Jennifer Bazeley, E-Resources Metadata Management Librarian, Yale University Library, will present NISO Transfer Code of Practice (https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/transfer) and the related Transfer Alerting Service managed by the ISSN International Centre since 2018. The Electronic Resources & Libraries Annual Conference will take place in Austin, TX, USA on March 8-11, 2020.

This Learned Publishing article, by Eti Herman, John Akeroyd, Gaelle Bequet, David Nicholas, and Anthony Watkinson, presents an up-to-date portrayal of the greatly changed landscape of scholarly journal publishing and identifies the emerging trends characterizing it. The article posits that journal transition can be seen as falling into three categories: enhanced models of the traditional scholarly journal, innovative models of the traditional scholarly journal and possible alternatives to the traditional journal. This review shows that each of the models identified makes contributions to enriching the reporting and showcasing of scholarly output. This study on the evolution of serial publications, and more particularly on the transformations of scientific journals, was commissioned by the ISSN International Centre as part of a reflection on the new multi-year development strategy of ISSN International Centre for the years 2020 to 2024.

Since 1 January 2020,  the Frankfurt-based technology and information provider MVB has taken over the role of a registration agency for the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. MVB is building the new standardization service during the first half of 2020. All author information in the VLB (Verzeichnis Lieferbarer Bücher), the catalogue of books in print used in the German-speaking world, automatically receives an ISNI, provided the German National Library has clearly identified the author.  From now on, publishers who maintain their titles on vlb.de can also add ISNIs to their authors. Consequently, the number of titles with unique creator identifiers will increase significantly within a short period of time.

The conversation continued at the 2019 ALA Midwinter Conference in Philadelphia between representatives of the RDA Steering Committee and the larger BIBFRAME community, which includes the Library of Congress/NDMSO, LD4P, Share-VDE, and the organizer group of the annual BIBFRAME workshops in Europe. A possible field of future cooperation is an approach to application profiles. For the coming years, the RSC has a BIBFRAME mapping on its action plan. The group is pleased to report continuing progress and is planning to meet again at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago in June 2020. All the presentations of ALA Midwinter Conference are now online.

ISO standards regularly undergo a systematic revision process. A ballot about ISO 4 standard revision has been issued by ISO and will be closed by February 25, 2020. This ballot is intended to decide if the standard should be revised, maintained without any modification, or withdrawn. The ISSN International Centre is in favour of confirming the ISO 4 standard. Contact your ISO national member body to voice your support for the confirmation.

The following resolutions are currently submitted to vote by ISO TC46/SC9:

RESOLUTION 2020-01: Stop Publication ISO 3297

ISO/TC46/SC9 resolves to stop the publication of ISO 3297 to incorporate the missing section and make other amendments to the document resulting from the FDIS ballot closed November 29, 2019 and the translation of ISO/FDIS 3297 as contained in ISO_PUB_3297.doc.

RESOLUTION 2020-02: Launch 2nd FDIS Ballot

ISO/TC46/SC9 resolves to launch a 2nd FDIS ballot of the document with the missing text included and the other proposed changes included. Please note that a 2nd FDIS is an exception when the first FDIS resulted in approval. In this case with missing text, this is the only option to ensure a well vetted document.

Please contact your ISO national member body to support these resolutions before March 16^th, 2020.

Together with CSUC (Consorci de Serveis Universitaris de Catalunya), OCLC organized a symposium for library professionals in Spain engaged in metadata practices around authorities and identifiers. The goal was to encourage thinking strategically about the transition towards an interlinked ecosystem of bibliographic entities. Thirty-five staff from CSUC member institutions, the national library of Spain and the university of the Basque Country participated in this event in Barcelona on 3 December 2019.

Have a look at the event webpage with the slide presentations

CONTENTdm is a service for building, preserving and showcasing a library’s unique digital collections.

The large volume of unique, digital content stored in CONTENTdm offers an excellent opportunity for transition to linked data. Using linked data, the wide variety of data models and descriptive practices across CONTENTdm will be significantly easier to manage for library staff and will provide rich discovery for library end-users and web browsers. Immediate benefits of this project will be the ability to do structured searching across all CONTENTdm repositories and searching and faceting based on authority files and library-staff-defined vocabularies. The outcomes and findings from the linked data Wikibase prototype (Project Passage) completed in 2018 have provided great insight into how to implement a system to facilitate the mapping, reconciliation, storage, and retrieval of structured data for unique digital materials.

Four members of the Society for Scholarly Publishing attended the Academic Publishing in Europe  conference held in January 2020 in Berlin. They share their brief impressions, take-aways, and notable points.

Scientific, technical and medical publishers face upheaval from open access and open data, but this transition represents opportunity in online services, particularly for competitors that can develop broader discovery tools and dynamic content capabilities to win users’ loyalty. STM report, STM Online Services 2019-2023, focuses on the databases that offer online content or abstracting and indexing and are sold to academic, government and commercial customers. It found that between 2016 and 2018, online services revenue grew at a compound annual rate of 5.1% after elimination of trade between competitors — faster than STM journals or books.  The report analyzes trends impacting the industry and forecasts market growth to 2023. It includes an in-depth review of 10 leading scientific and technical publishers, including Wolters Kluwer, Clarivate Analytics, Elsevier, …

Predatory journals find most of their prey in developing countries, and in particular, among emerging economies where research output is rapidly growing. Professor Patwardhan is a researcher and the founder of a medical journal published by Elsevier. He is also the current Vice Chairman of the University Grants Commission (UGC) which plays a key part in India’s anti-predatory journals efforts. In this interview, Professor Patwardhan tells us about India’s battle against predatory journals.

Ex Libris, a ProQuest company, has completed its acquisition of Innovative, a leading provider of integrated library systems for public, academic, and specialist libraries. Innovative is now a business unit within Ex Libris. Ex Libris will continue to support and develop the solutions that Innovative’s customers have relied on for many years. At the same time, Ex Libris cloud technology will power the development of a cloud-based Polaris SaaS solution for public libraries.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) launched the new PubMed. The new, responsive design is mobile friendly and reflects NLM’s ongoing efforts to transform PubMed into a modern hub with a fast, reliable, and intuitive search that connects people to the world’s leading sources of biomedical information. The new PubMed will become the default in spring 2020 and will ultimately replace the legacy version.

Please watch the NLM Technical Bulletin for updates and announcements.

In 2019, Portico made great progress on scholarly preservation with the support of their library and publisher participants. Together, they expanded the archive, developed efficient new processes, and engaged with the community on critical issues in preservation. In 2020, Portico will deliver a set of guidelines and best practices for publishers to ensure that new forms of digital scholarship have the best chance to be preserved successfully.

This study examines the role of learned societies as publishers in Finland based on bibliographic information from two Finnish databases. Finnish learned societies play an integral part in national scholarly publishing. They play an especially important role in journal publishing, as commercial publishers produce only 2.6% of Finnish journals and book series, and only 1.4% of the journal articles from scholars working in Finnish universities.

Robert Harington, as an Associate Executive Director of Publishing at the American Mathematical Society, attempts to disentangle the issues and paints a picture of how scholarly societies are an indelible part of the research and support system for academics across many disciplines.  In this way, they resemble private, non-profit academic institutions as a vital part of the academic landscape, which similarly receive public monies in support of their role.

For several years now, digital journal offerings have been developing via publisher or aggregator platforms. These forms of editorial organisation offer researchers unified access points and resource groupings, allowing a wider dissemination of knowledge and a better valorisation of scientific publications. The French government has thus chosen to support these platforms, and consequently, French scientific journals. In this context, the Ministry of Higher Education and Research has commissioned a quantitative, qualitative and prospective study on the economy and editorial organization of the platforms and aggregators of French scientific journals. The study, carried out during the first half of 2019, analyses the economics of nine French scientific journal platforms and aggregators on the one hand, and the competitive potential and complementarities of eight foreign platforms and aggregators on the other: Cambridge University Press, EBSCO, Érudit, JSTOR, Open Library of Humanities, Project MUSE, ProQuest and SciELO. [Article in French]

The Journal of European Periodical Studies released a special issue originating from the seventh annual conference of the European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit) held in Paris in June 2018, and whose topic was: Periodicals In-Between: Periodicals in the Ecology of Print and Visual Cultures. During this conference, the complex roles played by periodicals in a rich array of cultural and scientific settings from numerous points of view were discussed : history of literature, art history, press and media, visual studies, etc. A variety of serial publications were considered: magazines, journals, annuals, book series, newspapers, even a radio broadcast. This special issue proposes a few selected contributions developed into research articles. By presenting them and recalling the conference’s main arguments and themes, the introduction offers an overview of investigations, and highlights some of the hypotheses significant for periodical studies today.

Johan Rooryck, Open Access Champion for cOAlition S, explains that concerns about the threat from the Global North to Latin America’s exemplary tradition of open access publishing are understandable, but ultimately misplaced. Renegotiation of subscription agreements and the stipulation that article-processing charges should be covered by funders or institutions are examples of the ways in which Plan S presents new opportunities for the region, even if there is still work to be done.

SPARC Europe has released their Annual Report for 2019 providing a concise look at how they have focused their efforts to help advance Open Access in 2019.

Please download the report.

Much has been written about ‘predatory publishing’ over the past decade. In this discussion document, COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) will describe the basic phenomenon, identify the key issues, describe the impact on the various stakeholders involved, analyse proposed interventions and solutions, and present COPE’s perspective on addressing the problem going forward. This discussion will synonymously refer to predatory publishing and predatory journals/publications as fake scholarly publishing and fake scholarly journals/publications, respectively, and will elaborate on the issues with terminology. While the focus of this discussion paper is primarily journals, there are also predatory conferences and predatory proceedings of those conferences. COPE welcomes feedback and comments from publishers, journal editors, reviewers, researchers, institutions, librarians, funders, and other stakeholders on this subject.

It is now possible to upload article metadata containing ORCIDs to DOAJ. ORCIDs are displayed on article pages in accordance with the ORCID display guidelines. Changes have been made to the search interface and API to allow search and retrieval of ORCIDs. Also, the code lists for countries, currencies and languages have been updated through a service called Pycountry.

An independent report published in January 2020 by Information Power aims to improve the transparency of Open Access (OA) prices and services. The report is the outcome of a project funded by Wellcome and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) on behalf of cOAlition S to inform the development of Plan S. During the project, libraries, funders, publishers, and universities worked together to inform the development of a framework intended to provide information about OA services and prices in a transparent, practical, and insightful way.

UK Research and Innovation is seeking views on its proposed open access policy and related considerations via a consultation, which opens on 13 February 2020 and closes at noon on 17 April 2020. Responses must be submitted by noon on 17 April 2020, using the online response form.

On this occasion, UKRI is holding an information event for the consultation.

The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) is organising its 42nd Annual Meeting.

Topic: Rethink, Reimagine, & Revolutionize the Future of Scholarly Communication

Tracks and meeting highlights are announced.