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The International Internet Preservation Consortium held its General Assembly in Stanford, from April 27^th to May 1^st, 2015. The IIPC groups together around 50 organisations from more than 30 different countries; working collaboratively to build archives of internet content; to develop tools, standards and best practices, and to encourage heritage and research organisations to address Internet archiving and preservation issues. Clément Oury, Head of ISSN Data, Network and Standards Department, chaired a workshop on the revision of the WARC standard (ISO 28500:2009) used to store and preserve web archives and other types of digital content.

UNESCO’s Knowledge Societies Division convened a Consultative meeting of experts, jointly with the International Council on Archives (ICA), the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) and the Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO, which took place on 20 and 21 April 2015, at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. Clément Oury contributes to the Content Task Force.

At its General Assembly meeting in Vienna on 15 April, Science Europe’s members – comprising 50 major public research organisations in Europe – adopted four new common principles on Open Access Publisher Services. The topics concerned were: indexing, copyright and re-use, sustainable archiving, and machine readability.

Computer scientists are trying to shore up broken links in the scholarly literature. Nature presents a brief summary on the achievements and the ambitions of the « Hiberlink project », a study which investigates how web links in online scientific and other academic articles fail to lead to the resources that were originally referenced.

Is the term « predatory » itself really useful in the context of scholarly communication? Rick Anderson’s point of view on this controversial expression.

Scholars are citing an increasingly aging collection of scholarship. Does this reflect the growing ease with accessing the literature, or a structural shift in the way science is funded–and the way scientists are rewarded?

Springer announced that it is becoming the first publisher to offer title and chapter level metrics across all of their books via a new platform, Bookmetrix. Developed in partnership with metrics provider Altmetric, the data captured via Bookmetrix is displayed on the book pages on Springer’s content platform SpringerLink and reports how often an individual book or chapter is mentioned, shared, reviewed or read online.

An overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing by STM, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers. Various subjects are covered such as the day to day management of a journal, the Open access environment, and the new developments in scholarly communication.

Signed by over 50 organizations, the declaration calls for the loosening of intellectual property laws and policies in order to support improved access to content and the ability to text/data mine for new discoveries.

IFLA, along with Copyright for Creativity, EBLIDA, LIBER and Communia, hosted a meeting at the European Parliament on May 6th 2015. The meeting tackled the relationship between copyright and licenses, and argued that licensing is not the solution to the problems that libraries have in making available material to their users in the digital age.

Data Quality was the theme of a session organised as part of the last EuropeanaTech Conference held on February 12th and 13th 2015. The following report summarises the discussions that took place during this session: it touches upon the problems leading to poor data quality and proposes solutions to tackle them. The report also attempts to find useful elements of definitions that help better grasp the notion of what good data quality really is.

Representatives of several member states of the Arab League and a Chinese delegation agreed in Cairo to establish an expansive Arab-Chinese digital library so as to enhance cultural cooperation between the two sides.

For a second year in a row, major open access repository networks have met to develop closer ties and further align their expanding repository networks. The meeting, organized by the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), welcomed representatives from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America.

The German legislator introduced new rules for handling out-of-commerce works: under these, works published in Germany before 1966 can, under certain conditions, be licensed for digitisation and public accessibility. The major part of German National Library’s (DNB) collections stems from the 20th century, accordingly it has a vital interest in making use of this newly created opportunity.