The ISSN International Centre has been invited to participate in ABES Annual Conference. Nathalie Cornic, Head of Metadata and Technical Coordination of the ISSN Network, will give a joint presentation with Philippe Cantié, Head of ISSN France, about the contribution 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 about the latest developments of the ISSN Portal is also on the agenda.

The National Library of Nigeria (NLN) launched a new application for the assignment of international standard numbers (ISSN and ISBN) on 11 May 2019 during the Nigeria International Book Fair (NIBF).

Prof. Lenrie Olatokunbo Aina, Chief Executive Officer of the National Library Of Nigeria, explains that this application will enable librarians and publishers to track the level of legal deposit compliance, a precondition for further issuance of new standard numbers.

On April 18th, 2019, the National Book Chamber of the Republic of Moldova (NBCRM) and ISSN National Centre for Moldova organized a conference-meeting entitled: National editorial system – the National Book Chamber: Interactions and paradigms. The event was supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Research, in partnership with the Moldovan Publishers Association, the Institute for Information Society Development (IDSI), and Andrei Lupan Scientific Library (Institute).

The event included an update for stakeholders regarding ISSN, as well as other identifiers such as ISBN and ISMN, and sessions where the attendees reported back on the current status of publishing from their own perspectives.

The full press release (in English) from the conference can be downloaded here.

ISNI IA plans to introduce new  services for ISNI member organizations and other communities. These will include better partitioning of organizational vs personal ISNI identifiers, the provision of ISNI identifiers and associated metadata in the form of open linked data, and enhancements in search and API functionality. Publishers and even imprints can have ISNIs, they can be used as publisher and imprint identifiers in ONIX and in other metadata sets such as the one managed by the ISSN International Centre in its portal.

In February 2019, DOAJ tightened up procedures for article uploads. This includes checks that are carried out on uploads particularly ISSN, DOI, and full text URL information.

This means that, whether uploading article XML or JSON via the API, the metadata must include the exact same ISSN value(s) as those DOAJ holds in the journal record. If a journal title has two ISSNs on its website (one ISSN for the print version and one ISSN for the online version) and DOAJ only has one, you should contact DOAJ to have the second ISSN added. If need be, the ISSN Network can be contacted to update journal metadata.

The journal Serials Librarian has just released an article about the future of ISSN written by Gaëlle Béquet, ISSN IC Director, and John Akeroyd, consultant with CiberResearch. The article entitled Irreplaceable ISSN: from 2007 to the Future  reports on the global survey of ISSN users that was undertaken in 2018 to inform ISO experts working on the revision of ISSN standard. Article is available at https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/wser20/current .

PIE-J, i.e. Presentation and Identification of E-Journals, is a NISO Recommended Practice that offers guidelines on how journals can be presented online so as to ensure discoverability and access of content over time. A presentation will be given at NASIG annual conference in Pittsburgh, 4 – 8 June 2019, to showcase how publishers use PIE-J.

More information about PIE-J implementation was shared by Steve Shadle, Head of Serials Cataloging at the University of Washington Libraries, at ER&L 2019 Conference. His presentation can be downloaded at PIE-J Presentation-S-Shadle-ErandL2019.

The first ever RDA Meeting in Brazil was held 16 – 18 April 2019 in Florianópolis (Santa Catarina). It brought together more than 200 information science professionals who are actively teaching and researching RDA. The objective was to share information and experiences about research and application of the standard in Brazil, and discuss how to work towards adoption of RDA into Brazilian Librarianship.

The event was organized by the National Service of Commercial Learning of Santa Catarina (Senac/SC) and the State University of Santa Catarina (UDESC). The event’s program and slides are available.

In 2007, ISO 3297 introduced the mechanism of “Linking ISSN” (ISSN-L) for the purpose of supporting search and delivery functionality across all media versions.  The ISSN-L simplifies the search, recovery and delivery of data across services including, in particular, search systems and knowledge databases. The ISSN International Centre publishes an ISSN/ISSN-L matching table, updated daily and available on the ISSN International Centre’s website upon request.

Since January 2018, the “cluster” ISSN-L record type is also available through the new public version of the ISSN Portal (https://portal.issn.org) which contains more than 2,5 million ISSN records. The Portal offers users access to free ISSN essential identification metadata, which can also be reused in several linked open data formats; for subscribers, it offers a completely new range of data and services through ISSN records enriched with information from external sources that cooperate with the ISSN International Centre.

As a result of the amendments introduced by the European Directive issued on 6 November 2018, Member States of the European Union are now authorised to apply the VAT rates they apply to printed publications to the marketing of periodicals and books published online. The Italian Revenue Agency explains in which cases the reduced VAT rate of 4% also applies to databases that allow access to editorial content. The requirement for the application of VAT at 4% is the identification of the editorial product with the ISBN or ISSN. The ISSN code must identify, not so much the database itself, but the editorial contents it gives access to.

[Article in Italian]

Springer Nature sets out a new approach to research publishing with the goal of increasing the demand from authors to immediately publish their research open access (OA). The other goal is to increase the supply of journals able to publish OA, potentially enabling even highly selective journals such as Nature to transition to OA. The new approach would see publishers become active drivers of the transition to OA, with this demonstration of commitment increasing institutions and funding bodies’ confidence and support. This blog post describes a potential significant way to progress.

ABES, i.e. the French Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education, has been publishing SUDOC data in Worldcat for the past 10 years. Work to improve the visibility of collections and libraries is currently under consideration, jointly with OCLC and the National Library of France (BnF), particularly with regard to data quality. ABES also wishes to facilitate and improve international interlibrary loan.

[Article in French]

In order to help journals take full advantage of the DOAJ’s indexing services, Scholastica Open Access Publishing has made it possible for those using Scholastica’s Open Access Publishing software to have their articles automatically deposited into the DOAJ. SOAP software handles all article formatting for journals.

Free access to scientific content is often limited due to the fragile technical infrastructure around it: Content is stored in a variety of versions at various locations and without any uniform search functionalities. The Open Access initiative Knowledge Unlatched has addressed this growing problem and is launching the Open Research Library together with several international partners. Its goal is to unite all Open Access (OA) book content. To this end, the Open Research Library is working with publishers and libraries worldwide and is open to all providers and users of quality-assured research content.

Metadata 2020 was established in 2017 with the mission to facilitate the collaboration of all involved in scholarly communications to consistently improve metadata and enhance discoverability. Metadata 2020 has set out four principles underlying good quality metadata: Compatibility, Completeness, Credibility and Curation. Comments are welcome. A forthcoming set of Best Practices will illustrate use cases and provide some concrete action items to support the Practices.

Spain is very active in the open access movement. Although the gold route has scarcely been used there, the green route has been intensively implemented through fulfilment of European and national mandates and the development of institutional policies. Plan S is becoming a disruptive element in the context of scientific communication. The challenges and opportunities are examined to conclude that repositories can be a fundamental tool for monitoring the fulfillment of mandates.

A contract is a transformative agreement if it seeks to shift the contracted payment from a library or group of libraries to a publisher away from subscription-based reading and towards open access publishing. Transformative agreements are increasingly described as either Read-and-Publish or Publish-and-Read. Learn more in this essay which is a basic primer on transformative agreements and their characteristics and components.

Plan S requires that, from 2020, scientific publications funded by public grants must be published in open access (OA) journals or platforms. A ‘read and publish’ agreement that offers researchers a funder compliant route to publishing in hybrid journals has been agreed by Jisc and SpringerNature.

Built on a previous arrangement, this agreement limits the costs of publishing for all UK articles in OA while maintaining access to all of Springer’s subscription articles. Jisc and Springer Nature will also continue to work together to evaluate the agreement and gather evidence to inform the transition to open access.

Topic: Shaping the New Status Quo: Global Perspectives in Scholarly Publishing

The programme is online.

The international Open Repositories Conference creates opportunities to explore the challenges faced by global academic library, research, preservation and access communities.

The 2019 conference programme is online.