IFLA World Library and Information Congress, 83rd IFLA General Conference and Assembly will take place in Wroclaw, Poland. This year’s theme is Libraries. Solidarity. Society.  We would like to pinpoint 7 sessions regarding ISSN concerns and topics to share with you: Linked Data and standards, cataloguing, cultural heritage and long-term preservation of serials, open access to scholarly output and altmetrics.

You will find more details about those highlighted sessions below in the WLIC 2017 special section.

Gaëlle Béquet, Director of ISSN IC, will chair the session about Epistemological and theoretical foundations of information of the 11^th Biennial Conference of the French ISKO Chapter (International Society for Knowledge Organization) which will be held on 11 and 12 July 2017 at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. The overarching theme of the conference is Epistemological and theoretical foundations of Information – Documentation science: a tribute to francophone pioneers.

The programme is online.

The ISSN International Centre will participate in the Annual Conference of the American Library Association which takes place in Chicago, IL, 22-27 June 2017. On Saturday 24 June, there will be a presentation of the latest news regarding the revision of ISO 3297 – ISSN at NISO Annual Meeting and Standards Update. On Sunday 25 June, Gaëlle Béquet, Director of the ISSN International Centre, and Regina Romano Reynolds, Director of the US ISSN Centre, will speak at the session The Once and Future ISSN organized by the Continuing Resources Cataloging and Standards Forum (ALCTS CRS).

The Annual Conference about standardization in the information and documentation sector took place at the National Library of France on Friday 23 June 2017. Gaëlle Béquet, Director of the ISSN International Centre and President of the ISO Technical Committee 46, delivered the opening address together with Pierre Fuzeau, President of the mirror French Committee 46.

Programme: http://www.bnf.fr/fr/professionnels/anx_journees_pro_2017/a.jp_170623_afnor.html 

LIBER, the Association of European Research Libraries, and OCLC Research are launching a collaborative project.  The organizations will examine the research information management (RIM) practices in three European national contexts—Finland, Germany and The Netherlands—with close attention to the adoption and integration of persistent identifiers (PIDs) and their role in supporting disambiguation and interoperability.

The Permanent UNIMARC Committee meets once a year, usually at the UNIMARC Strategic Programme venue, in Lisbon, Portugal. The report about the 2017 meeting is available online.

Five months after the Beall’s list of possible ‘predatory’ scholarly journals and publishers was shut down, another index of untrustworthy titles is appearing — although this version will be available only to paying subscribers.

Scholarly-services firm Cabell’s International will launch its own list of predatory journals. The firm described its work on 31 May, at the annual meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing in Boston, Massachusetts.

When a journal is first suggested for Scopus, it must undergo a rigorous evaluation and selection process to ensure it meets all the high-quality title selection criteria required for acceptance. However, journals must also demonstrate the ability to maintain their quality status year over year. This is where the re-evaluation program comes into play. Now in its second full year, this year’s annual title evaluation has been completed and journals that must undergo the full re-evaluation process have been notified.

Angela Cochran,  Associate Publisher and Journals Director at the American Society of Civil Engineers, is offering some thoughts on how Sci-Hub harms OA journals. Many of these reasons are the same for subscription journals and the amount of harm may be more, less, or the same depending on the business model of the journals affected.

KB+ is promoting an international initiative from non-commercial knowledge bases through an open letter. In order for libraries to have a good set of metadata and to optimise the functionalities of the systems in use at the libraries, KB+, together with ERDB-JP (Japan), ABES-BACON (France) and Bibsam, have published an Open Letter to System Vendors. The objective is to encourage a constructive dialogue to be able to maximise the impact of the metadata provided.

The IFLA IAP is a capacity-building programme designed to promote and support the role libraries can play in  planning and implementating the United Nations 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The IAP Update – May 2017 features activities and plans reported by IAP participants between February 2017 and the end of May 2017. The document’s structure mirrors the four regions (Africa, Asia Oceania, Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean) where the six IFLA IAP Regional Workshops have taken place.

This issue makes clear that IFLA Journal continues to mirror the overarching dialogues within the profession through the publication of research that represents widely held research problems within the profession and a diversity of scholars working to identify and develop applied solutions to issues that range from indigenous knowledge, digitization services, assessment, and the overall value of libraries and knowledge access to societies.

The ISSN International Centre and its network are updating their services which will include a new interface to request ISSN assignments and a new web portal to access ISSN data more easily.

IFLA Committee on Standards (CoS) invited IFLA standards review groups as well as practitioners from international standards organizations (ISBD, UNIMARC), and national libraries (Latvia, France, Australia) to talk about the implementation of IFLA Library Reference Model (LRM) and give some updates on ISBD and UNIMARC.

An important role for libraries is to further the sharing and exchange of data within and outside its sector. In the cataloguing world, this means the creation and development of new data models, where entity description gives better opportunities to cluster resources and reuse metadata, ultimately serving the user experience. It can also mean active work with linked data, promoting open data licensing and open source solutions. Metadata is a valuable commodity. To enable its sharing and reuse is both an act of solidarity and a way to make most of our investment. Four representatives from European national libraries and an academic libraries network -the Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education (ABES) will present their projects.

This session aims to highlight some of the international and national efforts and cooperation taking place to safeguard cultural heritage in all its forms. Important projects like the #unite4heritage Campaign, Memory of the World and UNESCO PERSIST will be presented to illustrate how UNESCO is acting to fulfill its objectives. The cooperation on IFLA’s Cultural Heritage Programme will also be discussed.

Old and new media are the foundation for culture and science. Digitization and long-term preservation determine the quality and availability of information and knowledge in the future. Speakers from eight countries will share their best practice experiences. Themes like data protection, audiovisual media and newspapers will be discussed.

Four different visions of open access to research will be discussed. A Dutch scholar imagines a sustainable “locked open” ecosystem where scholars and companies can cooperate rather than compete, while another speaker will explain how mining the scientific literature is a form of new research. China’s efforts towards Open Science will be presented by the Chinese Academy of Sciences as an example of a Chinese academic library to introduce its Open Knowledge practice. More generally, SPARC Europe will provide leadership to Europe’s research community to enable more research to become accessible to all. 

Created to measure research impact on the web, Altmetrics are now growingly valuable to scientific journals and libraries who are using them to evaluate and promote themselves. How are altmetrics used in libraries and why are they important when working with scholarly communication, serials and other continuing resources issues? The present and future potential impacts and uses of altmetrics will be examined, with a special focus on Iran, South Africa and China.

This study, conducted by Reme Melero, a CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) scholar and member of the Open Access team, together with Mikael Laako and Miguel Navas,  implements the four core variables of the recently published Open Access Spectrum (OAS) (reader rights, reuse rights, copyright, and author posting rights) to measure the level of openness in all 1,728 Spanish scholarly journals listed in the Spanish national DULCINEA database at the end of 2015.

From 12 to 16 June 2017, IFLA’s presence at the World Summit on the Information Society Forum 2017 allowed delegates to hear the library perspective on three aspects of access – open (free for users), public (Internet access in libraries) and meaningful (ensuring that people have the necessary skills to make information useful). Panelists from a range of international organizations – ADB, CERN, ESA, UNESCO, WHO, WIPO and IFLA – spoke about their experiences in developing and implementing Open Access (OA) policies.

The main outcomes can be found on pp. 200-204 on the Forum Track Outcomes.

COAR has just published a new report entitled Asia Open Access Regional Survey.

In terms of research outputs, the Asian continent is already prolific and is growing quickly, with China poised to become the world’s leading country in terms of number of published research articles. This report provides an account of the current state of open access in 16 regions of Asia. It is expected that the survey results will contribute to the wider implementation of open access and help various regions make the case for greater investment in open access, both in terms of policies, as well as national and local infrastructure.

A cocktail organised by ISSN IC will be the opportunity to get an insight into the new ISSN IC customer extranet and web portal.

The Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives and Museums summit will gather 100 participants.

Theme : Libraries powering sustainable knowledge in a digital age

The programme is online.

Theme : Reclaiming Scholarship: Voice, Rights, Ownership

The program is online.