Marcel LaFlamme, Director, Research Policy and Scholarship, ARL
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The ARL Monitor is a quarterly newsletter providing intelligence and insight on the research environment. Aiming not to break the news but to offer analysis and contextualization of thoughtfully curated content, the ARL Monitor helps set the stage for member engagement with issues related to scholars and scholarship. Please encourage your colleagues to sign up for the ARL Monitor.
If you have questions or suggestions, please email me at marcel@arl.org.
In the Government Affairs section of this issue, once-threatened grants to US research libraries resume and Canada pursues closer alignment with the European Union. Around the Ecosystem examines movements for publishing reform and the collision of AI with scholarly vocation. Guest columnist Elizabeth Kalbfleisch from the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) provides an overview of the recently updated Tri-Agency Open Access Policy. Finally, The Global View considers what societal stakeholders in the UK value about the work of knowledge brokers.
Read on for more details!
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IMLS Grants Resume, Track White House Priorities
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The 2025 relaunch of the ARL Monitor opened with an analysis of grant terminations by the US Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). After being targeted for closure and laying off much of its staff, the agency appears to have resumed its previous funding cycle and, in early September, announced a new round of competitive grant awards.
ARL’s analysis identified 23 awards involving our member libraries, with a total value of over US$5 million. Across all new awards, we found a focus on AI, research data, digitization of archives, and workforce development, with projects around specific populations limited to criteria like age and rurality.
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Canada to Deepen Ties with the European Union
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In her September State of the Union address, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made waves by proposing that Canada become the bloc’s first associate member. While no such status exists at this time, leaders from both sides of the Atlantic will meet in Montreal on October 29–30 to announce new partnerships on a range of issues.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has signaled that expanded participation in the Horizon Europe research funding program, as well as the Erasmus+ student mobility framework, are areas of interest for Canada. For their part, ARL and CARL hope to welcome a representative of LIBER to their 2027 joint meeting to explore areas of cooperation among research libraries.
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The Repertoires blog series distills actionable insights for library leaders from book-length studies of research communities and their ways of working. By understanding emerging and impactful configurations of how scholarship gets done, libraries can ensure that the services they offer reflect the epistemic diversity of the scholars they support.
A September 2026 post about The Handbook of Broader Impacts: Strategies for Enhancing the
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Societal Impacts of Research (Michigan State University Press, 2026), edited by Laurie Van Egeren and Susan Renoe, traces the emergence of broader impacts infrastructure at universities following changes in the US National Science Foundation’s review criteria.
Rather than limiting their focus to making research outputs accessible, libraries can take a broader view of their potential contributions to societal impact. When deciding where to begin, libraries can connect to models of public engagement that already have gained traction in their local context and then adjust course as other needs arise.
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Aligning How We Share with What We Reward
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A September 2026 report from ASAPbio, the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), the International Science Council, and the Center for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University calls for greater coordination between movements for publishing reform and research assessment reform. Despite the links between rigid expectations of researchers and publishing models that exclude and strain capacity, disconnected efforts to address these issues can lead to incompatible incentives, duplication of work, and what the report calls “reform fatigue.”
The report identifies three action areas that present opportunities for working across these domains: developing trust indicators that look beyond legacy metrics, recognizing research outputs beyond the article, and building a flexible framework for how researcher assessment unfolds in different contexts. I have been selected to represent ARL on a National Information Standards Organization (NISO) working group that will engage with the first of these areas and work toward recommended practices for implementation.
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Reversing Publishing’s Order of Operations
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What would it mean for research if scholars shared their work early and opened it up to diverse forms of evaluation and endorsement, rather than relying on an up-or-down decision from a journal? On Wednesday, October 28, at 10:00 a.m. eastern, a launch event will be held for the Publish Review Curate (PRC) Alliance, a joint initiative of ASAPbio and the Confederation of Open Access Repositories that aims to enhance the visibility of this model for research communication.
The PRC Alliance plans to operate as a membership organization consisting of both infrastructure providers and supporting institutions. ARL member libraries that invest in field-specific preprint servers or host institutional repositories may wish to learn more.
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Mapping the Landscape of Community-Based Archives
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A September 2026 report from the Mellon Foundation presents the results of a landscape study of 336 community-based archives across the United States. These independent organizations preserve records that might otherwise go uncollected and serve as stewards of community memory, but face constraints that affect their long-term sustainability.
The report’s recommendations are primarily aimed at other funders who may wish to follow Mellon’s lead in supporting this sector. However, the report also includes a discussion of partnerships with larger institutions, noting that community-based archives seek to “collaborate selectively without ceding identity or control.”
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Reckoning with AI-Driven Breakthroughs in Mathematics
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The world of research mathematics is reeling from OpenAI’s bulk release of putative solutions to longstanding problems in the field. Even as mathematicians marvel at the achievement (and verify the work), a statement from leading figures cautions that “solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight.”
A September 2026 meeting at Harvard focused on the implications for PhD education, calling for an emphasis on in-person assessment and broader skills development. But beyond instrumental concerns around research integrity and job loss, the field is confronting deep questions about what the production of knowledge is for.
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A New Open Access Policy for Publicly Funded Research in Canada
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by Elizabeth Kalbfleisch, Senior Program Officer, Canadian Association of Research Libraries
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On October 5, Canada’s three federal research funding agencies—the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)—released the revised Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications. This update affirms Canada’s commitment to an open and equitable research ecosystem. The policy will ensure that publicly funded research is freely available open access immediately upon publication, and thereby align Canada with a growing number of research funders worldwide.
In a nutshell, the new policy stipulates that authors must acknowledge agency contributions in their peer‑reviewed research articles, retain sufficient rights and apply an open license, inform publishers of funder obligations when submitting articles, and ensure that articles are made immediately and freely available at the time of publication either in a Canadian institutional repository or through a trusted Canadian platform. The elimination of a 12-month embargo and acknowledgment of the importance of diamond open access in policy language reinforce a meaningful commitment to the spirit of openness, while using both rights retention and open licenses in an effort to dislodge control held by for-profit publishers in the realm of publicly funded research.
Another addition to the revised policy is the requirement for institutions administering federal funds to develop an institutional open access strategy. This is similar to a requirement for research data management already prescribed by the Tri-Agencies. Institutions will have at least two years to meet the requirement, and CARL is working with the Tri-Agencies to create resources that will help streamline this process for institutions.
Given current concerns in Canada around research sovereignty, the continued maturation of Canadian infrastructure is paramount. So too is sustained support for library expertise in the stewardship of research knowledge. Mandated deposit means heightened reliance on library infrastructure and greater demand on library capacity. Compliance effectively depends on researchers receiving appropriate support, support that they will look to libraries to provide. Libraries must be properly resourced to meet that demand.
CARL provided extensive feedback to the Tri-Agencies as the policy was under revision, underscoring the essential contributions of research libraries. CARL will continue to work with the Tri-Agencies and the Canadian research community as the policy comes into effect, reinforcing an open science ecosystem for Canada through robust infrastructure and services and coordinated institutional support.
The policy comes into effect on January 1, 2027.
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A September 2026 article in Science and Public Policy investigates the impact of knowledge-brokering organizations in the United Kingdom called What Works Centres, which were created to determine which policy interventions deliver the best value on public investment. Drawing on interviews with societal stakeholders, the study finds that the centers helped decision-makers access, monitor, and communicate social scientific evidence as well as shaping how that evidence was valued and understood.
Libraries offering evidence-synthesis services should take note of the high value interviewees placed on reviews and syntheses; might affiliated policy institutes be another audience for these services? The study also concludes that while policy citations are one readily countable metric, they fail to capture types of impact beyond the application of knowledge.
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About the Association of Research Libraries
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The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit membership organization of research libraries and archives in major public and private universities, federal government agencies, and large public institutions in Canada and the US. ARL champions research libraries and archives, develops visionary leaders, and shapes policy for the equitable advancement of knowledge.
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