The following set of links/announcements from CNI's Clifford Lynch help to frame many of our recent posts about the future of publishing, scholarly communications, and our course management platforms in the context of cyberinfrastructure.

Even though these documents have been out for a few days already, I wanted to be sure that CNI-announce readers were aware of them, as they are very important.

The on-going crisis in Scholarly Communications is no longer breaking news. We all are aware of the sky-rocketing costs of journals, the imploding market for scholarly monographs, the struggles to develop sustainable business models for open access publications, and the paralysis induced by the lack of an agreed-upon process for peer review of born digital scholarship. In the face of this dismal situation, the folks at the The Institute for the Future of the Book and Rice University have been busily planning two new initiatives, both of which address head-on many of our shared problems.