The issue of IFLA Metadata Newsletter dated December 2018 includes an article about the activities of the U.S. ISSN Center under the News from the Library of Congress section. This article also mentions the 43rd meeting of ISSN National Centers’ Directors hosted by the Library of Congress in September 2018.

ISSN has been a persistent identifier for more than 40 years and still is! This is good news the Director of the ISSN International Centre will share with experts attending the two-day PIDapalooza Persistent Identifier festival in Dublin, Ireland, on 23-24 January 2019.

At November 2018 Wikicite Conference held at Berkeley, the ISSN IC Head of Information Systems made a presentation about ISSN and Wikidata.

Fifty percent of “periodical entities” of any kind have ISSNs in Wikidata, including 30,000 with linked article citations. Most entities lacking an ISSN in Wikidata probably have one assigned in the ISSN Register. The ISSN International Centre is ready to help curating ISSN data in Wikidata in order to fill the most important gaps and help with the creation of missing periodical entities.

The presentation slides are online, as well as the video.

The ALCTS CRS Continuing Resources Cataloging Committee is announcing its Forum, to be held on January 28th, 2019, (1-2:30 p.m.) at the ALA Midwinter conference. This forum will focus on the impact of the LRM and the diachronic works on serials cataloging using RDA, related LC-PCC policy statements, and how the concept of diachronic work relates to the practices of the ISSN Network. Regina Reynolds, Director of the U.S. ISSN Center at the Library of Congress, will be among the speakers.

PREMIS (PREservation Metadata Implementation Strategies) is a data dictionary created in 2005, hosted by the Library of Congress and maintained collegially by the PREMIS Editorial Committee. It is used to express information on digital documents with a view to their sustainability. Karin Bredenberg, Chair of the PREMIS Editorial Committee, gives an overview of the projects and outcomes achieved in 2018.

The ALPSP Conference and Awards was held on 12-14 September 2018. You can view the full conference programme, including speaker biographies, and browse the event website here. You can also access the audio recordings and slides for each session. Video footage of all plenary sessions is also available on the ALPSP YouTube page.

ATLA is announcing significant growth in the content of its core full-text products, ATLAS® and ATLAS PLUS® in the past year. ATLAS PLUS, ATLA’s largest online full-text collection, has grown to include more than 470 full-text titles. In addition, ATLA’s original full-text collection, ATLAS, continues to grow and now offers more than 335 titles.

ATLA is among the partnering databases whose data enhances the ISSN Portal.

The DARIAH Beyond Europe (DBE) event, held on 2-4 October 2018 at the Library of Congress (LoC), was a workshop dedicated to international cooperation and knowledge exchange. It brought together digital humanists from the US East coast and Europe to exchange ideas and discuss the state of play in the two continents. The Horizon 2020 funded project, NewsEye, was presented as well as the LoC funded National Digital Newspaper Program.

Open access to digital research output is increasing, but academic library policies can place restrictions on public access to collections. This paper reports on a preliminary study to investigate the correlation between academic library access policies and institutional positions of openness to knowledge. The results show that academic library policies may suggest open public access, but multi-layered user categories, privileges and fees charged can inhibit access, with disparities in openness emerging between library policies and institutional open access policies.

At the IFLA Governing Board meetings held in mid-December 2018, further important steps have been undertaken. Board members, representing all library types and regions, explored how the evidence produced by the Global Vision can be turned into a strategic plan. For the next World Library and Information Congress, a strategic plan will be launched for IFLA as a whole, as well as action plans for all Professional Units.

In October 2018, Ithaka S+R published a brief, The State of Digital Preservation in 2018: A Snapshot of Challenges and Gaps, which is based on interviews with 21 experts to survey their perspectives on the state of digital preservation. The brief highlights some assessment- and metric-related matters as it is becoming more complicated to articulate what success entails in digital preservation. One of the areas highlighted in the report is the difficulty in preserving the outcomes, methodologies, and context of such engagements. Ithaka S+R is looking forward to hearing reactions to the brief to carve out a research agenda through the wisdom of the community.

On September 4th, 2018, the second HIRMEOS Workshop was organised on Entity-Fishing for Digital Humanities and Scholarly Publishing. Entity-fishing, a service developed by Inria with the support of DARIAH-EU and hosted at HUMA-NUM, enables identification and resolution of entities: named entities like person-name, location, organizations, concepts, artifacts, … The workshop aimed to discuss and clarify practical concerns arising when using the service and possible new use cases presented by Edition Open Access, ScholarLed and Septentrio Academic Publishing. This report describes challenges related to the development of these applications and provides recommendations for its integration and use on digital publishing platforms.

Wikidata, a knowledge base for structured linked data, provides an open platform for curating scholarly communication data. Because all elements in a Wikidata entry are linked to defining elements and metadata, other web systems can harvest and display the data in meaningful ways. Thus, Wikidata has the capacity to serve as the data source for faculty profiles. Methods for contributing to Wikidata and displaying the data with Scholia, are explained, as part of a pilot project.

Consultant Tao Tao offers an overview of the Chinese academic market. As in any other country, the academic market in China consists of universities and research institutes, and hospitals for medical content. The market demand and buying power can be found mostly in the top 20% of universities and a few research institutes. The author intends to answer the question on where  efforts should be concentrated.

Jisc, the UK’s technology solutions organisation for higher and further education, and Eduserv, which specialises in digital transformation in local government, public bodies, healthcare, charities, higher education and emergency services, are coming together to form a unique powerhouse of world-leading expertise to benefit all UK and overseas clients. The two charities will begin operating as one from 1 January 2019, in a move that will retain existing staff and services.

The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) reiterates its support for the goal of Plan S to achieve immediate Open Access to all scholarly publications from research. COAR and others in the repository community have significant concerns related to several of the requirements for repositories. Some of these might create artificial barriers to the participation of universities and other research organizations in the scholarly communication system.

Scholastica, a vanguard academic journal software and service provider with tools for peer review and open access publishing, has announced new archiving and indexing automations. Scholastica now offers automated article and metadata deposits for the Portico digital preservation archive and for the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The new automations are in line with Scholastica’s mission to modernise all areas of publishing, helping OA journal publishers do more with fewer resources.

In three position papers, China’s National Science Library (NSL), its National Science and Technology Library (NSTL) and the Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), all said that they support the efforts of Plan S to transform research papers from publicly funded projects into immediate open access after publication. However, it is not yet clear when Chinese organizations will begin implementing new policies, or whether they will adopt all of Plan S’s details.

cOAlition S has recently released guidance on the implementation of Plan S. While it provides many new details about the plan, it has not provided reassurance to anxious society publishers. As a matter of fact, the cOAlition S vision of the future of scientific and scholarly publishing is in contradiction with the values and practices of most society publishers. While in theory Plan S supports “diversity of models and non APC-based outlets,” in reality such models are not presently available to society publishers. The author proposes a solution and encourages Society members to provide feedback on Plan S and its impact on their society journal programs.

The Association of European Research Libraries is calling for papers for its annual conference.

Topic: Research Libraries for Society

The deadline for submitting a proposal is 14 January 2019.

iPRES is the premier international conference on the preservation and long term management of digital materials.

Topic: Eye on the Horizon

Deadline for all submissions is 18 March 2019.

The American Library Association is organising ist midwinter annual meeting in Seattle.

The full schedule is announced.

The Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) is the higher education association for librarians. The association will hold its next annual conference in April.

Topic: Recasting the Narrative

The keynotes and invited speakers are announced.