A training session will be held at the National Library of Kazakhstan from 3 to 5 April 2017 for colleagues from ISSN national centers in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Russia. Representatives of the Book chambers of Belarus and Ukraine will also participate in this training. At the same time, discussions will be held with the representatives of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia on the establishment of an ISSN regional center. A visit to the International Book Fair “On the Silk Road” is also scheduled for April 6th 2017.

The German National Library (DNB) organizes an information day regarding the topic Open Access (OA) for its staff. The OA days take place on 2nd March in Leipzig and on 9th March in Frankfurt am Main. The in-house training with OA experts -from the Universitätsbibliothek Regensburg, Kooperativer Bibliotheksverbund Berlin-Brandenburg, Copernicus Publications and Springer Nature- will provide (from different prospects) an overview and definition of OA and describe the benefits for science and research. New challenges and possibilities for scientific libraries, publishers and for the DNB in the near future will be highlighted. Kristina Eckl and Christian Schütz (both from ISSN Germany) will hold a presentation about ROAD: the Directory of Open Access scholarly Resources.

An encounter between the representatives of international organizations operating in France was organized by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Development on 9 February 2017. In his opening speech, the Minister, Mr Jean-Marc Ayrault, mentioned France’s commitment to multilateralism, the promotion of human rights, access to education and preservation of cultural heritage. The Minister also announced some actions to ease the dialogue between French administration and international organizations to which the most favorable terms of French legislation will be applied. The challenges faced by international organizations shall be approached at the interministerial level. In her address, Ms Irina Bokova, General Director of UNESCO, rejoiced over the good cooperation  between her organization and the French Government, notably in the field of the preservation of historical landmarks threatened by armed conflicts.

The video of the presentation entitled Stewardship of the Digital Scholarly Record & of Each Nation’s Published Heritage given at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Fall Membership Meeting in Washington D.C., U.S.A. (Dec. 12-13, 2016) is now available on:
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/203130517
YouTube: https://youtu.be/9yprtDgwbEw

The MARC Advisory Committee (MAC) convened two meetings at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Atlanta. Action was taken on 5 discussion papers and 7 proposals during the meetings. Read the proposals that were discussed and approved.

Open ISNI for Organizations is a new service to share the ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) and data for over 400,000 organizations in the world. Neither the web service proposed nor the website require registration and are free to use. Any dataset mapped to ISNIs can be linked together to provide interoperability between systems to benefit the entire scholarly community.

Redalyc has undertaken a transition to the adoption of XML-JATS which provides a standardized format for describing and exchanging structured data. Redalyc is launching a new online tool (Marcalyc) for XML JATS markup—compatible with the JATS4R recommendation—as a free service for the Open Access journals indexed by Redalyc. Once having XML files, Redalyc provides enriched file formats like ePUB and intelligent readers resulting in greater visibility and accessibility for Open Access research in Latin America, lowering costs for journals and leveraging the power of new technologies.

(Article in Spanish)

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Gates Foundation have formed a partnership to advance scientific communication and open access publishing. As a result of this partnership, AAAS will allow authors funded by the Gates Foundation to publish their research under a CC BY license in the Science family of journals. This means that the final published version of any article from a Foundation-funded author submitted to one of the AAAS journals after January 1, 2017 will be immediately available to read, download and reuse.

The Jisc Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) offers a single point of access to journal and ebook usage data, giving libraries a simple way to analyse usage trends and provide evidence of value for money. The results of the 2016 JUSP community survey are now online.

The Internet and digital technologies have profoundly affected scholarly communication, publishing, collaborative research, literature searches, and management of digital assets and data. In turn, our views of the research life cycle have changed. What does this mean for librarians in the health sciences who support or even actively participate in clinical research?

In order to assert its position as an actor in the international open data movement, Persée launches its triplestore, data.persee.fr. This triplestore is intended to address the need of collecting complex corpuses and text-mining within a linked data environement. The data available in RDF format gather all the metadata created by Persée about its collections (authors, illustrations, articles, etc.), those co-created with partners (idRef, Cairo Gazeteer), and the data harvested from various repositories (GBIF, DBpedia, data.bnf, VIAF, etc.). 

OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association) explain their membership application procedure, with a defined list of criteria and a set procedure for investigating problems that arise. OASPA’s goal is to allow publishers a chance to strengthen their processes before reevaluation by OASPA Membership Committee. When it comes to assessing publications themselves, OASPA reminds how INASP and the Think. Check. Submit. initiative are complementary to OASPA’s membership application procedure.

WAME (World Association of Medical Editors), aims to provide guidance to help editors, researchers, funders, academic institutions and other stakeholders distinguish predatory journals from legitimate journals. The initiatives proposed would hasten the demise or conversion of predatory journals. 

Sci-Hub is a repository that makes illegal access to academic papers possible to anyone. It has generated a controversy among librarians, publishers, and open access advocates. Among people who denounced the repository, Ernesto Priego thinks that Sci-Hub might offer a technological solution to access, but it fails to address complex moral, social, and legal barriers in a sustainable way. This controversy led to a panel discussion about ethics, technology, copyright, and inequality, whose results are explained.

SciELO is in the process of establishing a preprint server. This initiative is driven by the need for speeding up the publication process and enhancing its transparency. On this occasion, Jan Welterop, a consultant on open access, analyses the growth of preprints since the late 50’s onward. He thinks that communicating and sharing research results on the one hand, and formal publication in a peer-reviewed journal on the other hand, could be separate and parallel processes.

ProQuest has launched a program to provide no-cost access to its databases for students and researchers who have been separated from their universities and libraries because of travel bans or other immigration changes. The program resolves authentication problems displaced researchers may face when trying to access their institution’s holdings remotely.

After DOAJ implemented new criteria for inclusion of open access journals and invited all journals listed in the directory to reapply, a large number of journals was removed from the database, most for failing to submit an updated application within the deadline. Two DOAJ volunteers for Italy investigated if their contribution, and the contribution by DOAJ volunteers all over the world, was effective in trying to improve the quality of journals indexed in the directory. They are now publishing the results of this investigation.

Hilda Bastian, a member of the PLOS One Human Research Ethics Advisory Group, makes a month-by-month roundup of some of the major open access actions in 2016. A study in the biomedical literature database PubMed reveals a general trend: accessibility of publications seems to increase in waves, with those waves arriving in different intervals, geographically and by academic discipline: 2020 looks like the year to watch now.

The Max Planck Digital Library and Taylor & Francis Group have signed an agreement which enables researchers based in Max Planck institutes to publish open access in 2,390 journals, under a centrally funded arrangement. This applies to peer-reviewed papers in full and hybrid Taylor & Francis Group journals, including Routledge and Cogent OA titles.

Clément Oury, Head of Data, Network and Standards department at ISSN IC, will attend the next ICEDIS meeting and UKSG annual conference.

Panelists: Xin Bi (Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University/DOAJ), Ina Smith (Academy of Science of South Africa), Abel Packer (SciELO), Lars Bjørnshauge (DOAJ).

On the same topic, access the December 2016 webinar and the blogpost reflecting on the discussion.

The IFLA Governing Board seeks nominations for new members of the IFLA Committee on Standards by Wednesday 1st March 2017. See more details about eligibility and how to send nominations.