In a year of exceptional growth of the ISSN Network, the ISSN International Centre is delighted to announce the opening of the 93rd ISSN National Centre in Lima, Peru, on August 24th, 2021.

The Peruvian ISSN Centre is hosted by the National Library of Peru and is the newest registration agency for ISO 3297, the standard for the identification of serials and continuing resources. Dr. Ezio Neyra Magagna, Director of the National Library of Peru, said, “The opening of the ISSN National  Center in Peru is a very relevant event for our country and our National Library in the context of the 200th anniversary of its creation in 1821. Many thanks to the ISSN International Center for its cooperation and guidance during the process of implementation in Peru.”.

Dr. Gaelle Bequet, Director of the ISSN International Centre, commented, “2021 is a very successful year for the ISSN Network with three consecutive openings of national centers: ISSN Ukraine in March 2021, ISSN Austria in April 2021 and ISSN Peru in August 2021. Our teams of information professionals in Kiev, Lima, Paris and Vienna have been instrumental to achieve this expansion. The recent commitment of the National Library of Peru to promote ISSN is a pledge of success for this persistent identifier in Latin America.”

Replay the opening ceremony of the ISSN National Centre in Peru (August 24th) via Facebook Live: https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=5945722972165494&ref=watch_permalink

Watch this brief video originally prepared for IFLA’s World Library and Information Congress in August 2021, describing the activities of the ISSN International Centre. The video is subtitled in 6 languages, that you can set up clicking on the blue CC symbol in the lower right corner of the viewer.

The number of open access scholarly journals has increased six-fold according to statistics published in the ISSN International Center’s 2020 annual report regarding the development of the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources (ROAD) service. Publishers who manage a portfolio of open access journals wish to optimize the impact of these resources in indexing databases and improve their bibliometric indexes. Librarians and researchers want to reference titles that best meet commonly accepted editorial quality criteria. But what about the emergence of questionable journals? Their editors are more eager to cash in on author processing charges (APCs) than to provide a quality service to authors.

Dr Gaëlle Béquet, Director of ISSN International Centre, chaired this session organized by IFLA Serials and Other Continuing Resources Section. The session included Mathias Astell, Hindawi; Ana María Cetto, Latindex; Kate Snow, African Journal Online (AJOL); Leena Shah, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). They presented the quality criteria they have developed and implemented in their respective services for the benefit of librarians and researchers worldwide.

Watch this session and view the presentations from the IFLA WLIC 2021 website (registration required).

Gaëlle Béquet’s introduction can be viewed on Slideshare.

Ten years after the publication of its Consolidated Edition, ISBD is at a crossroad. The Revision of the ISBD is taking place in a complex environment driven by diverse bibliographic and technological developments and pressing users’ needs.

There is on one hand the urgent need to extend its coverage horizontally (to a larger array of resources) and vertically (to more granular descriptions). There is on the other hand the strategic mandate to align the ISBD with the IFLA Library Reference Model (LRM), to keep up with the developments in the bibliographic universe and achieve complementarity between IFLA standards. In addition there is the necessity to engage – with other cultural institutions – in the web of data and linked data and semantic web technologies.
In this session, experts of ISBD and bibliographic standards are presenting their views that are driving the transition of the ISBD. Elena Escolano Rodríguez, Head of the Central Library at the Spanish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, presented an update of ISBD as the response to the communities of users to solve their needs of information; Mikael Wetterström, Specialist in Automated Processing of Bibliographic Data at ISSN International Centre, presented the ISBD revision work done so far by the ISBD for Manifestation Task Force. Gordon Dunsire, RDA Technical Team Liaison Officer, presented the position and role of ISBD in the current bibliographic universe, including its relationship to other IFLA bibliographic standards, RDA (Resource Eescription and Access), BIBFRAME, and linked open data.

To ensure digital scholarly content in all formats remains available to future users, all organizations involved in scholarly production and dissemination have a role to take in digital preservation. NASIG introduced its Digital Preservation Model Policy as it moves into the comment and revision stage of development. This evolving policy, designed as a tool to publicize, measure, and grow organizations’ commitment to the preservation of their scholarly assets, includes identifying first step initiatives, activities emerging in the field, and opportunities to share and refine professional experiences.

The policy is available for public comment from August to November 30, 2021. Download the draft document or submit comments.

The coordinator of the Brazilian Network of Digital Preservation Services (Cariniana) of the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (Ibict), Miguel Angel Márdero Arellano, participated in an open class entitled “Data Blackout and Information Preservation, what is the future?”. During the webinar, scholars debated about digital preservation as a public policy for information and data management and the concern with informational risk. Watch the webinar on YouTube.

O coordenador da Rede Brasileira de Serviços de Preservação Digital (Cariniana) do Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia (Ibict), Miguel Angel Márdero Arellano, participou numa aula aberta intitulada “Blackout de Dados e Preservação da Informação, qual é o futuro? Durante o webinar, estudiosos debateram sobre a preservação digital como política pública de gestão de informação e de dados e a preocupação com o risco informativo. Veja o webinar no YouTube.

Transformative OA agreements repurpose former subscription funds to support open access publishing, enabling more research to be published openly. How can open access and open science be advanced further? An expert panel will provide important insights into future directions and opportunities for further collaboration between libraries, funders, and not-for-profit publishers, and will highlight the most effective models for driving compliance, cost restraint, diversity, and open access.

The Library of Congress announced its third release of more than 200,000 new records in its online catalog for free bulk download for research and discovery. These releases enable researchers to engage with the unparalleled and rich source metadata at the Library, inspire discovery of Library collections and provide resources to inform future discovery within the Library and data communities. The data covers a wide range of Library items including books, serials, computer files, manuscripts, cartographic materials, music, sound recordings and visual materials.  The unabridged records are easily accessible through the Library’s Selected Datasets Collection in XML and UTF8 formats. Direct access to each data set is available here. The release supports the Library’s effort to continuously expand open access to its vast collections.

The National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) has announced new and renewed funding for state projects in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), an initiative jointly sponsored with the Library of Congress and supporting the Chronicling America (ISSN 2475-2703) online collection of digitized historic newspapers. Boston Public Library, representing Massachusetts, newly joins the program, with additional awards supporting ongoing projects. These projects received two year grants to digitize up to 100,000 selected historic newspapers from their collections for contribution to the collection.

More information on program guidelines, participation, and technical information can be found at https://www.neh.gov/projects/ndnp.html or https://www.loc.gov/ndnp/.

With the announcement of her presidential theme – libraries building a sustainable future – IFLA President-elect Barbara Lison focused her session at WLIC on the long-term trends facing the library field, as defined by the emerging talents who will lead it. In a dynamic session, the President-elect, with the support of IFLA’s Secretary General Gerald Leitner, and a panel of inspiring people, led participants through a process of identifying the top priorities. Discover the 5 top ideas which will feature strongly in work undertaken during Barbara’s IFLA Presidency.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is pleased to announce the implementation of the Universal Viewer for examining the thousands of digitized texts on the Digital Collections web site. Universal Viewer is an open-source community-supported software developed by Digirati for the Wellcome Library and the British Library. The NLM Digital Repository Working Group selected Universal Viewer after an in-depth software evaluation. Universal Viewer fits easily with the existing applications Digital Collections uses to present high-quality page images through the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), Loris image server and Blacklight discovery layer.

LIBER and COAR have signed a partnership agreement with the aim of strengthening the role of repositories in Europe. This new agreement provides a framework for joint strategic actions that will reinforce the important role of libraries in sustaining and advancing open repositories in the region.

The International Science Council has welcomed the draft UNESCO recommendation on Open Science strongly. UNESCO has engaged with the scientific community over the last year to generate a list of draft recommendations including: for open access to the published record of science, open data, open educational resources, open-source software and code, open hardware and infrastructures, and open engagement with society. It is seeking to formalise these trends internationally by placing a Recommendation on Open Science before its 193 Member States for their endorsement.

Jisc’s OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) has launched a self-assessment feature for repository staff that allows them to check whether their repository meets the six Plan S requirements for repositories.

In one of their previous articles, the authors of Predatory Publishing blog asked “Is there a good reason to publish in a predatory journal?“ They concluded that there was not, but they wanted to explore this topic in a little more detail, looking at some of the reasons that scholars gave when asked why they decided to publish in unreliable journals.

cOAlition S endorses several strategies to encourage subscription publishers to transition to full and immediate Open Access (OA).  These approaches are referred to as “Transformative Arrangements” and include Transformative Agreements, Transformative Model Agreements and Transformative Journals. A Transformative Journal (TJ) is a subscription/hybrid journal that is actively committed to transitioning to a fully Open Access journal. Some 16 months on from publishing the formal TJ criteria, 14 publishers and some 2275 journals, have enrolled in this programme. This is a summary of the uptake of the programme by publishers and an analysis of the initial data TJ publishers have provided.

Conversations on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in scholarly publishing vary between the Global North and the Global South. The author provides his view about the three keys to real scholarly publishing inclusion. Geographical inclusion in scholarly publishing shouldn’t only mean how the Global North is bringing the Global South closer. It should also mean how the best practices from the North are contextualized in the South to improve its publishing system, how the South is changing the North, and how the Southern countries are helping each other.

‘Global South’, a term frequently used on websites and in papers related to academic and ‘predatory’ publishing, may represent a form of unscholarly discrimination. Arguments are put forward as to why the current use of this term is geographically meaningless, since it implies countries in the southern hemisphere, whereas many of the entities in publishing that are referred to as being part of the Global South are in fact either on the equator or in the northern hemisphere. Therefore, academics, in writing about academic publishing, should cease using this broad, culturally insensitive, and geographically inaccurate term.

Did you know that organizational ISNIs can now be deposited as part of DOI affiliation metadata? Ringgold provides ISNIs for all records in the Identify Database, the authoritative reference database curated by Ringgold that serves the scholarly, academic, and research fields. The Identify Database contains almost 600,000 organizations in all countries and sectors. Related organizations are linked together, such as universities and their departments, or corporate entities with subsidiary firms or divisions. Ringgold hierarchies are key to understanding complex relationships and the wider market.

The ISNI International Agency (ISNI-IA) announces it is formally reviewing the handling of gender identities associated with the ISO 27729 International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI). A small advisory group will review current ISNI policy and emerging best practice in gender identification to identify shortcomings. The group will involve representatives from key ISNI sectors (including libraries, the music industry, book publishing and rights organisations) and from affected groups. The recommendations will be offered to ISNI’s community for comment and the ISNI Board will make a final decision.

IFLA’s Key Initiative 2.3 outlines the integral role of  developing standards, guidelines and other documents that foster best professional practice. During the session of IFLA’s Committee on Standards, Vincent Boulet highlighted the role Standards play in dealing with user tasks (IFLA Library Reference Model – LRM). The strength of IFLA Standards lies in their continued visibility and adaptability. In order to ensure both, new opportunities to build bridges with other stakeholders must be taken.

These include “ensuring a new generation interoperability (cross-domain identifiers) and joining other networks. Joseph Hafner, Chair of LIDATEC, provided an update on the recently-launched Namespaces project, a powerful linking tool that brings all of IFLA’s technical standards together.

On 19 October 2021, ICSTI will hold its General Assembly meeting, open to member representatives and alternates only, and ICSTI Members’ Fair on Open Data, open to anyone affiliated with an ICSTI member organization (registration required). Five invited ICSTI members will give 10-minute presentations on open data-related topics, followed by time for questions and discussion.

More details to be announced on ICSTI website soon.

The Charleston Library Conference will take place as a hybrid event, with options for in-person and virtual attendance.

View the agenda and register.

      

Topic: Publishing in a changing world

This year’s STM Annual Conference will explore how the industry can adapt to continue to improve the quality, integrity, and availability of scholarly communications whilst dealing with the important technological challenges that underpin research integrity, user privacy, and cybersecurity.

Attracting the leading figures from across scholarly and professional publishing, STM’s Annual Conference provides a program focused on strategic thinking, public policy, business models, and the key drivers that will shape the future of the STM industry.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together people working in the transition from MARC to Linked Data using the BIBFRAME model and related tools.

Participation in the meeting is free of charge, but registration is necessary. View the schedule.

Source: Library of Congress, Illustration of BIBFRAME 2.0 model, with three core levels of abstraction: Work, Instance, and Item

As the leading trade fair for the international publishing and content industry, Frankfurter Buchmesse (20-24 October 2021) is further developing its in-person events and digital offerings. The 73rd edition of the industry’s largest gathering is set to take place on the fairgrounds in Frankfurt, subject to the pandemic’s further progression and the health and safety regulations in effect in October. The on-site fair will be supplemented by digital and hybrid offerings, along with a programme of events in the city.

The first day of the digital Frankfurt Conference will focus on academic publishing, while on Tuesday various CEOs and publishers from multiple industry segments will discuss current challenges and developments affecting the publishing sector. Both days of the conference will end with a networking session in the Hof series.

OASPA is organizing its annual conference on open access scholarly publishing.

Topic: Designing 21st Century Knowledge Sharing Systems

Registration is still open. View the full program.

If you are going to attend iPres 2021, come along to paper session 13 A collaborative approach to preserving at-risk open access journals: journals preserved forever, to hear the latest news on Project JASPER. The project partners (DOAJ, CLOCKSS, Internet Archive, PKP and the ISSN International Centre) are building ways to enable more open access journals to be preserved for posterity.

View iPRES 2021 programme.

Registration is still open.

The annual conference on scholarly publishing and communication is organized by the Arctic University of Norway. Among the keynote speakers, Johan Rooryck, Executive Director of cOAlition S, will speak about trends in institutional open access publishing in Europe.

The presentations and videos from the 15th Munin Conference