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 context 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, Capitol Hill pushes back on the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to research funding, while Ottawa looks to research institutions for AI leadership. Around the Ecosystem charts what’s next for openness from enabling exchange to expanding participation and evidencing impact. ARL/CNI AI Researcher in Residence Natalie Meyers offers the latest installment of her column AI in 800 Words, which features an interview with Kari Weaver, AI and Machine Learning program manager at the Ontario Council of University Libraries. Finally, The Global View examines how Russian scientists are provisioning their labs—and reading lists—under sanctions linked to the war in Ukraine.
Read on for more details!
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Appropriators Nix Deep Cuts to US Funding Agencies
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Following last fall’s US government shutdown, Congress is working to pass FY26 spending bills in advance of a January 30 deadline. Ongoing analysis from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) points to a 4% reduction in overall federal research funding, in contrast to the 22% reduction proposed by the Trump administration. The president’s budget request called for the largest reduction in federal spending on science since World War II.
Appropriators settled on a 0.9% increase in spending levels for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), while the Department of Energy’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program is on track for a 7.7% increase, due to its central role in the recently announced Genesis Mission. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is slated for a 3.4% reduction and is prohibited from cutting any of its directorates by more than 5%.
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Universities Make Their Mark on Canada’s AI Strategy
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In November 2025, the Standing Committee on Science and Research in Canada’s House of Commons initiated a study on innovation and scientific research around artificial intelligence. The study, whose charge includes assessing the needs of research institutions regarding funding, infrastructure, recruitment, and interdisciplinary collaboration, is taking place as the Carney government works toward releasing a refreshed national AI strategy in 2026.
Of particular interest to research libraries is the brief submitted by U15 Canada, which calls for connecting research funding, computing and data capacity, and commercialization while prioritizing responsible adoption in teaching and learning. Around the same time, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon gave an interview in University Affairs in which he praised universities for their role as “catalysts for startups and innovation zones.”
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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 December 2025 post about Academic Times: Contesting the Chronopolitics of Research
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(Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), by science and technology studies scholar Ulrike Felt, examines how researchers are encountering ever more diverse forms of time and striving to cinch them up with each other.
Informed by the narratives that Felt collected across a range of disciplines, libraries can signal their commitment to matching researcher rhythms while embracing greater transparency about their own temporal spend. And if the challenge of staying in sync is unlikely to go away, libraries can still offer researchers paths back to the wonder of discovery.
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Locating the Human in AI-Enabled Science
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A November 2025 commentary in Science conjured a vision of AI-enabled research that advances prediction and control of the natural world but fails to extend human understanding. The authors suggest that the role of the researcher may shift toward interpreting what AI systems uncover, devising new methods of quality control and ensuring that convergent approaches do not constrain inquiry.
In March 2026, the independent research institute Data & Society will host an online workshop entitled “The Craft of Science with AI: Evidence, Judgment, and Practice.” I will participate in the workshop and provide feedback on works in progress by researchers studying AI-enabled science in action.
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Growing Open Access Through Expanded Participation
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Last spring, the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) marked the milestone of 50% of recent journal content being available open access and announced a project considering how to complete “the next 50%.” The project’s framing acknowledged that the growth of open access had started to slow, suggesting a need for alternative approaches.
The November 2025 final report embraced a course correction of sorts, affirming that “how open access is achieved matters, not simply what percentage we reach.” The report identifies enabling broader participation in open publishing as the challenge at hand, addressing geographic and economic exclusion, disciplinary fragmentation, and linguistic hegemony with system- and sector-level solutions arising from cross-stakeholder engagement.
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Weighing the Evidence for Open Science Impact
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For research libraries, the value of sharing scholarly outputs as openly as possible can at times be treated as a foregone conclusion. Yet as the costs of enabling openness come into focus against the backdrop of disrupted investment in scientific research, taking stock of what we know (and don’t) about the causal effects of open practices is essential.
The results of the pioneering PathOS project have now been published as a set of three scoping reviews on academic, economic, and societal impact, complemented by in-depth case studies. A December 2025 news story noted that the evidence for many hypothesized benefits was weaker than expected, pointing both to the difficulty of disentangling the role of openness from confounders like research quality and the need for further targeted research on impact and context of use.
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Assembling an Interoperable Publishing Future
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The concept of modular publishing takes the basic unit of scholarly communication to be not the paper, but “building blocks” like datasets that can be shared separately and then recombined for different audiences. In November 2025, a group of tool developers and infrastructure providers gathered in San Diego, California, to develop a common framework for passing these components across distributed systems.
The resulting workshop report outlines a schema called the Open Exchange Architecture (OXA), which is designed to be web-native, proactive on licensing, and self-describing to AI agents. The organizers are in the early stages of establishing a governance structure to carry the project forward, and research libraries may wish to be at the table as development proceeds.
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by Natalie Meyers, ARL/CNI AI Researcher in Residence
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The AI in 800 Words column explores artificial intelligence and its relevance to research libraries through brief interviews that give attention to opportunities, challenges, governance, ethics, and the research enterprise.
In this installment, I speak with Kari D. Weaver, AI and Machine Learning program manager at the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL).
Tell us a little about yourself.
I've been a librarian for over 20 years in the United States and Canada. I’m currently on secondment to OCUL from my role as Learning, Teaching, and Instructional Design librarian at the University of Waterloo, a large public university in Ontario where five out of six faculty members are STEM-focused. This translates well to my work at OCUL, which focuses on AI and machine learning professional development for library workers across Ontario research libraries.
What recent work would you like to bring to ARL members’ attention?
I’d like to share the Artificial Intelligence Disclosure (AID) Framework, which I published in College & Research Libraries News in 2024. I created the AID Framework because of my passion for supporting graduate students and addressing the tensions they feel. At Waterloo, I was on an AI committee that was grappling with recommendations for citation practices. Some graduate students’ supervisors didn’t want to sign off on their dissertations because students had used AI, even though they had cited it properly. Out of that conversation, an administrator said to me: “Citation isn’t enough, Kari. Perhaps you should do something about that!”
I spent two months asking myself: “What do you mean, citation isn’t enough?” During that time, I explored the purpose and function of citation and I came to the conclusion that a structured yet more flexible solution was needed. My solution, the AID Framework, was inspired by the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) and similarly has labeled components that can be used to create statements describing AI use, which are intended to go at the end of a document where you’d typically put an acknowledgment statement.
Who or what inspires you?
The students at Waterloo, and those I’ve met in a part-time role at the University of Toronto. I particularly enjoy service to graduate students and a lot of my work has focused on that. The uncertainty and sense of overwhelm in the graduate student community, where learning happens in a context of still-emerging expertise, has a lot in common with AI learning experiences in today’s library workplaces.
The changes being brought about by AI are stressful for communities but there are solvable problems. AI disclosure is one of them, and key players are arriving at the same conclusions. I am co-leading, with Bert Seghers, president of the European Network of Research Integrity Offices and secretary of the Flemish Commission for Research Integrity, a project to collaboratively establish a global reporting standard for AI disclosure in research, which is intended for use across publications and publishers. It’s a joint initiative with the World Conferences on Research Integrity Foundation (WCRIF); the International Science Council (ISC); the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE); the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM); and the Global Young Academy (GYA).
The project involves three rounds of consultation: the first round, which will map needs and also looks at format options proposed so far, is open now. Bert and I would love to hear from readers of the ARL Monitor across research libraries and beyond by the deadline of February 28. The second round will take place in May in Vancouver at the World Conference on Research Integrity, and will focus on identifying what should be disclosed. The third round will be a broad-based consultation on a proposal leading to a fully developed standard.
What challenges do you see for higher education and, in particular, research libraries vis-à-vis AI?
The biggest challenge with a lot of things about AI, especially AI models coming from large corporations, is that on the surface they can be very much in conflict with long-held professional values of academic librarianship. When we look deeper, though, the circumstances become more complex and we as librarians can struggle to sit with that discomfort. We like things to be organized. We like things to be tidy, and this is not! It’s messy. We are a feeling profession but we don’t always unpack those feelings in a professional way. Sitting in those places of discomfort and asking questions like “what about this doesn’t feel right?” is an important next step.
I have the opportunity to expose OCUL’s member libraries to AI and its outputs and I’ve seen firsthand that, through these experiences, the sense of threat we feel can dissipate. But I do think there are legitimate concerns around labor and access that are going to have to be negotiated. These concerns can lead to protectionism during a time when we need openness and collaboration. So I’m trying to ask: how can we support experimentation during a period of austerity and resource constraints in libraries? This work is within our expertise but whether the broader higher education sector recognizes this and centers our knowledge in campus conversations about AI remains an open question.
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Is there someone you’d like to see interviewed here? Send your suggestions to nmeyers@arl.org.
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When Science and Sanctions Collide
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As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nears its fifth year, the effects on the Russian research landscape (and, of course, that of Ukraine) have been profound. Thousands of Russian scientists have emigrated since the start of the war, and those who remain must have international collaborations approved by the country’s security service.
Yet a December 2025 article on the independent media platform T-invariant notes that “science in Russia has not died.” The author describes the strategies chemists use to source materials and repair equipment in the context of Western sanctions, which include gambling on new suppliers or else turning to gray-market resellers in countries like Turkey.
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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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