The International Standard Serial Number International Centre (ISSN IC) partnership with ORCID has resulted in improved accessibility and easier discovery of authoritative information about academic journals and where scholarly articles are published.

ORCID utilizes the machine readable ISSN Portal, building upon its existing functionality, to look up journal names at the authoritative source and display that data within ORCID records. Notably this new functionality better connects researchers with their peer review activity, allowing scientific publishers to acknowledge the huge amount of effort put in by researchers. The ORCID registry currently has a total of 1,528,407 peer reviews linked to 28,407 different ISSNs. This number will grow in the near future.

As of January 1st, 2020, the ISSN Portal contained more than 2.1 million Confirmed records.
58,000 new ISSN were assigned in 2019 and 247,337 records were updated during the same period.
You can find the detailed 2019 statistics at https://www.issn.org/under…/the-issn-international-register/.

Due to the pandemic of COVID-19 in France and the measures imposed by the French authorities to limit contagion, ISSN International Center staff work from home.

In the current circumstances, we kindly advise you, whenever possible, to pay your ISSN credits and your subscriptions to the ISSN International Center services by credit card in order to facilitate the management of your requests.

The two resolutions submitted to vote by ISO TC46/SC9 regarding ISO standard 3297 were officially approved by 20 national standard bodies on March 17th, 2020. A final draft of ISSN standard will be balloted by ISO in the coming weeks.

Due to the COVID-19 global outbreak and health and social measures imposed by several national authorities, the ISSN Governing Board and the ISSN Member Countries voted to cancel all in-person meetings and the International Conference that were to take place in Paris in April 2020.

Instead of the General Assembly in-person meeting, the ISSN International Centre will organize distant meetings.

The ISSN International Centre operates remotely and responds to all your requests concerning the use of its services (ISSN Portal, Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources, Keepers Registry, Enhanced Transfer Alerting Service, ISSN assignments to serials and continuing resources). Do not hesitate to contact us by email or via Facebook and Twitter.

Due to the COVID-19 global outbreak and health and social measures imposed by many national authorities, ISSN National Centres and their hosting institutions may encounter technical and operational issues. This particular situation may have an impact on the timely management of publishers’ ISSN requests and ISSN assignments. Unfortunately, the ISSN International Centre cannot currently replace impacted ISSN National Centres and manage all ISSN requests and assignments. If ISSN National Centres and their hosting institutions are temporary closed due to this crisis, the ISSN International Centre invites publishers to be patient and renew their requests regularly. We thank you for your understanding.

The first ever NISO Plus conference was held in Baltimore, USA, on 23 to 25 February 2020. It was centered on scholarly communication related to standards which is of special interest to SciELO and ORCID. NISO Plus succeeded in avoiding the “sage on stage” traditional conference format, and was all about open, lively (and nerdy!) discussions. This post recaps the discussion around contemporaneous standards.

When UKSG was cancelled, ICEDIS decided to make a virtue out of a necessity, arranging a conference call round-up instead. Sixteen colleagues from a range of organizations interested in serials took part in this virtual meeting. Tim Devenport, making a brief recap about ONIX-PC and other serials standards maintained by EDItEUR, announced the decision to place ONIX-PC in ‘maintenance mode’ unless or until new requirements or novel use cases emerge. EDItEUR’s Graham Bell said more about the organisation’s work outside of serials, focusing particularly on recent progress with ONIX 3.0, Thema and EDItX.

There then followed 2 presentations on topics related to the core mission of ICEDIS:

• Nathalie Cornic (ISSN International Centre) updated the group on progress since ISSN-IC took over the stewardship of the Keepers Registry – a vital resource covering e-journal preservation that records which agencies have preserved what;
• Todd Carpenter of NISO briefed the meeting on a series of NISO, ISO and other initiatives either underway or at the planning stage.

Copies of the meeting Minutes are available from the EDItEUR website (slides used by each presenter are linked from within the minutes).

During its last two meetings, the RDA Steering Committee (RSC) drew up and adopted the RSC Action Plan 2020-2022.  This action plan was also presented at ALA Midwinter by Kathy Glenan, Chair of RSC.  In parallel, there is a Strategic Plan of the RDA Board.

STM’s members have acted rapidly and decisively to support the continued global response to the rapid worldwide spread of COVID-19 with immediate access to accurate and validated articles and monographs that the public can trust. Visit STM’s Covid-2019 resource page to find links to publishers support centres and freely available articles and read their press release.

Release 5 of the COUNTER Code of Practice became effective from January 2019. Now, libraries have twelve months of Release 5 usage data from an array of content providers. Therefore, COUNTER would like to commission research to evaluate Release 5.

Timeline

• Submit proposals by 30 April 2020
• COUNTER will inform successful bidders by 15 May 2020
• Interim Report by 30 August 2020
• Final Report by 7 October 20

Download the call for proposals

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), and EDUCAUSE released the second part of a report by Sarah Lippincott, Mapping the Current Landscape of Research Library Engagement with Emerging Technologies in Research and Learning, that will be published in its entirety by late spring 2020. This installment introduces the context and scope of the report, describes the study’s methodology, and explores opportunities that cut across multiple areas of research library services.

In March 2020, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) hosted a webinar on ‘Enacting Environmentally Sustainable Preservation’. This webinar was based on a recent article in American Archivist. In the paper, the authors (Keith Pendergrass, Walker Sampson, Tim Walsh and Laura Alagna) call for a paradigm shift to create environmentally sustainable digital preservation. They focus in particular on three key areas, asking to consider how we view and enact appraisal, permanence, and the availability of digital content. They encourage to make sustainable choices by integrating environmental sustainability into existing decision-making criteria and follow with detailed discussion and a framework for helping more effectively consider the choices made.

The relationship between research behaviors and technology is a topic Danielle Cooper has a birdseye view on, through her work at Ithaka S+R, where she oversees a program examining scholars’ research practices discipline-by-discipline. On 25 March 2020, she gave the introductory talk to NISO’s virtual conference on Research Behaviors and the Impact of Technology. She focused on how the current crisis shows the limits of technology for researchers. In spite of the many affordances, research is not propelled by technology alone and it is the human dimension to scholarly inquiry that matters more than ever.

The SciELO Program has launched the SciELO Preprints server – http://preprints.scielo.org – with the aim of accelerating the availability of research articles and other scientific communications before, or in parallel with, their evaluation and validation by scientific journals through the peer review process. Although open to all thematic areas, SciELO Preprints will focus on immediately serving communications related to COVID-19.

Further to our announcement in October, the Steering Committee of Think. Check. Submit. is delighted to announce a new addition to its resources: a checklist for authors wishing to verify the reliability and trustworthiness of a book or monograph publisher. Drawing on existing expertise from experiences of their newest partner, OAPEN, the checklist for books offers sound advice along the lines of the recommendations already offered by the journal checklist.

The rest of the Think. Check. Submit. website has also been updated to make it more relevant for both books and journals.

Following on from the recent webinar entitled What is Scholarly Communication and Publishing in the 21st Century, OASPA asked their speakers to summarise their talks by offering a few key takeaways. This may be useful for those who missed it or wish to share with colleagues. You can also access the full audio recording and slides.

LIBER has won a role in Open Research Europe (ORE): a project which will build a new peer-reviewed Open Access publishing platform so that Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe beneficiaries can publish research openly and free of charge.

Following a public consultation cOAlition S announces updated criteria for Transformative Journals. cOAlition S defines a Transformative Journal as “a subscription/hybrid journal that is committed to transitioning to a fully (OA) journal. In addition, a Transformative Journal must gradually increase the share of Open Access content and offset subscription income from payments for publishing services (to avoid double payments)”. cOAlition S members have made several changes and simplifications to the way they define a Transformative Journal. Publishers who wish to develop a Plan S compliant Transformative Journal should complete the form at https://www.coalition-s.org/tj-forms.

As part of its continued strategy to enhance its metadata offering, DOAJ is constantly looking for ways to improve the quality and recency of the DOAJ article metadata. DOAJ can edit article metadata itself, including the URL, directly in the database. This makes changes immediate and goes a long way to improve the reliability of the DOAJ metadata. This is one of the good reasons why the DOAJ is one of the partnering data sources of the ISSN Portal.

This webinar consists of three presentations:

Preprints: where are we now? – Jessica Polka, PhD, Executive Director, ASAPbio

Preprints – Finding their place in scholarly research – Judy Luther, President, Informed Strategies LLC

An academic’s experience of preprints – Prof. Stephen J. Royle, Centre for Mechanochemical Cell Biology, Warwick Medical School, UK.

Free webinar with advanced registration required.

An increasing number of LIBER institutions—and also institutions and consortia worldwide—are looking to integrate their Open Access strategies with Transformative Agreements. Such agreements enable institutions to repurpose their subscription expenditures to support open access publishing rather than paywalls.

Institutions of higher education (IHEs) are required to provide access to information resources. But what goes into making an ebook, a textbook, or other course materials fully accessible? This event will bring together stakeholders to discuss current efforts made to ensure that all content is accessible and the challenges still to be overcome.

Registration closes on 12 May 2020 05:00 pm

The DOCLINE Team will provide a brief system overview including current statistics, recent enhancements, power user tips for best results, and answer user questions.