Dear NSC Alliance Members,
The NSC Alliance recently organized and sent a community letter (NSC Alliance, SPNHC, & AIBS) to the National Science Foundation (NSF) expressing our concerns over the agency’s suspension of funding for the Collections in Support of Biological Research (CSBR) program. We have also spoken with a number of reporters about this hiatus in funding and it has been reported in Nature, Science, and elsewhere. Next week, the NSF Biological Sciences Advisory Council will meet and one of the topics of discussion is expected to be the community’s response to the CSBR suspension. Our representative will be at this meeting.
NSC Alliance is working to gather additional examples of how CSBR funding has enabled research and education across the range of disciplines supported by NSF. If you have examples, I hope you will share them with us so that we can offer the strongest possible recommendations to NSF. The agency is particularly interested in examples that show how CSBR funding has led to new insights that are innovative and/or transformative in understanding unanswered questions in biology or that significantly impact education or outreach.
Additionally, we are developing recommendations from the community that we can share with NSF to challenge the agency to increase its investment in CSBR and other collections-related programs. We think that a compelling, forward-looking vision for CSBR will indeed lead to new opportunities at NSF. If you have ideas, please share them with me at cookjose@unm.edu.
Finally, if your institution has not yet communicated its concerns about the CSBR hiatus, I encourage you to please send a letter to NSF this week. These letters can truly make a difference.
With best wishes,
Joseph A. Cook, Ph.D.
President
