In January 2018, the ISSN International Centre will release its new portal and customer extranet. It has been completely re-designed and will offer a new interface to request ISSN assignments, and some new customer services.

The ISSN International Centre has been working for one year with the French IT company Progilone to set up a RDF triplestore based on the specific ISSN data model designed by the ISSN International Centre. ISSN applicants will also use the new extranet to register their publications’ data and track the status of their requests. Other features shall include online report of titles for which a given publisher assumes editorial responsibility, and online request for modification regarding the metadata describing serial publications under the responsibility of any publisher.

A first version of the portal and customer extranet will be presented as a preview for French users on December 12th, 2017 in Paris. The ISSN International Centre will make a demo of the new portal and will present new services, more specifically those available for subscribers.

Participation is free upon reservation.

[Article en français]

Do you use  ISSN? The ISSN standard is being revised and the ISSN International Centre is seeking views from all sectors as to the future of the standard.

There is a short survey available which should only take 10 minutes or so to complete. It can be found at :

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/Z3D5XX5

Surveys in French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Arabic are also available.

Thank you for your time.

The annual meeting of Directors of ISSN Centres was hosted this year by the National Library of the Kingdom of Morocco in Rabat (November 7-10, 2017). Twenty-seven countries were represented with participants coming from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America. IFLA WLIC 2017 featured high on the agenda with presentations about the new Library Reference Model (LRM) and the revision of ISBD. Another hot topic was the release in January 2018 of the new ISSN web portal based on linked data technologies. The portal will enable the development of new services developed within the framework of the 2015-2018 strategy of the ISSN International Centre.

Philippe Cantié, Director of the French ISSN Centre, explains the process of ISSN assignments to Hypothèses' scholarly blogs. These blogs are searchable by ISSN or by title on the catalog of the National Library of France, as well as on the ISSN Register (subscription-based) and ROAD, the ISSN Directory of Scholarly Open Acess Resources.

The identification of the scholarly blogs through ISSN assignments is meant to facilitate their search and discovery and to highlight the authors’ publications.

Working Together to Ensure the Future of the Digital Scholarly Record is a statement that outlines the actions required to tackle the challenges of preserving and ensuring the long term accessibility of digital scholarship. Initially released in August 2016, the statement sets out a series of recommended activities that publishers, research libraries and national libraries can undertake to support archiving and preservation initiatives. The ISSN International Centre is involved in this action. The statement has already been endorsed by 8 organisations. Other organisations are invited to endorse the statement and lend their support to this call to action.

Articles written by experts in cataloguing and bibliographic standardisation explain how French libraries introduce new cataloguing rules and practices.

[En français]

A meeting about Impact of the IFLA Library Reference Model on ISBD, RDA and other bibliographic standards was held at Wrocław University Library on 25 August 2017, following the IFLA World Library and Information Congress. The meeting and its outcomes continue the on-going effort to harmonize the treatment of serials in RDA, ISBD, and the ISSN Manual, further to the discussion hosted by the RSC at its meeting in Frankfurt in November 2016.

During the RSC meeting at the Biblioteca Nacional de España, there was a community outreach event entitled Preparing for the New Toolkit. This event was recorded and can be viewed on the BNE website. On the agenda was a presentation by Gordon Dunsire about serials, aggregates and changes over time.

Short presentations from representatives of relevant standards bodies were followed by intense and fruitful discussions on the modelling of serials, manifestations, and items in the Library Reference Model. Gordon Dunsire’s presentation on RDA and the LRM is available.

The RDA (Resource Description and Access) Toolkit Restructure and Redesign (3R) Project is a year-long effort to improve the RDA Toolkit in several different ways. Restructuring includes generalizing existing instructions, and incorporating new elements from the IFLA Library Reference Model. Redesign includes greater flexibility in the display of instructions, improved user interaction with the Toolkit, and better tracking of revision history. The 3R project will extend into Summer of 2018 with an initial rollout of the new Toolkit on June 13, 2018, and an additional rollout in late August/early September.

The African Academy of Sciences, in partnership with F1000, is launching a publication platform, AAS Open Research, to enable AAS funded and affiliated researchers to publish immediately and without barriers. AAS Open Research will showcase African research on the global stage in an immediate and transparent way. The platform will launch in early 2018.

The ability to access and review the data behind research is a well sought after, but often elusive, resource. In recognition of this, Scopus has been working to incorporate new tools that can make it easier to search and share data. As part of a new initiative introduced earlier this year, Scopus has established two key partnerships: Scholix and DataSearch. Each provide different but complementary ways to connect researchers to each other’s data.

The new plan grew out of a few important developments. In 2015, the NASIG Board established the Financial Planning Task Force to take a long-term view of NASIG’s finances, set benchmarks and timelines, and to establish financial goals for the next five years. The Board appointed a Strategic Plan Implementation Task Force to draft the final strategic plan for the remaining items.

The results of the application of the new editorial quality criteria of the Latindex Catalogue to a selection of Latin American journals specialized in Library and Information Science are presented. The results show a compliance greater than 90% in 25 of the 38 characteristics, evidencing a high degree of standardization in the journals of these disciplines. Nonetheless, some criteria that underwent adjustments in the new methodology faced difficulties to be fulfilled. When analyzing by groups of characteristics, it was found that the set of features inherent to online journals had the lowest percentage of compliance.

[In Spanish]

The Core Competencies for Scholarly Communication Librarians were developed out of research and discussion conducted by the NASIG Scholarly Communication Core Competencies Task Force. The specific duties of the scholarly communication librarian (SCL), though, may be broad and amorphous. The task force proposes the Core Competencies as a tool box consisting of four themes and five areas of emphasis.

Both ResearchGate and Sci-Hub make it easy to obtain articles by sharing in a social network (ResearchGate) or simply by making direct downloads available of PDFs obtained via institutional proxies (Sci-Hub). This widespread usage reveals a lack of universal access. Whilst a minority of papers is fully open access (freely accessible and re-usable), 47% of the new articles viewed by unpaywall users are OA. Notably, the most common mechanism for OA is not Gold, Green, or Hybrid, but rather an under-discussed category called ‘Bronze’: articles made free-to-read on the publisher website, without an explicit Open license. But all the “legacy” articles behind paywalls remain closed off.

Jan Velterop, a science publisher and an active advocate of BOAI-compliant open access, suggests that all paywalled journal articles should be given an open access licence after a period of no more than 12 months of the date of publication.

Gold open access publishing is a cause for concern because it drives a redistribution of valuable research money to support open access papers in ‘mega-journals’ with more permissive acceptance criteria. A data-driven evaluation of the financial ramifications of gold OAP is presented and evidence is provided that gold OAP in mega-journals is biased toward Western industrialized countries. The global inequity of the cross-subsidizing APC model was demonstrated across five different mega-journals, showing that the issue is a common problem. Stringent and fair criteria need to be developed to address the global financial implications of OAP, as publication fees should reflect the real cost of publishing and be transparent for authors.

This paper makes the case for stronger engagement of libraries and consortia when it comes to negotiating and drafting offsetting agreements.

Two workshops have shown a clear need for an improvement of the current workflows between academic institutions and publishers in terms of author identification, metadata exchange and invoicing. 

As a result, strategic and practical elements will be introduced. Firstly, the Joint Understanding of Offsetting, launched in 2016, will be discussed. Secondly, this paper proposes a set of recommendations for article workflows and services between institutions and publishers. These recommendations should be seen as a minimum set of practical and formal requirements for offsetting agreements and are necessary to make any publication-based open access business model work.

Representatives from the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) member organizations gather twice annually to explore new technologies, further collaboration and catalyze the development and deployment of new projects according to the Program Plan.

STM Weelk combines these events:  

STM Digital Publishing 2017, Innovations Seminar 2017 and STM Future of Publishing 2017

The 8th CRECS Conference (Conferencia internacional sobre REvistas de Ciencias Sociales y humanidades) will be focused on the Iberoamerican cooperation in sscholarly publishing.

The deadline to send papers and posters (in English, Spanish or Portuguese) is: 15 January 2018

The symposium Empowering Access and Ensuring Accessibility: Connecting People to Information and Collections will take place during ALA Midwinter 2018