As from January 2018, the ISSN International Centre is offering:

• a new ISSN Extranet for publishers with enhanced services such as:

– easy ISSN requests for publications
– tracking of the assignment process at every stage
– reports of titles for which publishers assume editorial responsibility
– fast requests for modification
– declarations of transfer of ownership
– interactions with the ISSN team through a collaborative platform

• a new ISSN Portal interface (http://portal.issn.org) combining free data and subscription-based access to enhanced ISSN data.

ISSN assignment is now a paid-for service. An ISSN request shall cost between 25 € and 50 € as per the country the publisher is located in. Service packages are also available on request.

The current ISSN Request web form will no longer be in use after Dec. 10th, 2017.

Publishers shall wait until Jan. 3rd, 2018 to send their new ISSN Requests using the extranet.

For further information, please contact communication[a]issn.org.

A working group that includes some members of the PREMIS Editorial Committee plus external Linked Data experts and preservation practitioners, is working on the preparation of a new OWL ontology. This ontology is not just an update of the previous version but rather a re-imagining of how to express preservation metadata as Linked Data. This is a work in progress, and a draft will be released soon for a period of public review and feedback.

SharedIt, Springer Nature’s free content sharing initiative, was launched in October 2016. A positive assessment is established after this first year of existence. As a matter of fact, SharedIt links were used to read Springer Nature articles 3,276,125 times, by readers in over 200 markets and from almost 29,000 institutions.

SharedIt covers over 2,700 journals including all the Springer Nature-owned portfolio and over 1,000 co-owned and partner-owned journals. It enables authors and subscribers to post links to free-to-read versions of research articles anywhere, including social media platforms, repositories, websites, scholarly collaboration networks and via email.

EBSCO Information Services and the American Theological Library Association (ATLA) launched ATLA Serials (ATLAS) PLUS and updated their ATLA Religion Database (RDB), which are both available on EBSCOhost. ATLAS PLUS has more than 425 full-text journals in the fields of religion and theology, including full-text content in 16 languages from 30-plus countries. ATLA RDB is merging with the ATLA Catholic Periodical and Literature Index (CPLI), which features more than 500,000 additional records on Catholicism.

This year, the first ever International Digital Preservation Day was celebrated around the world on November 30th, 2017. Digital Preservation Coalition organised this initiative, aiming both to celebrate achievements, and to highlight how much there is still to do. IFLA raised awareness about the challenges libraries face in preserving digital heritage, and in ensuring that it remains accessible in the future. This includes issues such as policies, storage, and “bit-rot” – the masses of digital content that become unreadable as technology evolves. A recent survey conducted under the UNESCO PERSIST initiative offered some ideas on what other action may be needed.

Library as Publisher: New Models of Scholarly Communication for a New Era, by Sarah Kalikman Lippincott, is available as an open access e-book through the Charleston Briefings series. This book will help the reader understand the context of library publishing. It also explores when a publishing program is a good fit for a library and provides guidance for defining, launching or growing a publishing initiative.

Since 2015, the Nordic countries have been collaborating on a common registry of authorized research publication channels. In early December 2017, the Nordic List Steering Group met to define hosting and access rights.

This joined list will be consisting of top level bibliographic data on journals, series and publishers collected from the national registries. Notably, ISSN is used for matching the national registries in joined list. The participating organizations will use the Nordic List to gather and compare data in order to reduce and share the costs of maintaining and validating the bibliographic data and to provide higher quality.

This article describes how a society-owned philosophy journal, Nordic Wittgenstein Review, evaluated various publishing models and made an informed decision on how best to adopt open access publishing for the journal, and implement measures to evaluate the chosen model.

The DOAJ’s re-applications project, which started in January 2015, is officially complete. All the journals which are now listed in the database have been reviewed under DOAJ’s stricter criteria. In total, over 40% of the journals were culled from the database. DOAJ will work with its technical partners, Cottage Labs, to develop a system whereby publishers can submit updates to their journal records.

The program is  online.

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) will hold the Professional & Scholarly Publishing annual conference.

Topic: Data, diversity and discovery: How professional and scholarly publishing is accelerating change and growth

The program is online.