Gaëlle Béquet, Director of the ISSN International Centre, will chair the 2019 ISO TC46 Annual Meeting hosted by Library and Archives Canada/Bibliothèque et Archives Canada. The program includes a meeting of ISO TC46/SC9/WG5 experts who will discuss the outcomes of the 2019 DIS ballot regarding the ISSN standard ISO 3297.

The French Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education (ABES) organises every year in Montpellier, France, its annual conference with its network of academic libraries.  ABES also holds annually the SUDOC PS Network Meeting with university librarians specialized in serial identification and cataloguing.

The ISSN International Centre has been invited to participate in both events. Nathalie Cornic, Head of the Metadata and Technical Coordination of the ISSN Network, will participate in SUDOC PS Network Meeting to be held on 27 May 2019. She will give a joint presentation with Philippe Cantié, Head of ISSN France, about the participation of the ISSN Network in CIDEMIS. This professional application, whose acronym means Dematerialized CIrcuit of ISSN Requests, is designed to automate the management of ISSN assignment and modification requests for continuous resources reported in the Sudoc. A presentation of the latest developments of the ISSN Portal is also on the agenda.

Nathalie Cornic, Head of the Metadata and Technical Coordination of the ISSN Network, will attend COAR Annual Meeting to be held 21-23 May 2019 in Lyon, France.

COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) vision is to work with the repository community and other stakeholders to develop a sustainable and inclusive global knowledge commons. The 2019 COAR Annual Meeting will continue efforts to foster existing relationships across countries and regions in support of global interoperability, sharing of perspectives, and knowledge exchange. The meeting will launch a dialogue with domain repositories and have presentations outlining new initiatives to support publishing functionalities on top of repositories. It will also offer opportunities for participants to discuss other current topics and trends such as FAIR data, next generation repositories and Plan S. Keynote speakers will bookend the meeting to underscore why working towards sustainable open access and open science is so important.

Pierre Godefroy, Head of Information Systems, will participate in a meeting organised by JISC about The Future of Metadata: An Action Plan Discussion, to be held in London on 22 May 2019. This invite-only event is led by active participants in the Community Data Group that formed in response to the Jisc-led National Bibliographic Knowledgebase (NBK). It will bring together a wide range of key stakeholders (libraries, data suppliers, publishers, vendors and standard agencies)  to create an action agenda to clarify the demand, optimise the supply, and enhance the quality of metadata for print and electronic published resources. Participants will work towards agreement on a set of principles around the supply and exploitation of bibliographic data. Discussions will be based on a Jisc-commissioned recent report (download summary slide deck) by Ken Chad Consulting Ltd.

The ISSN portal is now available in Chinese and in Arabic. English, French and Spanish interfaces are also provided for publishers requesting ISSN assignments and subscribers managing their access options.

Prof Lenrie Aina, Chief Executive Officer of the National Library of Nigeria, has called on stakeholders in the publishing industry to comply with international standards of publications in Nigeria. His appeal was made at the opening of a sensitisation workshop on legal deposit, ISSN and ISBN. He expressed dissatisfaction over the lack of adherence to statutory regulation of the organisation and stressed the need for compliance by all stakeholders.

NISO has just released an updated version of the Transfer Code of Practice that provides voluntary guidelines for publishers to follow when transferring journal titles between parties. The ISSN International Centre supports this initiative by managing the Enhanced Transfer Alerting Service.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announces the formal publication of a new update to the JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2019). The purpose of JATS is to define a suite of XML elements and attributes describing the content of metadata and journal articles while using a common format that enables the interchange and exchange of that content. The added elements and modifications made in 2019 allow greater flexibility in existing models while enabling support for emerging publishing practices. The published version of the Standard may be found at https://www.niso.org/publications/z3996-2019-jats.  Non-normative and supporting materials, including schemas and Tag Library documents, may be found at: https://jats.nlm.nih.gov.

Since 2017, Springer Nature has provided an optional Research Data Support service to help researchers deposit and curate data that support their peer-reviewed publications. This service builds on a Research Data Helpdesk, which since 2016 has provided support to authors and editors who need advice on the options available for sharing their research data. This paper describes a short project which aimed to facilitate an objective assessment of metadata quality, undertaken during the development of a third-party curation service for researchers (Research Data Support). The curation services which have been developed and introduced are also described.

The National Bibliographic Knowledge Base (NBK) is a new UK-wide service to help libraries collaboratively manage their collections and improve access to print and digital resources. The availability of the Jisc Library Hub Discover and Cataloguing interfaces will effectively signal the start of the countdown to the retirement of Copac and SUNCAT at the end of July 2019. Neil Grindley, Head of Resource Discovery at Jisc, reviews the progress accomplished so far and mentions the next steps to be taken. In another post, the NBK data model is explained.

The 14th International Digital Curation Conference was organised by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) which is an internationally-recognised centre of expertise in digital curation with a focus on building capability and skills for research data management. The main theme of the conference was collaborations and partnerships in the field of digital curation and preservation. How do they develop and evolve across the professional, disciplinary, institutional, regional, national, and international levels? And how are such collaborations supporting the advancement of digital curation and preservation practices?

The presentations and videos are online.

It is often anecdotally remarked that early career and PhD researchers have to publish their research more frequently and earlier in their careers than previous generations of academics, if they aim to secure a permanent academic job. In this post, Rob Warren lays out empirical evidence from the field of Sociology showing that this is indeed the case and highlights two market trends driving this process.

On March 26, the European Parliament adopted the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, after several years of development and negotiations marked by intense lobbying from all sides. With a final agreement little more than a formality, this new legislation is poised to impact the research community and change the environment around open science. Several meaningful improvements and the persistent concerns are stated from the research community perspective. The Directive needs to be implemented into the national law of each Member State within two years. Member States have an opportunity to develop national legislation that will be adapted to their particular circumstances.

The Future of Scholarly Publishing and Scholarly Communication is a report published in January 2019 and produced by a Group of Experts at the European Commission, created to support the Commission’s policy development on open science. The report proposes a “vision” for the future of scholarly communication. It analyses the current system – with its strengths and weaknesses – and its main actors. It reviews their roles and makes recommendations to each of them, identifying where there is room for collaboration and synergies. The report concludes that funding agencies, with their access to money and their relative freedom to act, are probably best suited to shape and develop the scholarly publishing landscape of the near future, and their growing collective commitments to open science are positive signals in this regard.

Plan S raises challenging questions for the Global South. Even if Plan S fails to achieve its objectives the growing determination in Europe to trigger a “global flip” to open access suggests developing countries will have to develop an alternative strategy. Richard Poynder explains what this strategy might be.

On 30 April 2019, there will be a major update to the RDA Toolkit BETA site that will include a stabilized version of the English text as well as added and improved functionality to the BETA site.

A Free Webinar will take place on May 10 to introduce users with the new Toolkit’s features.

The Publishers’ Forum offers a top-class, specialist program with hands-on workshops and seminars which communicate concepts and experiences in order to provide workable solutions to the challenges which have arisen as a result of digitization.

The programme and speakers are announced.

The 2019 LIBER conference brings European research library directors and their staff together for three days of networking and collaboration.

Topic: Research Libraries for Society

The programme is online.