The ISSN International Centre, i.e. the Registration Authority for the ISO International standard 3297:2020 – Information and documentation, is proud to announce that the standard is now available in English and French. This document defines and promotes the use of a standard code (ISSN) for the unique identification of serials and other continuing resources. Thank you to the international experts who contributed to the development of this sixth version. Long live the ISSN!

Gaëlle Béquet, Director of ISSN International Centre, and Nathalie Cornic, Head of the Metadata and Technical Coordination of the ISSN Network, are invited to participate in the next DOAJ Team meeting to be held on 19 November 2020.

A brief report on the 44th Meeting of Directors of ISSN Centres has been published in the National Diet Library Bibliographic Data Newsletter, vol. 53/54. The article is available in Japanese.

The ISSN International Centre, as sponsor and partner of Challenges in the Scholarly Publishing Cycle (CISPC) 2020, will participate in the conference on Nov. 30th, 2020. Gaëlle Béquet, ISSN-IC Director, and Dominic Mitchell, DOAJ Operations Manager, will give a joint presentation. This event is organised by Research Information magazine in partnership with London Info International. The program is available.

The National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina was established on 31 October 1945 by the Regulation on the National Library of the Yugoslav Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2020, the National and University Library of B&H (NULB&H) celebrates the 75th anniversary of its founding (31^st October).

In spite of the fact that the Library building (Vijecnica) and 90% of its valuable documentary content were destroyed in the Summer of 1992, the library has succeeded in the revival of most of its services, and it works according to the Law of Librarianship. A huge effort of reconstruction and reconstitution of catalogues and collections based on preserved collections was undertaken. Following the technological development and requirements of users, the library has gradually transformed functions and services in the attempt to adapt towards modern library and information trends. This institution represents Bosnia and Herzegovina in the international library associations, and it is home for the ISSN, ISBN and ISMN agencies.

Ms Rabab Rashwan, Director of ISSN Egypt and coordinator of the Egyptian National Publishing Committee, together with Ana María Cetto, Research Professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and founding President of LATINDEX, participate in the Working Group on Combatting Predatory Academic Journals and Conferences supported by the Interacademy Partnership (IAP). This Working Group met virtually three times in June 2020 to discuss the project’s objectives and priorities, identify key resources and stakeholders, and agree the project plan going forward. The Group’s ongoing work will be divided into four main areas: (1) defining predatory practices, (2) gauging their extent and impact, (3) interventions to help combat them, and (4) an exploration of their root causes.

Keepers Registry (https://keepers.issn.org/) is the service that aims to inform the community of librarians and publishers about the actions taken by archiving agencies across the globe to preserve titles of digitised and born-digital serial publications bearing an eISSN, in order to promote long-term access to documentary resources, and thus consolidate scientific references for the world of research. In July 2019, ISSN International Centre took over from EDINA the Keepers Registry as a natural extension of the ISSN Portal’s services. This strategic decision turns the ISSN Portal into an irreplaceable source of information about periodicals, including their preservation by the partner archiving agencies.

Gaëlle Béquet, Director of ISSN International Centre, outlines the work of the Keepers Registry – followed by interviews with four of its partner agencies: Portico (USA), Public Knowledge Project (Canada), the National Digital Preservation Program (China), and the Cariniana Network/IBICT (Brazil).

The Digital Preservation Coalition organized a 3-day virtual event to support the digital preservation community. On 22 September 2020, a presentation of Keepers Registry was scheduled, whose video recording is now available (starting at 2.15.45 in the timeline).

According to the International Cataloguing Principles (ICP), the Form of Name for Persons as an authorized access point should be constructed following a standard. A new file devoted to Chinese names is available on the Names of Persons webpage. The file is divided into three parts, one for mainland China, and two smaller parts for the special traits from Hong Kong and Macau. This is an excellent and library-oriented piece of information about how Chinese personal names are structured, and aims to be a guide for non-Chinese librarians to better understand and work with Chinese authors.

This is the first in a series of five blog posts about JISC’s PIDs for Open Access project, aimed at expanding adoption and usage of persistent identifiers in the UK. Building on the 2019 report Developing a persistent identifier roadmap for open access to UK research, a group of stakeholders discussed the five persistent identifiers (PIDs) that have been deemed high priority for improving access to UK research. These are ORCID iDs for people, Crossref and DataCite DOIs for outputs, Crossref grant DOIs, ROR identifiers for organisations, and RAiDs for projects. The series of blog posts are based on the work accomplished by the 5 corresponding focus groups. The first two posts explore how grant IDs and PIDs for projects could be integrated into the research ecosystem more effectively.

OCLC released Transitioning to the Next Generation of Metadata, a report which synthesizes six years (2015-2020) of OCLC Research Library Partners Metadata Managers Focus Group discussions, and what they may foretell for the next generation of metadata. The 56-page report discusses the ways in which metadata is evolving in the information environment, touching on concerns having to do with tools, infrastructure, and changing standards. Why is metadata changing? What is the impact on metadata creation and what does that imply for internal workflows? The report is further supported by useful supplementary material — specifically, an annotated bibliography.

The FREYA team has taken forward a conversation that has been developing over several years amongst persistent identifier (PID) users and providers: the idea that these critical research information infrastructures could be better supported by a coordinated community. A ‘federation’ of PID providers and users, spanning other research infrastructures, funders and policy makers, and the wide research community was mooted in January 2020. A project was commissioned to scope this potential ‘PID Federation’, undertaken between June and September 2020. This report outlines that project and summarises its key recommendations.

In a Charleston Library Conference online session at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the discussion centered on the changes brought by open access for academic libraries, researchers, and publishers. Called “Charleston Library Conference Meets Frankfurter Buchmesse,” this digital program marks the start of a closer working relationship between the two big events.

The Ghanaian founder of Sub-Saharan Publishers outlines the importance of the Africa Publishing Innovation Fund’s program to assist the continent’s book business.

The 2021 Serials Price Projection Report from EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) is now available. The report projects that the overall effective publisher price increases for academic and medical libraries are expected to be in the range of two to three percent for individual titles and one to three percent for e-journal packages. EBSCO recommends caution when using these projections, as they rely on historical trends and current estimates. EBSCO will update the projection information if economic conditions warrant it.

Latindex is implementing a system to detect and prevent bad publishing practices that may affect all academic journals published in Latin America. They published a guide for the identification and treatment of spurious journals, a document aimed at the publishers in the Latin American region.

OCLC and LIBER announced the launch of a discussion series on Open Science through webinars and discussion groups from 24 September-5 November. The series, based on the LIBER Open Science Roadmap, will help guide research libraries in envisioning the support infrastructure for Open Science (OS) and their role at local, national, and global levels. This initiative aligns efforts between research libraries in Europe and North America.

OCLC has agreements in place with more than 400 publishers, aggregators and other content providers to supply metadata to facilitate discovery and access to key resources (electronic and print books, journals, databases, and other learning materials) through WorldCat Discovery. OCLC has signed new agreements with publishers.

The Open Preservation Foundation announces the publication of the findings report and anonymised raw data from the OPF digital preservation community survey. With responses gathered from 98 organisations in 31 countries, the results provide an interesting snapshot of the digital preservation landscape today.

Read the report and Download the raw data. Guidance notes, findings reports and raw data from previous OPF surveys can be found at openpreservation.org/resources/surveys/. The recording of the preservation community survey webinar has also been made available on OPF’s YouTube channel.

Digital assets and collections are as important as physical archives when storing and managing complex research and other vital data. This is why Jisc, the UK education and research technology solutions not-for-profit, has  launched a service known as Preservation, a fully managed software-as-a-service platform that can help academic institutions manage, store and preserve digital research output. The service works between universities’ existing systems and workflows to help records managers curate and back-up data in a way that enables them to find and access digital assets in the future.

IFLA Serials & Other Continuing Resources Section posted the recording of the webinar International Open Access Practices: beyond the APC model on their YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/mG2fhsJZbzs

You can also watch for future activities of the Serials & Continuing Resource Section of IFLA on this and other topics of interest.

On October 8th, COAR released a Community Framework for Best Practices in Repositories.  The aim of this work was to bring together relevant criteria into a global, multidimensional framework for assessing best practices that can be adopted and used by different types of repositories (publication, institutional, data, etc.) and in different geographical and thematic contexts.

As one type of attempt to address the important issue of predatory publishing, numerous individuals, associations, and companies have begun curating journal watchlists or journal safelists. This study explores the inclusion/exclusion criteria stated by these lists to better understand their content, as well as the larger controversies that continue to surround the phenomenon of predatory publishing. Four watchlists and ten safelists were analyzed through an examination of their published mission statements and inclusion/exclusion criteria. Some researchers wish to go beyond these lists and are exploring the efficacy of information campaigns on raising awareness of predatory publishing.

The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) aims to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics in academic promotion. This study led by the Medical Faculty of University of Bern (Switzerland) demonstrates that the rank of the JIF is a bad proxy measure for the actual citation impact of individual articles. The University signed DORA and replaced the JIF rank with the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR), an article-level measure of citation impact developed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Publishers agree to make journal summaries open and searchable in single repository. This new cross-publisher initiative, launched on 24 September by Stuart Taylor at OASPA Conference, calls for unrestricted availability of abstracts to boost the discovery of research. Publishers involved in I4OA, the Initiative for Open Abstracts, have agreed to submit their article summaries to Crossref, which will make the abstracts available in a common format. It also aims to emulate I4OC (Initiative for Open Citations), an initiative established three years ago to make metadata and bibliographical references openly available through Crossref. Since its launch, 2,000 publishers have signed up to I4OC.

The paper provides a critical review of predatory journals phenomenon affecting the field of scholarly communication. This article highlights the main issues and establishes them as research subjects. The article concludes with research avenues that contribute to the analysis of mutation in digital scholarly communication. [Abstract in English, Article in French]

Recently, interest in utilising open source software tools to create and disseminate scholarly content has grown. A June 2019 report, funded by the Mellon Foundation, supported by MIT Press, noted the clear lack of incentives for collaboration, due in part to tool creators chasing the same philanthropic funding. In response to this, the new non-profit Knowledge Futures Group offers institutions opportunities for collaboration with other open source initiatives, as well as with commercial entities wishing to explore a more open offering in community publishing.

The recordings from the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) Online Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing 2020 are now available on YouTube. The OASPA 2020 Conference took place online on the 22 – 24 September 2020.  Slides can be found on the conference program page.

Details about next year’s conference will be available in the coming months from oaspa.org/conference.

INASP (International Network for Advancing Science and Policy) was commissioned to undertake a consultation to understand the challenges and opportunities that OA presents to Low- and Middle-Income country (LMIC) stakeholders. The implementation of and transition to OA modes of publishing involve a complex set of issues. This report provides a “read out” of the key issues for LMICs, based on consultations with 335 stakeholders, as a series of principles and building blocks to underpin UK OA policy, and to make recommendations to funders.

SPARC Europe is releasing an anticipated new report: Open Access: An Analysis of Publisher Copyright and Licensing Policies in Europe, 2020. It presents the results of a research study that was completed in the summer of 2020 and explores copyright and licensing practices amongst prominent journal publishers and OA publishers in DOAJ in Europe. Download the report.

Openness and innovation have been at the heart of Springer Nature’s business. They have been opening up research for more than 20 years – today, they publish the world’s most significant OA portfolio, with around 600 fully OA journals and the option to publish OA in 2,200 hybrid journals.

The 22nd International Conference on Grey Literature, organised by GreyNet International, will happen online on 19 November 2020.
Topic: Applications of Grey Literature for Science and Society

Registration closes 1st November 2020. The program is online.

The GL2020 conference papers will be published in the Series – International Conference Proceedings on Grey Literature. – ISSN 1386-2316. A selection of conference papers will be published by GreyNet International in The Grey Journal (TGJ) the flagship journal for the grey literature community.

Core is a new division of ALA (American Library Association) that is emerging from the former associations ALCTS (Association for Library Collections and Technical Services), LITA (Library Information Technology Association), and LLAMA (Library Leadership and Management Association). Core will serve the professional needs of those who work in all types of library organizations. In this e-Forum, will be discussed the perspectives on the new professional organization, on the interconnections between the operational areas represented by the Core sections, and on what it will take for Core to succeed.

Registration

Each day, discussion begins and ends at:

Pacific: 7 a.m. – 3 p.m.

Mountain: 8 a.m. – 4 p.m.

Central: 9 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Eastern: 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.

The theme for this year’s International Open Access Week, to be held from 19-25 October, will be: Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion. This is a time to coordinate in taking action to make openness the default for research, and to ensure that equity is at the center of this work. Notably, EIFL will be celebrating the event with libraries and researchers. Watch  their programme.

With the theme Digits: for Good, World Digital Preservation Day 2020 is an opportunity to connect the digital preservation community and celebrate the positive impact digital preservation has, for good. This event is open to participation from anyone interested in securing our digital legacy.

Share your stories through blog posts, social media posts, events and creative activities! ISSN International Centre is getting ready to share its plans on World Digital Preservation Day. Stay tuned! #DigiPres #digitalpreservation #WDPD2020 @DPC_chat 

Watch live on #WDPD2020 5th November at 12 noon UK time : https://dpconline.org/events/wdpd-event/dpa2020-presentations