprise, how conversations about continuity of library services and the reopening of libraries needs to be part of the conversation about restarting or resuming or providing greater continuity to the research enterprise. I'll say something even more significant here which I think can't be stressed enough. The library and research communities but particularly the library community has led 30 years of sustained investment in scholarly infrastructure in moving scholarly communications online in digitizing key resources that's the only thing that's allowed us to do as well as we have done in this crisis in sustaining both remote instruction and the research enterprise. It's really quite remarkable and I think it's really important to stress the scale of that investment, the sustained and strategic nature of it, the need to continue to sustain the investment and to take some credit for it and perhaps the easiest way to convey this to people who maybe haven't thought about it in these terms is to say, imagine where we would be if this pandemic had hit in 1990 instead of in 2020. Consider for example our ability to mount a research response to the pandemic, to collaborate nationally and internationally on various things like vaccines and medical treatments and the epidemiology of what's taking place today. I think that's very telling. Okay, a few other findings that I wanna stress. There is a very significant role that Hottie Trust, the Hottie Trust Emergency Access Program and a number of other things related to control digital lending have played in allowing us to navigate this. These have been important for both research and for instructional continuity. We've got a real dilemma shaping up particularly with the Hottie Emergency Access Program as we begin to reopen because as it stands right now at least it looks like as physical access returns even if it's very limited physical access like a certain amount of paging of material for curbside pickup or something like that. That may require Hottie to stand down their digital access to in copyright works that they don't have other permissions for. That's a real dilemma. I think another thing just while we're on the topic of libraries particularly is the way in which the crisis has underscored our continued reliance on physical collections and being able to move physical stuff around which we are able to do in the US under the Doctrine of First Sale. If you look there are all kinds of shared collections in place. There are many agreements between our research institutions for reciprocal physical access to physically proximate collections say universities within the same city or region. And then there is interlibrary loan of course. All of these basically stopped working when we lost physical access to our collections. I think that one of the very strong takeaway messages here is the vulnerability there, the fact that it's now unmistakable the way in which the inability to conduct some kind of first sale like practice like controlled digital lending. Handicaps our ability to operate responsibly in crisis and in the digital world. I think that's a very important and now well-documented public policy challenge. And I will just leave that observation there for the time being. I wanna take note of a number of other things that we talked about. One is the international dimension here. It seems like it's going, it seems very clear that while domestic travel will at least creep back at some point, we're not sure how quickly or how slowly. The international dimension is gonna be, I think very different for a longer time to come. The fairly casual way in which scholars moved internationally, I think is gonna encounter a lot of friction. And we need to really think carefully about some of the implications there. One issue, and this is particularly acute in the humanities is that we see often sabbaticals or other kinds of grant funded activities planned to allow scholars to go abroad to consult archives or special library collections or to do field work. And these are often planned far in advance. What do people do now? How soon is that kind of international travel gonna come back? And particularly when we start talking about travel to some of the more difficult to reach parts of the world, what does this mean for ethnographic work, for archeological work, for this sort of thing? One of the things that seems very likely is that this is going to change some of the character of international collaborations. And particularly when we think about access to special collections and archives abroad, libraries may be able to play a very helpful role in arranging reciprocal access and arranging digitization to support our scholars. Another dimension that I wanna mention here is data. So one of the things that's happened is that data has become much harder to collect either if you're collecting it through field work or you're taking it in your lab. You probably can't do that anymore. And it's clear that even as access creeps back to these facilities and practices around field work begin to resume that they're gonna have to take place at less density, it's going to become more costly and riskier perhaps to collect data. And I think that one of the implications of this is that data is going to become a more precious shared resource. And so this is gonna put much greater emphasis on data curation and data reuse. Not just because it's a good thing, but because scholars will rely on it more. I was very interested to hear accounts of scholars who do a lot of data intensive analysis and things like that who were able to pick up and work from home very smoothly with data they'd collected. And we're actually reaching out to research data managers at their institution and subject specialists at their institution to ask them to help the researchers to identify data that other scholars elsewhere had made available so that they could reuse it, reanalyze it, merge it with their data. I think we may see a lot more of that going forward and research data management may become not just about curating data that's created by teams at your institution, but helping those teams to find other data that's available. I think that's a really interesting development and one that bears watching. I'll just say a word about reopening. Everybody's trying to figure out how to reopen in the fall. Can we bring students back? How many students? What kind of students? Do we need to keep instruction remote in the fall? And I would say, I just wanna note a couple of things here. I certainly don't have a crystal ball anymore than anyone else does. And I don't know what's gonna happen in the fall. I'm not sure anybody else knows what's gonna work and what isn't about coming back to campus. But there are some things that are interesting and some things that are clear. First, a number of campuses are actually talking about a strategy that says, let's restart or resume research first and then cautiously, we will bring parts of instruction back. And that actually has a certain amount of plausibility to it because the population density is lower and it's a bit more manageable. There are some tricky implications there, though. Think about things like social distancing in labs. That means you can have a lot less people in those labs. That means they may need to run labs two or three shifts and that has a series of implications. If you wanna think about some really scary implications and we're seeing this in instructional space too, think about what happens if social distancing needs to carry on for a period of years. What does that mean for the costs of constructing instructional and research spaces? If one has to assume much greater individual isolation and social distancing. Another aspect of this restart research first strategy that's worth noting. And again, it ties into this fallacy about, oh, research is what our professors do in their labs. Well, it's actually what our professors and their graduate students do in our labs. It's also about what our graduate students do more broadly and what our professors do more broadly. It's also a bit about what our undergraduates do, but let's focus on graduate students here as they are really in many ways the absolute core of the research enterprise. You really can't talk about restarting research without thinking about what does it mean to bring under what terms and what does it mean to begin to bring graduate students back to campus in a measured way. And that has all kinds of implications about finances, financial support, whole range of issues. And I just wanna highlight it because it's easily overlooked. I see I've already gone on longer than I intended, but I need to make at least a few more points. And the good news by the way is that nobody's waiting for the meeting room right at the stroke of the hour so we can go on a little late if we need to for questions. I think it's really important for us to get a handle on the impact of what's happened across the research enterprise. A few of the institutions that participated in the roundtables have tried to do this at least on an informal basis and what they're learning is very useful. I would urge other institutions to think about doing some faculty surveys, trying to gauge the impact across disciplines and to share with the insights they're finding. They'll help us to identify as many pain points as possible and see if we can figure out ways to respond to them. There are some very interesting interactions that we can speculate about and we don't understand them very well yet between research, IT support and research continuity. So there has been a kind of an ongoing trend at many campuses but certainly not all campuses and certainly not among all researchers to shift computational capabilities out of individual labs and into professionally managed more centralized infrastructure at the institution be it high performance cluster condos or genuinely shared infrastructure. Now, in cases where that was already far along, the research IT infrastructure stayed stable. In cases where the IT infrastructure supporting individual labs was based on machines in those labs, there was a real dilemma as physical access on the campus is shut down. If there were problems, if certain kinds of maintenance needed to be done, if machines needed to be rebooted, could people get emergency physical access to go in and do that? And it's been very difficult to figure out how often those kinds of problems occurred and what the outcomes were. I have talked to a few campuses who sort of confessed off the record that yes, they've had to allow these on a case by case basis and they didn't like it very much but they understood why it needed to be done and felt it was a acceptable kind of a risk. But we have no idea of the impact or the incidents here. We can wonder about as things begin to resume, whether we will see more policy pressure to move to professionally managed and resilient institutional infrastructure to support research. I'll just make a couple of other notes along that theme. Research online lab notebooks have turned out to be very convenient in this setting and very helpful and I think we'll see increased uptake of those. I would also note that we tried to ask about what about remote controlled experimental apparatus and was there work going on there? Thinking about how do you put online, put labs online? And there is some work going on there and there are very interesting questions to ask and the report touches on these a little about how this is gonna change the design of experimental apparatus going forward and whether we need to be doing more in this area. And if so, who are the right teams to do this? Is this something that research IT and robotics folks and research data managers and interested faculty should be collaborating together on? Where is the locus for potentially convening these kinds of conversations? So that's a very interesting area to think about going forward. I noted already the issues around the performing arts and I just wanna close with one other question and it's related to impact. One of the things that emerged in a number of conversations is questions about how events here will potentially reshape the research agendas and the research specializations of scholars going forward. Are we going to find that we have scholars who work in areas that will be sort of impossible to work in for some years to come? Are we going to see scholars move towards more computational activities that can be more resilient in terms of openings and closings of physical access? I think that that's really not clear at this point but as we reach out to understand impact we should also be careful to try and understand those signals. We also are seeing some real reassessment about what can we do to better support the humanities and give them research resilience. Should we assign greater priority to digitizing special collections for example or to digitizing books that aren't available in electronic form? So I think there's all kinds of recalibration that's going on here going forward and I think it's very likely that we will do some reconvening in the fall to continue to try and understand through another set of virtual round tables how this thinking about research continuity and research resilience is evolving as institutions get farther into the evolution of this situation. And that's about all I wanna say in terms of summarizing the report there's lots more detail in there.