Due to the covid-19 outbreak, and measures imposed by national authorities, ISSN National Centres may encounter technical and operational issues. This may have an impact on the management of ISSN requests, assignments and portal updates. Some centres have staff working from home, but we are doing our best to keep everything running. Thank you for your understanding!

The Keepers Registry is now available on the ISSN portal.

As of December 2019, the ISSN International Centre is the sole operator of the Keepers Registry. This service aggregates preservation metadata to ISSN descriptive metadata to report about the archival status of digital journals. The Keepers Registry is now fully integrated with the ISSN Portal. The latter provides a complete and accurate overview of a serial title’s journey from initial publication to transfer of responsibility and to long-term preservation by archiving agencies. The ISSN Portal can thus be seen as an authoritative database for serial title identification and tracking.

New members for ISNI

Interest in ISNI membership continues to increase as the standard is adopted or rolled out more widely. A consortium of the leading university libraries in the Netherlands, represented by SURFmarket, has signed up for ISNI membership, bringing at least academic 13 libraries into the ISNI fold. ISNI also hopes soon to welcome the group of legal deposit libraries in the UK and Ireland, affiliating with ISNI in a joint effort coordinated by the British Library (which is already a Registration Agency in its own right).

Outside the library world, ISNI is also in advanced discussions with a number of organizations in the music industry, one of which Quansic (located in Switzerland) joined late in 2019. The ISNI board is keen to extend the territories where ISNI is directly represented, and have dialogues underway with prospective Registration Agencies in both South America and Australasia.

SAGE Publishing announces the launch of a new portal that enables authors, consortia, libraries, and funders to manage the open access publishing workflow. Named the SAGE Open Access Portal, the platform currently supports SAGE Choice, the publisher’s hybrid Open Access (OA) publishing option, for 900+ journals. Later in 2020, it will be extended to support SAGE’s 180+ pure Gold OA journals.

Commencing in 1993, the two companies have evolved their relationship from distributing scientific journals originating in the former USSR, to comprise all aspects of digital delivery, including extensive subscription agreements (often referred to as “Big Deals”). The new contract preserves the reach of Pleiades’ base of some 190 English journals (emanating from some 270 local language journals), which comprise the core of the Russian Library of Science. The new arrangement enables authors from thousands of non-translated journals to seamlessly submit their articles to thematic journal clusters at all levels of the Pleiades and Springer Nature collections.

The Serials and Other Continuing Resources Section (SOCRS) invites colleagues to submit proposals for its two-hour open session at the IFLA World Library and Information Congress (WLIC), Dublin, Ireland, 15-22 August 2020.

Increasingly, the governments and private organizations which fund research are mandating that the research outputs they support are made available as Open Access content. This naturally has a very direct and relevant impact on serials and other continuing resources which are a crucial part of scholarly communication and are increasingly subject to these mandates. Exploring the various ways these mandates impact scholarly communication, especially with regard to serials and other continuing resources, is vital for understanding both the current scholarly communication environment and how it is developing.

Important Dates

15 March 2020:            Proposal submission deadline

1 April 2020:               Notification to submitters

1 June 2020:              Deadline for authors to submit completed papers

In 2018, OhioLINK engaged its membership to envision a constellation of platforms and applications that would take the next step beyond “next-generation” commercial integrated library systems (ILS). This paper is the result of that process.

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) has announced the publication of the second report in a series by its Open Repositories Working Group (ORWG) – this report focuses on preservation functionality in repositories. This report is published both in English and French.

This blog series aims to surface the often hidden work of infrastructure, and digital preservation is a great example of a robust and ongoing function that is by definition mostly ‘behind the scenes.’ For more information on other established digital preservation organizations, please refer to the Keepers Registry.

In this interview with CLOCKSS Executive Director Craig Van Dyck, key questions are raised as how digital preseravation works, what are the challenges, or how it is funded.

AmeliCA, a multi-institutional community-driven initiative supported by UNESCO and led by Redalyc and CLACSO, seeks a cooperative, sustainable, protected and non-commercial solution for Open Knowledge. AmeliCA is taking the 16-year experience and technological resources from Redalyc to strengthen non-profit publishing beyond the region. It is strategic for the research community and libraries to join forces, as well as share and connect individual efforts to build a cooperative infrastructure, in order to guarantee that publishing is led by the scholarly community and that its openness is sustainable.

The French National Fund for Open Science (FNSO) has decided to support three international open science infrastructures as part of SCOSS, the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services initiative. The three supported infrastructures (OpenCitations, Public Knowledge Project and Directory of Open Access Books) were first evaluated by a jury composed by SCOSS, and also afterwards by the French Committee for Open Science, according to its key selection criteria set out in 2019. The results of this analysis were positive and prompted a dialogue with the projects on some minor points for improvement.

The OA Switchboard aims to facilitate the fulfilment of open access strategies across business models, policies and agreements, and reduce complexity for all relevant stakeholders. After an initial meeting of key stakeholders and subsequent feedback following presentations on the OA Switchboard concept, work has been done to further explore the feasibility of this idea and gauge the level of interest in the community to participate.  OASPA’s role moving forward is monitoring the progress of the project and making sure it is managed as prudently and efficiently as possible.

As interest in Subscribe to Open grows based on the experiences of early innovations, publishers and libraries need to develop an understanding of the various approaches to Subscribe to Open and the benefits and limitations of the model.

Wellcome, UK Research and Innovation, and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers commissioned Information Power Ltd. to undertake a project to support society publishers to accelerate their transition to open access (OA) in alignment with Plan S and the wider move to accelerate immediate OA. A workshop of consortium representatives and society publishers informed the development of an OA transformative agreement toolkit. Society publishers should consider all the business models this project has developed and should not automatically equate OA with article publication charges.

On January 23-24, 2020, COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) convened a meeting to investigate the potential for a common, distributed architecture that would connect peer review with resources in repositories. The aim of the meeting, hosted by Inria in Paris, France, was to share the current workflows of various projects and systems that are managing or developing overlay peer review on a variety of different repository types (institutional, preprint, data, etc.), and assess whether there is sufficient interest in defining a set of common protocols and vocabularies that would allow interoperability across different systems.

The North American Serials Interest Group is gathering for its 35th annual conference. Notably, on 12 June 2020, Steve Shadle will explain how to catalogue electronic serials with RDA. It will cover RDA and CONSER standards, core elements, and terminology with special attention paid to the differences in practice in the cataloging of print and electronic serials.

The full schedule is online.