The secretariat of ISO TC46/SC9 has just launched a committee internal ballot to confirm the revision of ISO 3297 – ISSN. SC9 P- members are requested to vote efore 2 June 2017.

The ISSN International Centre is invited by the French Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education (ABES) to participate in the annual meeting with SUDOC centres specialized in serial identification and cataloguing. This annual meeting about serial identification and cataloguing organized each year by ABES in Montpellier will take place in May 2017 at the same time as the annual 2-day professional event ABES Days, whose programme is online.

Clément Oury, Head of Data, Network and Standards Department, will represent the ISSN International Centre.

The ISSN Register is at the heart of The Keepers’ Registry, the database managed by EDINA – University of Edinburgh and which acts as a global monitor on archiving arrangements for electronic journals made by a dozen memory organizations.

The website thekeepers.org, which reports 34,357 e-journals as being archived, was recently upgraded and new features were added. Users can now submit lists of ISSN / titles so as to check the archival status of different publications in batch mode. Users searching for an ISSN associated with an e-publication get a result that shows basic information about that title, even if it is not reported as archived by any of the Keepers’. Furthermore, a machine to machine interface (API) has been introduced through which external applications can query the database.

The latest revision of the Statement of International Cataloguing Principles (ICP) 2016 has been announced by IFLA. This statement builds on the great cataloguing traditions of the world, as well as on the conceptual models in the IFLA Functional Requirements family. The aim of these principles is to help to increase the international sharing of bibliographic and authority data, and to guide cataloguing rule makers in their efforts. Translations into various languages are already in progress.

New IFLA Standard: Definition of FRBRoo: A Conceptual Model for Bibliographic Information in Object-Oriented Formalism

FRBRoo is an ontology or high-level conceptual model for bibliographic data. FRBRoo is the result of dialogue between the conceptual modelling communities of IFLA and the International Council of Museums (ICOM). FRBRoo version 2.4 was endorsed by the IFLA Professional Committee in December 2016.

The CAB Direct platform launched in July 2016 is a single point of access to all of CABI’s databases. It has been rated as ‘highly recommended’ for researchers, professionals and practitioners in the March 2017 issue of CHOICE magazine. CHOICE magazine notes how this enormous collection of scientific research and policy studies has more than doubled in size since its last review of CAB Abstracts almost a decade ago, and details its substantial number of references.

Recommended, a new service which connects the research community with the most relevant content, was launched by Springer Nature in February 2017. This service makes suggestions of primary research papers which are drawn from over 65 million papers ; they are chosen irrespective of publisher, and are algorithmically tailored to the individual researchers’ interests.

ProQuest is partnering with Jisc to enable UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to build strong, user-centered research collections that better support their research focus areas and budgets. This common project is a group purchasing program aimed at supporting HEIs with a more efficient, coordinated and transparent approach to the acquisition of digital archival primary source collections.

The Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Association of American University Presses (AAUP) are implementing a new initiative to advance the wide dissemination of scholarship by humanities and humanistic social sciences faculty members by publishing free, open access, digital editions of peer-reviewed and professionally edited monographs.

The challenge of increasing access to knowledge while reducing the cost of knowledge is addressed. Sustainable article processing charges and alternative open access models are explored. Librarians are facilitators of scholarly communications, and they must play a key role in ensuring that scholarly work can continue and that knowledge can be preserved and disseminated in a sustainable way. 

In February 2017,  the libraries at University of Oregon and Oregon State University made contributions that completed a four-year fundraising effort spearheaded by Reveal Digital to develop an open access collection of alternative press periodicals called Independent Voices.  Leading academic libraries from the U.S, Canada, and the U.K. contributed the entire $1.794 million needed to cover the costs of copyright clearance, digitization, platform development and hosting, project management, outreach, and other support activities for this large multi-year project.

A study published by BMC Medicine identifies 13 evidence-based characteristics by which potential predatory journals may be distinguished from presumed legitimate ones. From a sample, the study shows how these journals are distinct in some key areas from presumed legitimate journals, and it provides evidence of how they differ. While the characteristics identified in this study may not be sensitive enough to detect all potentially predatory journals, these findings may be helpful to researchers in assessing a journal’s legitimacy and quality.

The world of citation metrics can be a confusing one. What do all these metrics mean, and how are they used to benchmark the performance of articles and journals? This infographic is based on a related post to give a quick overview of the key citation metrics and what they tell us.

The arrival of a new preprint server for the social sciences called SocArXiv comes just after Elsevier has acquired the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), a preprint repository founded in 1994 by two researchers. SocArXiv is modelled on the physics preprint server arXiv, and describes itself as a free, open access, open source archive for social science research meant for rapid sharing of academic papers, mostly preprints. In this interview, its founder is asked if the newly reinvigorated preprint movement can gain sufficient traction, impetus, and focus to push the revolution the OA movement began in a more desirable direction.

APC data is now available for over 12,000 journals with longitudinal data going back to 2010 for selected journals.

This dataset includes information on OA journals derived from publisher websites and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). It was developed as the base for a longitudinal study on the open access APC method used by about a third of OA journals. Data gathering and analyses will continue on an ongoing basis and will be published annually. The two most critical elements for matching data and merging datasets are the journal title and ISSN.

David Crotty, the Editorial Director, Journals Policy for Oxford University Press and Board member of the Society for Scholarly Publishing, calls into question the victimization of authors and academic incentives. Precisely, the true root of the problem is the academic career and funding system, and its lack of effort put to true evaluation and oversight. Then, the solution should come from academic institutions, as taking away the incentive for these publishing behaviors and predatory publishers  would lose the market niche they serve.

The 15th anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) is the opportunity to take stock of collective progress. A small working group was convened to synthesize the community feedback further to an open survey, and provide updated recommendations that reflect the current state of the movement. Jean-Claude Guédon, one of the original drafters and leaders of the BOAI, provides his perspective on where the open access movement has been and where it may be headed.

Issues in four thematic areas are analysed: OA policies and mandates, EU copyright reform, new OA publishing models and open science. The level of dependence in the UK on European developments is assessed and its contribution to Brexit issues identified. To conlude, Brexit presents challenges, but also opportunities which the UK could seize. The UK needs to consolidate its current activity and leadership, and ensure that, whatever the nature of Brexit arrangements, its freedom does not lead to isolation.

Jisc Collections has been piloting ‘offsetting agreements’ that explicitly link subscription and APCs, seeking to reduce one as the other grows. However, offsetting agreements have become increasingly contentious with institutions, advocates and publishers. With reference to issues such as cost, administrative efficiency, transparency and the transition to open access, this paper provides an update on the status of UK negotiations, reflects on the challenges and opportunities presented by such agreements, and considers the implications for the path of future negotiations.

Theme:  Open Access: Action Required

3 sessions: Long-term preservation of OA Resources, Marketing of Open Access Resources, and Discovery and Access of OA Resources.

Deadline for proposal submission: 1st May, 2017.

Sponsored by: IFLA Section on Serials and Other Continuing Resources
Co-sponsored by: IFLA Section on Acquisition and Collection Development

A workshop on Identifiers and Linked Data and the new role for LIS stakeholders was organised by the National Library of France (BnF), Huma-Num and Persée. All the videos are online.

New technologies and business models will be examined, as well as the re-emerging role of collection development and librarianship in the continuing digital evolution of the scholarly ecosystem.

Theme: The Evolving Scholarly Environment 

Major topic: Next generation repositories.

The programme is available.

The latest scientific results and technology innovations around semantic technologies.

Two special tracks:  Multilinguality and Semantics & Transparency

Registrations are open.