The French firm Progilone based in Lyons will assist the ISSN International Centre to build a new ISSN Web Portal and a Customer Extranet that will allow institutions to manage directly their subscriptions and publishers to track their ISSN requests.

On 12 December 2016,  Peter Burnhill (University of Edinburgh), Gaëlle Béquet (ISSN International Centre), Alan Darnell (University of Toronto) and Theron ‘Ted’ Westervelt (Library of Congress) gave a presentation about the Stewardship of the Digital Scholarly Record and the role of the Keepers’ Registry in the coordination of this preservation.

More about the CNI Fall 2016 Meeting

Ringgold, an ISNI Registration Agency, has released a free service to provide open access to the ISNI Identifiers and data for organizations. The purpose of the ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) is to uniquely identify public figures. ISNI is an ISO international standard bridge identifier used by the ISSN International Register, Wikipedia, Musicbrainz, the British Library, Harvard University, Library of Congress, and a number of other organizations, to link data among disparate datasets. Any dataset mapped to ISNIs, whether open or proprietary, can be linked together to provide interoperability and enhance discoverability between systems to benefit the entire scholarly community.

The last Charleston Conference saw a presentation on the latest developments regarding Project COUNTER. These slides from the presentation outline the progress to date with drafting Release 5 of COUNTER, and include information on new reports, metric types and related attributes, report formats, sample use cases, and the project timeline.

The Public Knowledge Project announced that his Open Journal Systems is now being used by more than 10,000 active journals around the world. This makes OJS one of the leading online publishing platform. These 10,000 journals have published over 420,000 articles, the vast majority of which are open access. Latin America and the Caribbean account for 3,295 journals, making it the largest region of use.

Furthermore, PKK joined recently the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA), alongside ISSN International Centre, DOAJ, INASP, Knowledge Unlatched, SciELO, SPARC Europe, and others.

Click here to know more about this recent membership.

Research outputs from over 300 BioMed Central and SpringerOpen journals will be showcased on Figshare

This new service noticeably provides each journal with its own portal within Springer Nature’s Figshare repository, giving each journal its own data repository. Articles published in SpringerOpen and BioMed Central journals can now show a widget for previewing and browsing additional files, enabling readers to see this enhanced content in line with the article in the same browser window.

Elsevier recently announced CiteScore metrics, a free citation reporting service for the academic community. This service is similar, in many ways, to the Impact Factor. Both CiteScore and the Impact Factor are journal-level indicators built around a ratio of citations to documents. The specifics in how each indicator is constructed makes them different enough such that they should not be considered substitutes, says Phil Davis, an independent researcher and publishing consultant. The controversy is open.

A report detailing the rise of the Google search among young academics has prompted debate about the future of libraries. This research, funded by the Publishing Research Consortium, looks at the attitudes to publishing of early career academics and suggests that libraries have “little to offer” to the next generation of academics.

Digital technologies have allowed for a richer, more diverse production of ideas and expressions than ever before. However, they also bring challenges as regards the preservation of cultural heritage. As part of the Global Information Society Watch (GISWatch) report 2016, focusing on economic, social and cultural rights and the Internet, IFLA has contributed an article setting out the issues from the library perspective.

The British Library makes its data available to researchers and other libraries free of charge in a variety of formats and access mechanisms: MARC21 via Z39.50, basic RDF/XML, Linked Open Data and Researcher Format (.csv). They are now seeking feedback on these free data services.

 

In the last 5 years, mainstream tools like Google Scholar and ResearchGate disrupted learned publishing and academic library supply chains – right alongside the dawning of some web-scale library discovery services.

In this rapidly evolving market, there is already a new generation of cutting edge search tools, challenging the status quo and offering information users new avenues to the research literature. There are three new services in the content discovery marketplace that stand out and deserve our collective attention.

The Scopus Content Selection and Advisory Board (CSAB) met in Toronto for its biannual meeting. Some of the main discussion items included publication ethics, the Scopus journal re-evaluation process, and the overall review and acceptance process. The recommendations of the CSAB directly influence the overall direction of Scopus and the prioritization of new content requests to ensure that Scopus stays international and relevant for the global research community.

A new analysis, published in Current Science by the graduated student G. S. Seethapathy and his colleagues, has found that many of the weak papers in predatory journals are coming from top-flight Indian research institutions. The finding has turned the spotlight on an academic culture in India that tends to prize quantity of publications over quality when evaluating researchers. The secretary of India’s Department of Biotechnology (DBT) in New Delhi, K. Vijayraghavan, proposes some solutions to strengthen research evaluation and encourage sharing of research prior to publication.

On October 7^th, 2016, the French Law for a Digital Republic (LOI n° 2016-1321 du 7 octobre 2016 pour une République numérique) came into force, following a one-year open review process during which the draft law could be improved by citizens. This law introduces new provisions to regulate the digital economy, online cooperative economy, data protection and access to the internet. Two articles are of specific concern for scholarly communication, as they relate directly to open access/open data and text & data-mining (TDM).

In a detailed study, redacted by Madhan Muthu and coworkers on the effect of article processing charges (APC) on open access publishing in India, assessing the financial burden of publication fees on science dissemination in India, the proposal aroused for the creation of a decentralized national platform of Open Access (OA) journals, such as SciELO, to reduce costs, increase efficiency and facilitate sharing of metadata among repositories.

Xin Bi (Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University/DOAJ), Ina Smith (Academy of Science of South Africa), and Abel Packer (SciELO) recently joined OASPA for a webinar to discuss Open Access Publishing in the Global South. Lars Bjørnshauge (DOAJ) chaired the discussion. The Copyright Clearance Center hosted the webinar. Leyla Williams, Events and Communications Coordinator at OASPA, reflects on the discussion.

Eight highly-visible organizations today announced the launch of the Open Research Funders Group, a partnership designed to increase access to research outputs. The group arose out of a forum of open access stakeholders convened by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and SPARC in late 2015. All of these organizations are committed to using their positions to foster open sharing of research articles and data. One of their main goals is to develop practical solutions for monitoring open access and open data policy compliance and tracking impact.

 

As of 1 January 2017, Knowledge Exchange will count six partners with French CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique/ National Centre for Scientific Research) joining the initiative. The other partners are: DFG (Germany), Jisc (UK), Surf (The Netherlands), Deff  (Denmark), CSC (Finland). Renaud Fabre, Director of CNRS Scientific and Technical Information Department, stated that this is “a natural consequence of the fruitful exchanges and cooperation which already exist between KE and CNRS”. Among the activities to be shared is the monitoring of KE’s OA publications and OA policies.

Press release in English: http://knowledge-exchange.info/news and Knowledge-Exchange newsletter

The first comprehensive bibliometric analysis of 11 open-access mega-journals (OAMJs) is presented, focusing on four key modes of analysis: journal outputs ; OAMJ author characteristics; subject areas; and citation profiles. Actually, there is no “typical” mega-journal, and additional research should be carried out to better understand the current and future role of OAMJs in scholarly communication.

Academic and Research Libraries Section

Topic: Digital Humanities – Opportunities and Risks: Connecting Libraries and Research

Abstracts due by 15 January, 2017

 

The Library Theory & Research Section (LTR), Preservation & Conservation Section, Information Technology Section expect submissions by 18 February 2017

Topic: Data Curator’s Roles and Responsibilities: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives

 

Topic: Collecting, Preserving, and Transforming the News – for Research and the Public

Proposal abstracts due by 13 January 2017.

The schedule for ACRL 2017 is now available. Make your choice out of 300 sessions.

Topic: “Faceted Classification Today: Theory, Technology and End Users”

Submissions due by 29 January, 2017