The portfolio of services provided by the ISSN portal is expanding to support the identification of continuing resources and share information about their preservation in the digital scholarly environment. Plans to make the ISSN portal a hub of identifiers are emerging. Bring your chords and your PIDs and tune in for an innovative music piece.

The Director of the ISSN International Centre gave a presentation with Peter Burnhill about Keepers Registry, the new service provided by the ISSN portal (portal.issn.org), at CNI Fall 2019 Membership Meeting. The ISSN International Centre has launched this service on 3rd December 2019. The Keepers Registry supplies information about long-term preservation of digitized and born-digital continuing resources.

The Keepers Registry, a JISC-funded service for the UK Higher Education sector from 2016 to 2019 had been maintained, so far, by EDINA at the University of Edinburgh.

The ISSN International Centre and its Governing Board value the Keepers Registry as part of the global identification infrastructure for serials. The ISSN International Centre has been a partner of the service since its inception. The ISSN International Centre will continue to make its functionality and content available for the international communities of libraries, publishers and scholars.

Since 3rd December 2019, the ISSN International Centre, in cooperation with the various contributing Keepers agencies, decided to take over this service by integrating the Keepers Data into the ISSN Portal. Please visit The Keepers Registry.

The magazine Research Information interviewed Gaëlle Béquet, Director of the ISSN International Centre, along with other publishing experts, about the hot topic of “user experience”. The issue is available here, see page 9: http://email.europascience.com/files/amf_europa_science/project_26/RInov19_web.pdf?fbclid=IwAR30u6fUE1jtnm6BhjkVDNRzBRbgoteM8NYfIxBBw7oqrnHbHQPo_FQnAq8

On 1st December 2019, the national standards organizations members of ISO TC 46 voted and endorsed the revised version of ISO 3297, which will be released in 2020.

The RDA Steering Committee (RSC) is responsible for maintaining RDA: Resource Description and Access.

RDA is a package of data elements, guidelines, and instructions for creating library and cultural heritage resource metadata that are well-formed according to international models for user-focussed linked data applications.

The agenda for the asynchronous RSC meeting, to be held 6-9 January 2020, has been posted on the RSC website.

Three papers associated with agenda items being discussed have also been posted and are linked from the agenda.

• String encoding schemes in RDA Toolkit
• RDA content elements
• RDA content elements Appendix

Community feedback on these papers via your regional representative is most welcome.

A new comment article in Nature, headed up by lead-author Agnes Grudniewicz, unveils a new consensus-formed definition of predatory publishing, and provides some suggestions of steps to take in the future to tackle the problems developing from the phenomena.

Download rates of academic journals have joined citation counts as commonly used indicators of the value of journal subscriptions. While citations reflect worldwide influence, the value of a journal subscription to a single library is more reliably measured by the rate at which it is downloaded by local users. If reported download rates accurately measure local usage, there is a strong case for using them to compare the cost-effectiveness of journal subscriptions. The authors of this study examined data for nearly 8,000 journals downloaded in the University of California system during a period of six years. They came to the conclusion that the currently available download statistics, which are supplied by publishers, are not sufficiently reliable to allow libraries to make subscription decisions based on price and reported downloads, at least without making an adjustment for publisher effects in download reports.

STM and its members continue to stand ready to work with cOAlition S and individual funders to make a vision of a high-quality, sustainable, and more open scholarly communication environment a reality.

With 2020 just around the corner, the achievements of this year are reflected with a highlight on what will be delivered in the months ahead.

In the face of evolving user needs, many academic libraries are reimagining the services they offer. As instruction moves online, how can libraries best provide support for teaching and learning? As research becomes more reliant on data, computation, and collaboration, where can libraries best add value? As colleges welcome more diverse student populations and greater contingent faculty labor to campus, what is the library’s role? As budgets shrink, how should a library prioritize which resources and services to provide?

The Charleston Conference and Against the Grain released an initial selection from the 2019 Charleston Conference “Views from the Penthouse Suite” video interviews. Another set of interviews was released, featuring a number of singularly informed leaders from throughout the library industry.

Since 2008 the HathiTrust Copyright Review Program has been researching hundreds of thousands of books to find ones that are in the public domain and can be opened for view in the HathiTrust Digital Library. Over the past 11 years, 168 people across North America have worked together for a common goal: the ability to share public domain works from US libraries. As of September 2019, the HathiTrust Copyright Review Program has performed copyright reviews on 506,989 US publications; of those, 302,915 (59.7%) have been determined to be in the public domain in the United States. The opening of these works in HathiTrust has brought the total of openly available volumes to 6,540,522. In early January 2020, 40,000+ titles in the 17 million item HathiTrust corpus will be in the public domain in the U.S. with some global access. Thanks to HathiTrust’s 148 member libraries committed to preservation and access of these titles.

The Proceedings of iPRES 2019 are now available for download! As the official record of all the peer reviewed submissions presented at the conference, the proceedings ensure visibility and promotion of both academic research work and the projects and initiatives of institutions involved in digital preservation practices. You can download the iPRES 2019 Proceedings as a PDF (ISBN: 9789062590438) or EPUB (ISBN: 9789062590452) file via the iPRES 2019 Web Site and soon also via the Phaidra Repository to be found on https://ipres-conference.org.

One of the biggest threats to ensuring long-term access to our digital heritage is the cost of preservation; also, one of the critical cost drivers is the set of activities associated with selection, acquisition, and other pre-ingest processing (such as quality assurance of acquired artifacts). Therefore, this question is raised: how do we scale what might be called “pre-ingest” activities without scaling up our costs at the same rate?

As Portico was working on their “next-generation” technical infrastructure, they developed new analytics services.  These services automated among others the insurance of storage policy consistency and some of those pre-ingest processes associated with quality assurance of content.

Sarita Albagli inquires about the possible meanings of an “inclusive globalization” from four main argumentative sets: (a) the emerging climate regime and its corresponding regime of knowledge and information; (b) the recognition of other epistemologies and narratives, as well as the contributions both from the peripheries and “from below”; (c) the issues raised by the open Science movements; (d) the thesis of a common Science or a Science of the common.

Presentations from the 2nd AEUP conference (Re-)Shaping University Presses and Institutional Publishing, are now available on Zenodo. An outcome of the conference was the Declaration from the 2nd AEUP conference.

The Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) released a major Consensus Report on a commissioned study of Research Publishing in South Africa in 2006, with detailed data analysis and a 360-degree view of the topic, including the impact of new technologies on the dissemination of research results and the world-wide open access movement. The Academy has decided to publish a second report on scholarly publishing in SA, to include, notably, a review of the work of the SPP in the research publishing system over the past 12 years, and a set of headline recommendations for the future. This new analysis is close from the original conclusion, that only open access publishing of local journals will ensure the wide dissemination of their important content.

In the concept that there is a mainstream science and, by opposition, a “peripheral” science, the publications in journals indexed by Web of Science and the type of indicators used to measure the world’s scientific and technological production (STP), have undoubtedly played a fundamental role, since they have become the main axis of institutional and individual evaluation also in the periphery. Hence the urgent need to create new tools to measure STP in the periphery, which may break the vicious circle that commodifies evaluative cultures. Circulation indicators have been proposed as a possible response to this challenge, since they take into account the diversity of production styles and the multiscale nature of university interactions. In this work, progress made in this area is presented. On the one hand, in relation to the Latin American circuit of scientific journals, which has not yet been able to offer regional indicators of the published STP, so that it may have relevance in the evaluation processes. On the other hand, in relation to the styles of knowledge production in universities, in order to be able to examine the circulation of STP on a local scale.

[Article in Spanish]

In a collaborative effort Dutch research institutes and funders announce the development of new system of recognition and rewards. In November 2018, the Dutch universities, university medical centers and research institutes, together with funding agencies NWO and ZonMW put forward the ambition to revisit their collective system of recognition and rewards. In November 2019, the position paper “Room for everyone’s talent” was published, marking the result of a year’s worth of meetings and dozens of site visits with academics.

The Munin conference gathers librarians and research administrators from the Nordic countries and the rest of Europe, working on OA and publishing issues from higher education libraries.

The 14th edition took place in Tromsø at UiT, the Arctic University of Norway, from November 27–28, 2019.

The programme and the presentations and posters are online, as well as the videos.

Springer Nature appealed to cOAlition S in an open letter not to lose the opportunity Transformative Journals offer to speed up the transition to OA. Unless changes are made to the conditions being proposed the publisher believes it would be unable to commit to its journals participating. Springer Nature proposed an alternative timeframe and workable set of metrics in place of the cOAlition S requirements. This is cOAlition S’ reponse.

SciELO publishing serves as a framework for the implementation of national public policies for the development of peer-reviewed journals under national conditions while at the same time being part of an international network following the state of art in scientific communication. Moreover, the SciELO Network embodies a program of international cooperation for the progress of research and its open communication with a view towards an inclusive global flow of scientific information that considers the diversity of geographies, thematic areas, cultures, multilingualism and the resulting richness of asymmetries.

Alicia Wise of Information Power was invited to deliver a plenary presentation at the Charleston Conference. In just ten minutes, she was to discuss Our Open Future: how we will achieve Open Access, Open Infrastructure, and Open Research. This article develops the theme of how new – sometimes unexpected – collaborations will be available and essential to moving into the new open world.

ALPSP believes in the value of community-led publishing as a vital part of a thriving research ecosystem, and that this is recognized in the transition to open access. ALPSP members hope that cOalition S will continue to listen to feedback from the community in formulating its final guidelines. They are encouraging their members to respond to the consultation, using the survey.

The closing dates for comment is 6 January 2020.

This article reports on selected findings from the pilot African Open Science Platform landscape study, conducted by the Academy of Science of South Africa ASSAF, on request of the South African Department of Science and Technology, and funded by the National Research Foundation. Direction was provided by CODATA (International Science Council).

Agreements with open access (OA) elements (e.g. agreements with APC discounts, offsetting agreements, read and publish agreements) have been increasing in number in the last few years. Consortia and academic institutions need to monitor the number of OA publications, the costs and the value of these agreements. Publishers are therefore required to account for the articles published OA to consortia, academic institutions and research funders. One way publishers can do so is by providing regular reports with article-level metadata. This article uses the Knowledge Exchange (KE) and the Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges (ESAC) initiative recommendations as a check-list to assess what article-level metadata consortia request from publishers and what metadata publishers deliver to consortia.

Open Access guidelines propose recommendations to improve Open Access to publications in the arts and humanities. The core aim is to bring closer the harmonized but transforming European Open Access policy landscape to the communities around DARIAH and recommend very practical steps to achieve compliance with it.

The programme committee welcomes proposals for presentations and/or sessions.

The closing date for submissions is 15 January 2020.

Topic: Building Trust With Libraries

The Call for Papers is open!

Deadline for proposals: 13 January. 

Topic: Driving the Change – together!

The full programme is online, as well as the pre-conference programme.

The UKSG Annual Conference and Exhibition is a major event in the scholarly communications calendar which attracts over 900 delegates each year from around the world. The conference combines high-quality plenary presentations, lightning talks and breakout sessions.

The preliminary programme is annouced.

The 17th international conference on digital preservation is calling for papers and posters.

Topic: Empowering Digital Preservation for the Enriched Digital Ecosystem

Submission deadline: 15 March 2020