The 44th meeting of the Directors of ISSN National Centres will be held from November 12th, to 16th, 2019, at the kind invitation of the NISCAIR (National Institute for Science Communication and Information Resources). The Indian ISSN team is managing the logistics of the Directors’ Meeting. A dedicated web page (https://44thissnmeet.weebly.com/) has been set up to provide information for the attendees (on invitation only).

The ISSN International Centre is organizing an ISSN Regional Meeting in partnership with IZUM, the Slovenian Institute of Information Science (https://www.izum.si/en/) in Maribor, Slovenia. Representatives from Balkan and Central European ISSN National Centres will attend and share information about metadata issues, the ISSN Portal and the new metadata production tool.

The revision of an ISO standard is a very specific process involving experts from various backgrounds and countries. ISO Central Secretariat regularly issues guidelines and recommendations to help the convener of the working group and experts to proceed with the revision. The ISSN standard was last revised in 2007. This paper describes the current revision process of ISO 3297 -ISSN. Although ISO experts can share their insights at regular meetings, it is sometimes useful to call upon the community of users to get their input. A survey was thus conducted in 2018 about the views of ISSN users on the future of the standard. ISO experts have since reviewed the survey findings and come forward with proposals for the development of the next ISSN standard.

This paper was presented by Gaëlle Béquet, Director of ISSN International Centre and Chair of ISO/TC 46, at IFLA WLIC 2019 – Athens, Greece – Libraries: dialogue for change in Session 208 – Serials and Other Continuing Resources.

The University Press Library is the result of a five-year pilot project initiated by De Gruyter, the three prestigious presses of Harvard, Columbia and Princeton with collaboration from LYRASIS and ten participating academic libraries. The pilot project sought to address the challenges of acquiring complete DRM-free frontlist eBook collections of university press content for both the press and the academic library. The data gathered from this successful pilot inspired the University Press Library, a sustainable model that meets the financial and academic needs of both university press partners and the library in a digital environment.

Online search engines and academic indexes require machine-readable metadata to ingest and interpret information about journal articles. Without rich machine-readable metadata, the potential reach and impacts of journal articles are sure to be stunted because search engines and indexes will struggle to parse the articles and return them in relevant search results. Scholastica automatically produces machine-readable metadata for all of the articles published using their open access publishing platform, and they make it easy to apply metadata collected during peer review to published articles saving journals time. ISSN is among the core metadata required by publishing standards organizations and open access initiatives like Plan S.

DART-Europe is a partnership of research libraries and library consortia who are working together to improve global access to European research theses. DART-Europe is endorsed by LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche), and it is the European Working Group of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD). The DART-Europe partners help to provide researchers with a single European Portal for the discovery of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs), and they participate in advocacy to influence future European e-theses developments.

This annual report includes a summary of the activities of the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), during the 2018–2019 year, and plans for the future.

The not-for-profit technology provider for research and education, Jisc, and the publisher Wiley, are to digitise a one-million-page collection on the history of science. Through the partnership, the resulting digital collection will be free to all UK universities and colleges and, once the licences to the content expire, will be made available openly and globally password-free. Scholars and teachers will be able to freely access materials dating roughly between 1800 to the 1970s via the Wiley Digital Archives platform. The history of science collection will be available from March next year, giving access to primary source material that might otherwise have been hard to access, and difficult to use.

Historical newspapers are an important resource for academic research in various disciplines – particularly in Germany, where the newspaper sector is and always has been particularly diverse and prolific. The large-scale digitisation, full-text cataloguing and provision of online access to historical newspapers is an important desideratum. The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) has set up a funding programme in support of this work.

The project “DDB Zeitungsportal” (DDB Newspaper Portal) will encompass the development and implementation of a portal that provides centralised, user-friendly access to digitised historical newspapers from all over Germany. The technological and organisational basis for this portal is the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library – DDB).

Based on a survey conducted in late spring 2019, a report published in September 2019 examines what key international funding bodies are doing to incentivise openness in the work they help fund. The intention behind the survey, which was led by SPARC Europe in consultation with ALLEA, the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities, The European Foundation Centre (EFC) and Science Europe, is to spur even greater support for Open research and to advance Open Access to research results in Europe.

Preprints have become more widespread in a number of disciplines over the last few years, partly to counter the slow pace of the traditional publishing process and partly to allow authors to reach a broader audience. Knowledge Exchange, in collaboration with Research Consulting, investigated this phenomenon in order to explore the current place of preprints in the scholarly communication process.

The 23rd edition of the International Conference on Electronic Publishing (ElPub) took place in June 2019 in Marseille, France.

The posters and slides are online.

In September 2019, a project that included funders backing Plan S, the European-led effort to speed the transition to open access, released a set of contract templates and tips meant to help small, independent publishers reach deals with libraries that would eventually eliminate subscriptions while protecting revenue. The project also helped arrange pilots, which may soon be inked, that use the guidance; they will allow researchers served by library consortia to publish an unlimited number of open-access articles in return for a set fee paid to societies.

Even while founding megajournals have lost momentum, others that are more selective or specialized are thriving. Three discipline-focused megajournals have grown rapidly in recent years.

The National Library of France organises the 4th conference about the bibiographic transition in France, precisely about evolving catalogues towards a structure based on entities.

ALA (American Library Association) organises a series of 3 webinars intended for librarians, to explore digital preservation practices and approaches.

This three-part series includes the following sessions:

October 16, 2019: A Field Guide to Digital Preservation
October 23, 2019: Why (Not) Digitize?
October 30, 2019: Wayfinding for Digital Preservation

STM Week returns for 2019 – Save the Dates and register:

• 3^rd December: Innovations
• 4^th December: Digital Publishing
• 5^th December: Ideas Factory