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, research funding on either side of the 49th parallel gets top billing. Around the Ecosystem presents new approaches to tracking publications, supporting public involvement, and structuring research organizations themselves. ARL/CNI AI Researcher in Residence Natalie Meyers offers the next installment of her column AI in 800 Words, which reports on a panel about AI policy and practice at International Data Week in Brisbane, Australia. Finally, The Global View considers the rollout of a new Chinese visa program as a bellwether for research cooperation.
Read on for more details!
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Earlier this month, the Trump administration proposed a Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education to nine US universities, indicating that priority for (or possibly access to) federal funding would be linked to agreeing to its terms. The compact has been called unconstitutional and opposed by higher education associations including ARL, although scholars like Danielle Allen have argued that it represents an opening for institutions to collectively engage, defuse executive overreach, and codify reforms through legislation.
As of this writing, seven of the nine original universities have rejected the compact, which has since been opened to all US institutions. While it seems inevitable that some institutions will sign on, the question remains whether their number and level of research productivity will be sufficient to legitimize the process—as well as what the courts will make of it.
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Waiting On the Carney Budget
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Canadians have marked their calendars for November 4, when the first federal budget of the Carney government will be presented. Promising both austerity and targeted investment, the budget is expected to call for cuts to research funding even as defense, law enforcement, and built infrastructure spending grow. Preserving social programs and reining in deficits are likely to be hot-button issues as the budget is taken up in Parliament.
Stay tuned for an update from our colleagues at the Canadian Association of Research Libraries in a future issue of the Monitor about implementation of the revised Tri-Agency Open Access Policy in a constrained funding environment.
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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.
An October 2025 post about Triangles and Tribulations: Translations, Betrayals, and the Making of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory
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(MIT Press, 2025), by writing studies scholar Clay Spinuzzi, considers the persistence of social science theory in an age of data-intensive scholarship.
Drawing on Spinuzzi’s analysis of how one theoretical tradition was adapted from Soviet psychology to Scandinavian workplace studies and beyond, libraries can collaborate with scholars to visualize, test, and explore the impacts of different accounts of how theory changes. Libraries may also wish to balance out their investments in research data by piloting systems and services for research theory management.
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Building Capacity for Supporting Citizen Science
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Earlier this fall, ARL hosted an expert briefing with the current and former co-chairs of LIBER’s Citizen Science Working Group. Thomas Kaarsted (Southern Denmark University) discussed studies showing that research library staff already have many of the skills needed to support citizen science, while Alisa Martek (National and University Library in Zagreb) highlighted the series of guides and trainings that the working group has created.
ARL is deepening its ties with LIBER, in recognition of the leadership that our peer association has shown in this emerging area of open scholarship. We are also exploring other forms of public participation in research through the Engaged Scholarship and Societal Impact Interest Group, which is open to all staff at ARL member institutions and held its kickoff meeting on October 29.
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Tracking Transformative Agreements Through Open Metadata
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Transformative agreements have become a significant funding mechanism for open access publishing. Yet data on which published articles were supported by a transformative agreement are typically not publicly available, which poses challenges for research on the nonlocal impact of these agreements.
An October 2025 article published in Quantitative Science Studies presents a method for estimating which articles were covered under a transformative agreement using the Journal Checker Tool developed by cOAlition S and institution data from OpenAlex. The authors validate their estimates for a corpus of articles reporting research supported by public funders in the Netherlands against publisher data provided to a Dutch library consortium, showing a precision rate of 89%.
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Adopting Best Practices in Diamond Open Access
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Over the summer, Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council announced new requirements for its Aid to Scholarly Journals program, which will go into effect in 2028. These requirements include immediate open access without article processing charges, use of an open license, and alignment with the criteria of the Directory of Open Access Journals.
Coalition Publica has created a roadmap document for journals preparing to comply with the new requirements, whose guiding principles are also relevant to any journal considering a transition to a diamond open access model. The roadmap starts with an environmental scan that identifies key stakeholders and takes stock of journal finances, before making consultative decisions and implementing new policies and contractual agreements.
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Experimenting with New Types of Research Organizations
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A recent article in Issues in Science and Technology reviews the rise of focused research organizations (FROs), nonprofit startups that work to develop platforms, tools, or datasets meant to unblock scientific progress, as well as lessons learned from an initial wave of FROs set up with philanthropic support. The concept appears to be gaining momentum, and was referenced in the White House’s AI Action Plan earlier this year.
Other novel organizational forms are cropping up alongside traditional institutions where research libraries are typically based, and libraries would do well to ask how we can and should interface with them. As FRO sponsor Convergent Research turns its attention to new domains like “AI for epistemics,” there may also be hard problems in our own space that lend themselves to this approach.
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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.
This installment takes a different format, summing up the panel I moderated with Francis Crawley on “Bridging AI International Policy and Practice: The AIDV Approach” at International Data Week on October 15. The slides are available for readers who want more detail.
To kick off the panel, I introduced the primary outputs of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Artificial Intelligence and Data Visitation Working Group (AIDV-WG), which include guidance for ethics committees reviewing AI and data visitation projects, guidance for informed consent for such projects, legal foundations for secure processing environments, and recommendations for organizational AI bills of rights.
I moved on to describe a shifting research data paradigm where data sharing moves away from traditional file-based data transfer to a data visitation modality where licensed visitors, including machines, bring analysis to data. Because data visitation brings analysis to the data and permits analysis in situ, it can save file transfer time and reduce unnecessarily expensive and duplicative storage of datasets. Data visitation can also give data owners and source communities greater control over how and under what conditions data are exposed. I also described how a diverse ecosystem of data visitation platforms is emerging, with reference to the working group’s “Geographies of Trust: AI, Biomedicine, and the Next Era of Federated and Visiting Data Models” white paper, which classifies platforms into three categories and compares features across 20+ such solutions.
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Photo courtesy of Ryan O’Connor/RDA Europe
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I then moderated presentations by four terrific panelists. The first was Rodrigo Roa, executive director of the Data Observatory, a nonprofit public-private-academic institution in Santiago, Chile. Roa discussed the Data Observatory’s mission to acquire, process, and make available large volumes of data with scientific, technological, and social impact. The organization’s open data platforms are built with a FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) approach in partnership with SURDATA, a new regional alliance that promotes collaboration across sectors to strengthen data interoperability, research, and innovation. Roa emphasized that Latin America isn’t just consuming technology; the region is building it and plans to launch a tool called LATAM GPT by the end of the year. LATAM GPT is a 70 billion-parameter large language model (LLM), comparable to OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3.5, that is trained on data reflecting the region’s cultural, social, and linguistic diversity. Some 2.6 million documents from 21 countries formed this corpus, with support from 30 institutions and 60 experts.
Next, Seonyoung Kim, senior support scientist and data librarian at the Bernard Becker Medical Library at Washington University in St. Louis, spoke about the need to develop practical, regulation-ready language for informed consent to data visitation that protects participant privacy and supports responsible data use. She echoed advice from fellow AIDV-WG member Kristy Hackett that “a reconsideration of the classic form of informed consent is necessary in light of AI—we need to support autonomy through practical, flexible consent mechanisms.” Kim then offered examples of language to be included in institutional review board protocols and informed consent forms that are ready to be adopted by institutions. She underscored how consent can enable autonomy, not restrict it, amid the search for solutions that are realistic, transparent, and adaptable to new data visitation technologies.
Patricia Buendia, founder, CEO and chief technology and data officer of Lifetime Omics, made the case for promoting biomedical data sharing and protecting sensitive information through secure data visitation. The FAIRlyz tool, developed with support from the US National Institutes of Health, uses AI-driven data curation and quality control in the data owner’s own compute environment to generate reports that allow prospective users to assess sensitive data before initiating the time-consuming process of controlled sharing. The name of the tool reflects the proposed addition of a fifth principle, “anaLYZable,” to the FAIR principles, signaling the growing importance of machine-driven analysis to empower meaningful data discovery. Next steps for the project include the release of open-source plugins and integration of a locally trained AI model to eliminate reliance on external APIs.
The final speaker was Madhava Jay, head of Engineering of OpenMined, a nonprofit that focuses on open-source privacy-preserving technologies with a mission to build the public network for nonpublic information. Jay addressed the challenges faced by data owners who are forced to choose between giving up data ownership through copying and centralization, or not collaborating and failing to tap into the true power of their data. Jay demoed BioVault, a free, open-source, permissionless network for collaborative genomics, that is built for secure analysis of sensitive genomic data without moving or duplicating it. BioVault enables pathogen surveillance or rare disease research in the context of cross-border or multi-institutional collaboration under diverse policy regimes. The underlying technology, SyftBox, allows data owners to make their data available for remote analysis without uploading, sharing, or exposing the raw data.
After the speaker presentations, I fielded a number of audience questions ranging from concerns about surveillance, digital twins, navigating international law, and the double-edged sword of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The discussions that ensued are already fostering new collaborations and hold promise for better governed opportunities for AI-ready research data sharing.
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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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What Might the K Visa Portend?
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In August 2025, China’s government announced the creation of a new category of visa, the so-called K visa, to be issued to young science and technology talent. Media reports initially highlighted the coincidence of this announcement with the Trump administration’s decision to impose a $100,000 fee on applications for new H-1B visas. More recently, they have surfaced backlash to the announcement on Chinese social media amid worries about domestic underemployment.
The increasingly world-leading profile of Chinese science has become central to how science policy gets discussed in North America. Yet even as Chinese state media praise “embracing international talent with a more open attitude,” the at-times xenophobic pushback on the new visa program lines up with what analysts of research cooperation have identified as a global trend toward selective closure.
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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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