At 2016 Charleston Conference, Regina Reynolds, Director of the US ISSN centre at the Library of Congress, and Laurie Kaplan, Director of Editorial Operations at ProQuest, provided updates to several ongoing projects including the International ISSN Centre-Ulrich’s ISSN project, the revision of ISO-8 and the revision of the ISSN Standard (ISO-3297). Julie Zhu, Discovery Service Relations Manager at IEEE, presented the IEEE project to improve the ISSN in their metadata.

Their presentations are online.

With the implementation of RDA in Germany, the German National Library has been running a project for analyzing the possibilities of integrating the ISSN workflows by using RDA for cataloguing. The project’s aim was to merge the so far separated ISSN workflows for data and object into the general cataloguing workflow of the DNB and to reuse the metadata of the German Union Catalogue for Serials (Zeitschriftendatenbank) for ISSN records. The new workflow started at the beginning of December 2016.

IARLA fully endorsed Working Together to Ensure the Future of the Digital Scholarly Record – a statement by The Keepers Registry, a Jisc-funded service maintained by EDINA and the ISSN International Centre, that outlines the actions now required to tackle the evolving challenges of preserving and ensuring the long term accessibility of digital scholarship.

The statement sets out a series of recommended activities for publishers, research libraries and national libraries that can be undertaken to support archiving and preservation initiatives.

This webinar held in August 2016 included three presentations covering both librarians’ and publishers’ involvement with research identifiers, highlighting the implementation of these identifiers in the research lifecycle.

An interview with Tessa Minchew, NASIG new Standards Committee Chair, concerning the committee’s charge and upcoming work.

The COUNTER Report Validation Tool  helps content providers in their implementations of COUNTER and SUSHI by offering a means to measure the accuracy and compliance levels of their solution. The tool also gives users of COUNTER reports an easy way to test a questionable report for compliance and report issues to the content provider concerned. A greater compliance by vendors and publishers means that libraries will get data that are more accurate more efficiently, leading to better decision making.

Peer review is currently facing a transition moment, and many believe that it is necessary to redefine its principles and practices so as not to delay or hinder the progress of science. Open peer review is one of those practices and many survey tend to prove that a growing number of authors, editors and publishers authorize it. Some of them even stated that open peer review should be adopted as a routine.

Joe Esposito, a management consultant for the publishing and digital services industries, gives his own insight on the controversy regarding CiteScore, Elsevier new basket of metrics to be used by researchers and librarians to assess the value of a journal.

Every year, UCL Centre for Publishing organises a session about the latest ideas, techniques and products regarding discovery tools. This year, the focus was set on improved content discovery through semantic enrichment, with notably the Europeana case study.

Presentations from the conference held on 18 January 2017 are available online.

 

Eliminating myths and misinformation about licensing electronic content is the best way to learn how to negotiate and interpret digital license agreements. The revised edition of Licensing Digital Content, A Practical Guide for Librarians covers the basics of digital licensing for librarians in a plain-language approach that demystifies the process.

Over 2016, Librarians and Wikipedians have been working together to showcase the many successful collaborations between libraries and Wikipedia. Opportunities papers highlight the ways libraries and Wikipedia are already engaging to verify information and make it accessible. The papers focus on Academic and Research Libraries and on Public Libraries. They are a starting point for further IFLA work on the practical and policy issues raised by the rise in the number of people generating their own content online, not least through Wikipedia.

Germany’s DEAL project, which includes over 60 major research institutions, has announced that all of its members are canceling their subscriptions to all of Elsevier’s academic and scientific journals, effective January 1, 2017. The boycott is in response to interrupted negociations about a nationwide licence agreement and Elsevier’s refusal to adopt “transparent business models” to “make publications more openly accessible.”

GreyNet, an international grey literature network service, celebrates its 25th anniversary of providing research and reference support in the fields of academia, government, business and industry. The goal of GreyNet is to facilitate dialog, research, and communication between persons and organisations in the field of grey literature.

Read their business report.

Every six months, the Council of the European Union rotates its presidency among the European Union member states. From January to June 2016, the Netherlands presided over the Council. In this post, OASPA reviews the impact of the steps taken by the Dutch presidency to open up access to research, and the continued work by the Council of the European Union achieved so far to meet its goals towards openness.

Jeffrey Beall, scholarly communications librarian at the University of Colorado, decided to shut down his website on the beginning of January 2017. His website was known to host several controversial lists of “predatory” journals and publishers. Beall did not inform the community nor did he provide explanations for this decision.

Over a million records of open access publications from Latin America are now discoverable through the OpenAIRE platform. In December 2016, OpenAIRE began harvesting records from LA Referencia, the large regional repository network that aggregates metadata of open access publications. LA Referencia contains over 1.2 million records of open access content from nine countries in Latin America. The records provide access to peer-reviewed journal articles, theses and dissertations across all research disciplines. This effort will significantly raise the visibility of Latin American publications outside the region.

Publications such as Nature and Science have policies that clash with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation open-access mandate. The discussions could result in influential journals making special arrangements with the Gates Foundation to permit OA publishing. If that happens, it would be the first time that journals such as Nature and Science have allowed a group of scientists an open-access publishing route based on their funding source.

In The Dramatic Growth of Open Access, Heather Morrison, Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Information Studies, is drawing up an annual review of key data illustrating the growth of open access, with additional comments and analysis for each platform. She highlights the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, which surpassed two major milestones in 2016: over 100 million documents (about 60% open access) and 5,000 content providers.

UKSG celebrates its 40th anniversary with a programme highlighting publication ethics and practices, scholarly communication funding and future.

 

Enhancing the quality and credibility of peer review and scientific publication.

Call for research abstracts open until 15 February 2017

The IFLA Strategic Programme on Preservation and Conservation invites interested professionals to submit proposals for the open session.

Topic: Documentary heritage: digitisation, and born digital heritage – facing the challenges to preserve our heritage for the future.

Deadline: 6 March 2017

The 9th Plenary meeting of RDA (Research Data Alliance) to be held on 5-7 April 2017 will be preceded by ICSTI 2017 Annual Members’ Meeting. 

Keynote speakers at the members’ session will include Kathleen Shearer (COAR).

2 workshops will follow: 

Multimedia Publishing and Data Visualization ; 

Scientific Data Repositories : Use Cases, Innovation, and Best Practices.

Submissions about how OA publishing works or could work, are due before 15 March, 2017.

After the latest edition in Washington, COASP will get back to Europe. Programme and registration to be announced soon.

The conference will provide a networking and reviewing opportunity in the context of the OA 2020 initiative for the large-scale transition to open access. The aim is to strengthen the international network and share the experience of the various stakeholder groups in the process.

Registration for 22 March public session is open until 7 March.