The ISSN International Centre will participate in UKSG 42nd Annual Conference and Exhibition, to be held in Telford, United Kingdom.

Visit Booth 55 and learn about ISSN novelties.

The ISSN has been added to the directory of identifiers managed by EMBL-EBI on identifiers.org. The compact form of the ISSN identifier is ISSN: 1234-5678. The N2T resolver on identifiers.org refers to the ISSN portal page where the publication record is available.

Supported by the National Library of Iran, the Iranian ISSN Center organized a training workshop for 30 representatives of Iranian journal publishers on November 20th, 2018. During this one-day workshop, the staff of ISSN Iran and local journal publishers discussed the latest issues concerning the international and national regulations of ISSN assignment, the launch of ISSN new Portal and its free services to publishers, and information about OA resources provided in ROAD.

The RDA Steering Committee has announced several changes to its membership. Kathy Glennan began a four-year term as RSC Chair on January 1, 2019. Gordon Dunsire will continue in the role of RSC liaison to the IFLA Permanent UNIMARC Committee, in a two-year term that concludes at the end of December 2020.

The protocol between the RSC and the IFLA Permanent UNIMARC Committee (RSC/Chair/22) has been agreed to by both parties.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) have announced a proposed combination, designed to better serve their members, during a time of rapid change. The combined association will be more effective and influential within the community of publishers, information distributors, libraries, government agencies, and technology partners who make up the membership.

Alice Meadows, the Director of Communications for ORCID, gives an uncomprehensive account and her own thoughts about the PIDapalooza event. Here are some of the themes that emerged from the sessions she attended. The presentations are available on PIDapalooza 2019 repository.

At the ALA Midwinter Meeting held in Seattle in January 2019, members of the RDA Steering Committee hosted this three hour event thanks to the Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access. The presentations and subsequent question and answers sessions were recorded, and the recordings have been posted on the RDA YouTube channel.

The BIBFRAME Update highlighted expansion activities. Expanding the Library of Congress Pilot 2 during 2019 requires that BIBFRAME be convertible to MARC and the BIBFRAME system be more efficient. Philip Schreur described the exciting expansion that Stanford is leading under a Mellon grant. European activity and the European BIBFRAME Workshop were the focus for Reinhold Heuvelmann from the Deutsche Bibliothek. And OCLC provided an update on their BIBFRAME explorations. The presentations are online.

This discussion paper was submitted at the MARC Advisory Committee meeting at the Midwinter meeting of the American Library Association in January 2019. This paper proposes improved ways of indicating open and restricted access, as well as license information, for remote online resources through coordinated changes to the MARC 21 fields 506 (Restrictions on Access Note), 540 (Terms Governing Use and Reproduction Note), and 856 (Electronic Location and Access).

Within a set of feature articles gathered under the name Postcards from a Collective Ecosystem, Heather Staines and Lisa Hinchliffe introduce us to some thought-provoking ideas concerning publishing platform infrastructure and interoperability in a rapidly changing world.

Library publishing is both a growing area of interest in academic libraries and an increasingly visible subfield of scholarly publishing. This article introduces the field of library publishing from the perspective of the Library Publishing Coalition (LPC). In its first five years, LPC has produced a robust set of resources to support library publishers. It has also built a strong community of members and an extended network of affiliates. This paper presents and contextualizes these accomplishments,  and shares new developments and future directions for the Library Publishing Coalition.

On the same subject, see also this blog post by the same author.

ReCAP, the Research Collections and Preservation Consortium, founded by Columbia University, the New York Public Library, and Princeton University in 2000 to preserve and make accessible the collections of its members, has expanded its scope and membership, transforming its original mission from serving as a shared physical repository to becoming a model for shared collection building and management. In addition to improved access and increased efficiency already achieved through the Shared Collection Service, the ReCAP consortium is exploring collaborative collection building and joint digital initiatives to improve the user experience.

The way that researchers generate, analyse and share information keeps evolving at a rapid pace. The British Library’s key programme, Everything Available, will ensure the Library’s continued support for research with services to enable access to information in an open and timely manner. This paper describes the activities planned, with a particular focus on the aims of the Library’s recently refreshed Research Data Strategy. It will give an insight into the challenges and opportunities faced by a National Library in providing relevant services in an ‘open’ world.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published the ARL Statistics 2016–2017, ARL Academic Law Library Statistics 2016–2017, and ARL Academic Health Sciences Library Statistics 2016–2017. These three publications present information describing the collections, staffing, expenditures, and service activities of the Association’s 124 member libraries in fiscal year 2016–2017.

The minutes from the Metadata Interest Group’s 2019 Midwinter program and business meeting are now available.

Eight years after their successful 2011 Conference in Beijing, ICSTI’s 2019 Annual Conference and Workshops will take place in China on 24-26 September. This year’s conference is titled Open Science and Open Innovation. The Shanghai Library/Institute of Scientific & Technical Information of Shanghai (ISTIS) is hosting the event. The Conference will also include ITOC and TACC workshop sessions that will provide significant insights on the theme of Open Science – Latest Developments and Initiatives and Technology Enabled Innovation in Open Science respectively. 
The preliminary schedule is announced.

There is growing concern about the increasing concentration of control of research communication functions in the hands of a small number of players, whose objectives do not reflect the interests of scholarship. In September 2017, COAR and SPARC published a joint statement related to this issue and pledged to collaborate with others on actions that will ensure research communication services are better aligned with the aims of research. Accordingly, COAR and SPARC have developed seven good practice principles for scholarly communication services. The aim is to ensure that services are transparent, open, and support the aims of scholarship.

Open Access publishing is more widespread in Latin America than in any other region of the world, and continues to grow. An interview with Dominique Babini, CLACSO’s Open Access Advisor, explains why Open Access is such a success in Latin America.

The Guidance on the Implementation of Plan S has been taken very seriously by the global scholarly communication and publishing communities. Further to the huge volume of response to cOAlitionS’ call for feedback on the Guidance on the Implementation of Plan S, Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe is sharing some of the themes that she has observed emerging across the feedback documents.

On December 6^th, 2018, a group of stakeholders representing research funding organizations, academic libraries, scholarly publishers and open infrastructure providers, met in London to discuss a proposal for addressing the growing set of challenges in the implementation of institutional and funder policies supporting open access publication. The result of this meeting was broad support for this initiative, tentatively titled The OA Switchboard. Read the overview from Paul Peters and learn more about the key challenges that the OA Switchboard aims to address.

At the same time when  COAlition S was launched in Europe, AmeliCA was brewing the extension of REDALYC’s philosophy, knowledge and technology to the Global South. AmeliCA is a multi-institutional community-driven initiative supported by UNESCO, which seeks a collaborative, sustainable, protected and non-commercial solution for Open Knowledge in Latin America and the Global South. Both initiatives have a common goal: to make Open Access a reality. However, Plan S and AmeliCA imply two very different visions and two conceptualizations on the circulation of scientific knowledge. What is the main difference between them? How is it possible that some of their proposed strategies are counterposed?

This article looks at whether there is evidence to support two prevailing assumptions about open access (OA). These assumptions are: (1) fully OA journals are inherently of poorer quality than journals supported by other business models and (2) the OA business model is more ‘competitive’ than the subscription journal access business model. By combining citation‐based impact scores with data from publishers’ price lists, the authors were able to look for relationships between business model, price, and ‘quality’ across several thousands of journals. They found no evidence suggesting that OA journals suffer significant quality issues compared with non‐OA journals. Furthermore, authors do not appear to ‘shop around’ based on OA price.

ABES will set up a new session at its 2019 Annual Conference. Entitled Café Biblio, this event shall provide librarians with a time to discuss, present or promote initiatives that can be shared and transposed.

Deadline to send proposals : March 15th, 2019.

The Library Publishing Forum is an annual conference bringing together representatives from libraries engaged in publishing initiatives to define and address major questions and challenges; to identify and document collaborative opportunities; and to strengthen and promote this community of practice.

Dr. Arianna Becerril-García, co-founder and Executive Director of Redalyc.org, will be 2019 Keynote Speaker.

The program of the conference is available online.

Topic: (Re-)Shaping University Presses and Institutional Publishing: Profiles – Challenges – Benefits

Deadline for lightning talks and posters: February 28th, 2019.