The executive summary of ISSN IC 2019 Activity Report is now available in the 6 UN official languages on ISSN International Centre’s institutional website.

Deanna White, Project Officer, will participate in this conference now moved online from July 20th to 24th. Her presentation is entitled “Liberté, Egalité et Free Données : The Use of Linked Data at the ISSN International Centre”.

In the framework of the WikiProject Periodicals, the ISSN International Centre will soon upload some metadata from its ISSN Register to Wikidata. ISSN will only upload data on entries that have an ISSN filled in in Wikidata with ISSN (P236). This upload will be done by an automated bot, which will allow regular updates from the ISSN Register.

On 11 June 2020, the Keepers Registry was presented at the 35th Annual NASIG Conference by Ted Westervelt, Chief, US/Anglo Division, Library of Congress, and Willa Tavernier, Open Scholarship Librarian, Indiana University Libraries. They showed how the Keepers Registry and some of the other services offered by the ISSN IC can be used to great benefit by libraries, publishers and all those invested in scholarly communication.

See this presentation on Slideshare and the recording on YouTube.

You can also view all the recorded presentations on the NASIG YouTube Channel – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVvnh_CzXS8YgftuvIypTiQ.

Since December 2019, Keepers Registry has been provided through the ISSN Portal. Keepers Registry aggregates archival status information regarding continuing resources supplied by 13 archiving agencies.

Building upon this achievement, the ISSN International Centre has just developed and published free statistics, i.e. the number of archived resources per archiving agency, the level of archiving stewardship, the number of resources under exclusive stewardship, and the distribution of resources per publisher and per archiving agency. You will find them at https://keepers.issn.org/stats.

Educopia Institute has just published a report entitled « Bibliographic Scan of Digital Scholarly Communication Infrastructure » (May 2020) and the author David W. Lewis mentions ROAD and Keepers Registry as essential parts of the global scholarly environment.

An error crept into our last newsletter dated May 2020, in the last sentence. Please find the corrected version:

DOAJ does not allow provisional ISSNs. Applications which contain provisional ISSNs are rejected without review. Therefore, DOAJ insists that publishers, when submitting their application to DOAJ, check the ISSN Portal, and make sure that the ISSN(s) for their journal(s) is confirmed and that the title(s) match the one mentioned on their website and in their application form.

Note: Provisional records may be created for pre-publication ISSN assignment, and are only confirmed once proof of publication has been provided to the ISSN network. Provisional records can only be viewed by ISSN National Centres and not by subscribers of the ISSN Register as available at http://portal.issn.org.

Deanna White of the ISSN International Centre attended the Virtual Annual EURIG Meeting 2020 on May 18th and 19th to hear about the latest developments in RDA.
http://www.rda-rsc.org/www.rda-rsc.org/europe/meetings/2020meeting

Among all presentations, this report about RDA application in Europe is interesting.

The NISO Working Group on E-Book Bibliographic Metadata Requirements in the Sale, Publication, Discovery, Delivery, and Preservation Supply Chain invites comments on its proposed Recommended Practice. Everyone involved in producing and using e-book metadata — publishers, retailers, libraries, service providers, and preservation agencies — is encouraged to share their feedback by August 2nd, 2020. In this recommended practice, item 5.1.4 develops a recommendation for monographs in book series and the use of the ISSN.

The RDA Steering Committee (RSC) is pleased to announce that Damian Iseminger will succeed Gordon Dunsire as the Technical Team Liaison to the RSC and chair of the RSC’s Technical Working Group; his two-year term starts January 2021.

Damian Iseminger is currently a member of the Working Group and now takes on the additional role of Technical Team Liaison-Elect. At the beginning of 2021, Gordon Dunsire will step down as chair but will continue as a member of the Working Group.

The chief of the Italian publishers association tells Rome that its support for badly damaged cultural organizations is not enough: A family allotment for cultural spending is the next ask.

This article, written by members of the ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee, summarizes trending topics in academic librarianship from the past two years. These highlights provide a starting point or an update about many topics developed, such as machine learning or new transformative agreements between publishers and libraries. Overarching themes across the profession continue to emphasize the significant amount of change libraries are driving, managing, and navigating.

IFLA Journal, IFLA’s Preservation and Conservation Section, and PAC Centres are pleased to announce a call for papers for a special issue focused on storage as a strategic long-term function of libraries, including practices for physical and digital collections based on risk, value, and cost in terms of institutional mission and resources.

Articles for the special issue should be submitted to IFLA Journal for peer review before 30 September 2020.

The Library of Congress will soon release a new version of the Recommended Formats Statement. Recommended Formats Statement identifies hierarchies of the physical and technical characteristics of creative formats, both analog and digital. This annual revision process of the statement aims at ensuring that it correctly reflects the technical characteristics for best practices regarding preservation and long-term access. Notably, there is a specific section about electronic serials.

The 2020-2021 version includes significant changes from the 2019-2020 version. Anyone with input, comments or feedback on any aspect of the Recommended Formats Statement, is requested to share that with the expert team in charge by 15 August 2020, through one of the e-mail contacts listed on the Recommended Formats Statement website.

Before institutions can reproduce materials and publish them online for worldwide access, they have to sort out complicated legal and ethical questions — ones that often stop libraries and other cultural heritage organizations from being able to move forward in setting these treasures free. It is now easier to navigate these challenges, thanks to newly released responsible access workflows developed by the Library, which stand to benefit not only UC Berkeley’s digitization efforts, but also those of cultural heritage institutions such as museums, archives, and libraries throughout the nation.

Who owns the content of scientific research papers, and who has the right to circulate them? This CREATe Working Paper by Aileen Fyfe uses the history of academic publishing to explore the origins of our modern concerns in terms of claim to ownership, circulation reprinting and reuse of material during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It ends by considering how things changed in the twentieth century, as commercial interests became increasingly influential in academic publishing and as new technologies brought new opportunities for circulating knowledge.

The nature and extent of predatory publishing is highly contested. Whilst debates have often focused defining journals and publishers as either predatory or not predatory. Kyle Siler argues that predatory publishing encompasses a spectrum of activities and that by understanding this ambiguity, we can better understand and make value judgements over where legitimacy lies in scholarly communication.

The OA Switchboard initiative (www.oaswitchboard.org) is a not-for-profit collaboration between funders, institutions and publishers to provide essential infrastructure to facilitate open access strategies across business models, policies and agreements. Throughout 2020, a project (overseen by OASPA, funded through sponsorship) is being run to prepare for the OA Switchboard to go live as an operational solution. When the OA Switchboard moves to an operational stage, following a successful 2020 project, a sustainable governance structure and funding model will be in place.

Since May 2020, Unpaywall Journals is now called: Unsub! That’s the only change–all the functionality is still the same, and of course it’s still the same Our Research team behind it. This new name reflects two changes: first, data has been added beyond Unpaywall ;  second, Unpaywall Journals evolved into an increasingly focused tool, built to help libraries unsubscribe from Big Deals with confidence. The result: Unsub! A tool to help librarians forecast, explore, and optimize their alternatives to the Big Deal.

The agenda for the July 6-9 RSC asynchronous meeting has been posted on the RSC website, along with three papers that will be discussed there:

• RDA conformance (posted May 14)
• RDA entity boundaries
• Revision of the beta Toolkit menu tab for Resources.

The minutes of the April 2020 Asynchronous RSC Meeting has been published.