By letter dated 13 March 2018, Ms Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, acknowledged the accession of the Republic of Panama to the ISSN Network in response to the letter sent by Ms Isabel de Saint Malo de Alvarado, Vice-President and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Panama. The Ernesto J. Castillero R. National Library has been officially designated to house the future ISSN National Centre of the Republic of Panama.

ISSN International Centre is organising an all-day conference to be held in Paris on 26 April 2018.

Jean-Claude Guédon, as an expert with the European Commission and a pioneer in the open access movement, will introduce the session as the keynote speaker. Among the invited speakers, Mikael Laakso (Hanken School of Economics in Finland) will deliver his study about the recent evolution of Open Access journal publishing, focusing on the use of ROAD, the ISSN Directory of Scholarly Open Access Resources. Leo Waaijers (Netherlands) will present QOAM, Quality Open Access Market, a tool for quality assessment of editorial practices. Ana Maria Cetto (UNAM, Mexico) will talk about the recent Declaration of Mexico in support of the Latin American Non-commercial Open Access Ecosystem.

This event is on invitation only.

IFLA President Glòria Pérez-Salmerón has invited IFLA Officers to attend the official presentation of IFLA Global Vision Report that will take place on March 19th, 2018. ISSN International Centre Director Gaëlle Béquet has been invited since she is Secretary to IFLA Serials and Other Continuing Resources Section.

Insights Journal has published an article about the new ISSN Portal entitled Revisiting the identification of serials: ISSN goes linked.

UKSG 41st Annual Conference and Exhibition will take place in Glasgow, from 9-11 April 2018. ISSN International Centre team will attend the conference. A presentation of the new ISSN Portal will be held at booth 33, in the exhibition hall of the Scottish Event Campus.

The Conference Programme is online.

Clément Oury, Head of Data, Network and Standards department at ISSN International Centre, will also participate in the next ICEDIS meeting to be held after the UKSG annual conference.

DOAJ and the ISSN International Centre renewed the Memorandum of Understanding signed first in December 2015. The purpose of this agreement is to document the metadata exchange and linking between the DOAJ and the ISSN portal for open access scholarly journals. The benefit of this working agreement is to give an insight about trusted peer-reviewed open access journals in the ISSN Portal, and to improve the quality of the metadata.

David Shotton describes the Open Citation Identifier scheme, created and operated by OpenCitations, which supports the assignment of Open Citation Identifiers not only to the citations present in the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC) but also to open citations present in other bibliographic databases.

This is the fifth post in a series of 6 about Citations as First-Class Data Entities.

Pat Riva was invited to deliver the Lectio magistralis in Library Science at the University of Florence on March 6th, 2018. She spoke about IFLA’s new standard, the IFLA Library Reference Model. The IFLA Library Reference Model : lectio magistralis in library science = Il modello concettuale IFLA Library Reference Model : lectio magistralis in biblioteconomia. The text of the lecture is available in English and in Italian.

Pat Riva was the Chair of the Consolidation Editorial Group that wrote the definition of the IFLA LRM model: IFLA Library Reference Model :  a conceptual model for bibliographic information. 

The fifth and latest edition of the ISBN standard has been published by ISO (International Organization for Standardization). The new standard has been developed by an international working group of 41 experts from 14 countries who were involved with the project for three years, providing advice, feedback and discussion points as the work progressed. There are significant changes in the standard. Notably, metadata specifications have been revised to be in line with ONIX 3.0., and the scope for eligible products has been clarified. The Users’ Manual and FAQs have been revised as well and are available in English.

The International Publishers Association (IPA) chief Michiel Kolman, Elsevier’s senior vice president for global academic relations, made the opening address at 2018 Academic Publishing in Europe (APE) conference. As an answer to the event’s key question about “ramping up relevance”, he called for the industry to place its authority and intellectual rigor at the center of its work. He also pointed out that division in the business is not helping, and sharply condemned SciHub as a real threat of piracy.

Academic Publishing in Europe gathered more than 250 delegates in Berlin in January 2018. Publishing 2020: Ramping up relevance was the focus, and this notion led to the re-affirmation of the key themes of the conference series: transition to open access, the debate around peer-reviewed content versus uncontrolled data sharing platforms. There was also a focus on new technological challenges associated with the blockchain that likely will challenge academic publishing.

As library discovery and delivery has largely moved online, the scholarly workflow of academic researchers has become increasingly fragmented. Faculty members are using a variety of software solutions to find, retrieve, organize, annotate, cite, and share information, including library resources. The current status of discovery of library resources within citation management software is outlined, along with expected future developments. Utilizing findings from two Mellon funded studies, it explores the challenges users face in managing their individual scholarly workflows, and recommends optimizations designed to mitigate information loss and increase researcher productivity.

The full collection of papers from the 2017 ARL Satellite meeting: Digital Humanities – Opportunities and Risks Connnecting Libraries and Research are now available online from HAL, the National Repository of France.

Academic libraries are increasingly launching their own publishing programmes. Libraries have a long history of stewarding scholarly literature. Increasingly, they are applying their knowledge of the scholarly communications process to launch their own publishing programs. The goal is to disseminate unique and original content, and showcase their campus’ contributions to knowledge. As the Library Publishing Coalition attests, it has found a valuable and expanding niche. Pushing the boundaries of what is considered publishing may in fact be one of library publishing’s greatest strengths, writes Sarah Lippincott, a scholarly communication and digital scholarship consultant.

Researchers at Stockholm University can now get published in Open Access journals without paying article processing charges (APC), owing to new agreements with four international Open Access publishers. The aim is to increase the number of Open Access publications, reduce the researchers’ administration and be more cost-effecient.

PERSIST, with the UNESCO Memory of the World Secretariat, is joining forces with the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) to produce an Executive Guide on Digital Preservation. The Guide will provide an overview on the importance and urgency of digital preservation activities, including resources for internal advocacy initiatives. A joint DPC-UNESCO-PERSIST Advisory Group has been formed to oversee the direction and progress of the project. The Executive Guide is due in January 2019.

The celebration of the 20 years of SciELO in 2018 will culminate in the week of September 24-28 with meetings of the SciELO Network and the SciELO 20 Years International Conference. The website <www.scielo20.org/en/> will document the evolution of the organization of the SciELO 20 Years week. The SciELO 20 Years Conference will discuss 12 main themes organized into four programmatic lines that will address the trends, innovations, methodologies and technologies that are shaping the future of research communication and the key functions of journals.

This report will zoom in on the potential of blockchain to transform scholarly communication and research in general. It will highlight how blockchain can touch many critical aspects of scholarly communication. Moreover, blockchain could change the role of publishers in the future. The report shows that this technology has the potential to solve some of the most prominent issues such as those around costs, openness, and universal accessibility to scientific information.

Rick Anderson, Associate Dean for Collections and Scholarly Communication in the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah, wonders if open access (OA), and particularly Green OA, is likely to lead libraries and other customers to cancel their paid journal subscriptions. He gives his point of view on the question, summaring the issues and challenges of journals subscriptions, OA and Big Deals.

The American Theological Library Association (ATLA) is moving the Theology Cataloging Bulletin (TCB) and the ATLA Summary of Proceedings, two valued and frequently consulted resources of the ATLA membership and others, to open access. Historically, you had to be a member of ATLA to access to TCB and the Proceedings. With the shift to open access and to Open Journal System, these publications enjoy increased readership and the priorities and professional work of ATLA’s membership will be more discoverable.

Results from the world’s first-ever global discussion across the library community will be revealed on 19 March 2018 when IFLA’s Global Vision Report is launched during the IFLA President’s Meeting in Barcelona, Spain.

An in-depth look at the opportunities and potential changes in the world of scholarly communication that may be stimulated by Blockchain.

3 speakers: Joris van Rossum, Director of Special Projects at Digital Science; Sönke Bartling, Founder of Blockchain for Science; 
Lambert Heller, Digital Library Specialist and Founder of the Open Science Lab at TIB.

Topic: Scholarly Publishing at the Crossroads: What’s working, what’s holding us back, where do we go from here?

Topics: Overview and update of the 3R project and technical infrastructure of RDA in a linked data environment.

Topic: World-class scientific publication – 2018: Editorial Policy, Open Access, Scientific Communications

Deadline for submission of applications 1 April, 2018

Conference preceded by the workshop Preparation of Scientific Journals for Promotion to the International Information Space: Scopus recommendations.