Since September 10th, 2018, ETAS has been hosted by the ISSN International Centre. Please visit https://journaltransfer.issn.org/
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The 43rd meeting of the Directors of ISSN National Centres will be held from 18 to 21 September 2018 at the kind invitation of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, United States of America.

At FBF, the ISSN International Centre will deliver a presentation titled Innovative functionalities to request ISSN, access ISSN Data and manage your subscription. The aim is to present the new interface to request ISSN assignments, subscribe to ISSN services and access ISSN linked data. Serial publishers and serial librarians are welcome to attend this presentation on October 10th, 2018,  at 5.30 pm, at Academic & Business Information Stage (hall 4.2).

ISSN International Centre Sales team will be happy to meet you at FBF International Library Centre, ILC– hall 4.2, stand N 75 (9-11 October 2018).

By early October 2018, the National Library of Nigeria will launch a new Online ISSN platform to speed up and follow ISSN publishers’ requests for ISSN assignments to Nigerian serial publications.

Since the latest report of the Standards Committee, the COUNTER organization has continued its consultations with librarians and publishers and made a few changes to the original COUNTER Release 5 Code of Practice draft. The most notable changes regard the handling of “gold” and “delayed” Open Access. The technical report of the changes is available on the COUNTER organization website, but most librarians may find reading The Friendly Guide to Release 5 for Librarians to be the most useful to understanding the overall R5 as it stands now.

The College of Computing and Informatics of Drexel University announced three free open online learning series on metadata and linked data for the library and cultural heritage community. One of the webinars is called Linked Data for Librarians by Seth van Hooland and Ruben Verborgh. It provides an introduction to implementing Linked Data in library settings and then explores more advanced aspects of Linked Data applications, projects, and skills.

Michael Mabe,  chief executive officer of the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), reflects on a half-century for STM, and the continuing path of innovation.

The National Diet Library (NDL), which celebrates its 70th anniversary this year, has recently released the “National Diet Library bibliographic data creation / provision plan 2018-2020” (PDF: 386 KB). After introducing the background and the outline, the purpose of the “bibliographic plan 2020” is detailed. Among the most important tasks of the plan, one is to define how to implement new Japanese cataloging rules, and enhance access to digitized materials published within the National Diet Library Digital Collection, notably the Journal article index.

The IFLA Trend Report identifies five high level trends shaping the information society, spanning access to education, privacy, civic engagement and transformation. Its findings reflect a year’s consultation with a range of experts and stakeholders from different disciplines to map broader societal changes occurring, or likely to occur in the information environment. The IFLA Trend 2018 Update brings in four more expert perspectives and is the latest follow-up of the library community’s discussions on the Trend Report.

The  updated 2018–19 edition of the statement titled Recommended Formats Statement released by the Library of Congress identifies hierarchies of the physical and technical characteristics of creative formats, both analog and digital, which maximize the chances for survival and continued accessibility of creative content into the future. This report emphasizes the benefit of electronic delivery of datasets, to reflect the reality of acquiring and managing digital content in modern workflows.

SciELO has been a shining example of how a publicly supported infrastructure could bolster scholarship and knowledge as public goods. However, its focus on “professionalization” and “internationalization” may serve to reduce the intellectual and linguistic heterogeneity of the region, while subjecting the evaluation of quality to “standards” largely set by multinational corporations that are more interested in profit extraction than in local development.

In Japan, scholarly journals are mainly published by academic societies. J-STAGE is a journal platform on which Japanese academic societies can publish their journals. Although more than 80% of them are freely accessible, most of them do not claim to be open access. Some barriers to open access publishing are described based on conversations held between the Science Council of Japan and academic societies.

The 2018 Peer Review Week aims to highlight the theme of diversity in peer review. After looking at how diversity in peer review has evolved over the Royal Society’s history, some of the challenges in diversifying peer review are examined.

Further to a NISO webinar on Discovery: Where Researchers Begin, a historian wonders about her relationship to the use of archives and documentary resources offered by research libraries. She highlights the potential institutional bias inherent in archives: the purposes for which these archives were formed, how the material was organized and how it was catalogued. Finally, she considers libraries as active producers of knowledge, not only providers of resources.

At the 2018 World Library and Information Congress in Kuala Lumpur, the Serials and Other Continuing Resources group (SOCRS) held an open program on scholarly communication. It featured papers from across Asia and Africa, whose main takeaway was the steady march of Open Access (OA) within the world of scholarly communication.  Yet, OA does not end completely the challenges of rights management, digital preservation and funding. Besides challenges, exciting new uses of bibliometrics were also highlighted. Read the papers.

Think. Check. Submit. helps researchers identify trusted journals for their research. The team behind this initiative wants to ensure that this is as useful as possible to researchers, librarians and others around the world. The short survey about your experiences with Think. Check. Submit. will be open until 28 September 2018.

In January 2017, the UGC (University Grants Commission), a government body that regulates higher education, collated a white list of journals with the help of universities. This white list was later found to contain predatory journals. Consequently, in May 2018, the UGC reviewed it and deleted 4,305 journals. Academics suggest that besides creating a white list, the Indian government should sanction academics who publish in these journals, and change  regulations regarding government incentives to publish. 

On 4 September 2018, 11 national research funding organisation, with the support of the European Commission including the European Research Council (ERC), announced the launch of cOAlition S, an initiative to make full and immediate Open Access to research publications a reality. It is built around Plan S, which consists of a statement and 10 principles.

The STM International Publisher Association and the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) will hold a joint seminar titled The Transformation of Academic Journals and Books: New Technology and Legal Aspects. It will be followed by another seminar called Publishing innovation and Open Science – the next 50 years organised by STM Member Connect Japan.

The Association of Learned Professional and Society Publishers is celebrating its 30th anniversary.

The programme is online.

The Munin Conference is primarily revolving around open access, open data and other aspects of open science. The audience is mostly librarians and research administrators from the Nordic countries and the rest of Europe.

The keynote speakers are announced.

The 2nd edition of the international conference on Libraries and Archives in the Digital Humanities Era will propose some reflections on technological advances in the dissemination, enhancement and perpetuation of content. Their impact on the profession of the information specialists will also be discussed. This event will take place in the framework of the Digital Tools & Uses Congress.