The ISSN International Centre is glad to support the 2021 FORCE11 Online Conference as Platinum Sponsor. This conference focused on a number of relevant topics for the ISSN Network, e.g. Research assessment, Scholarly communications role in the sustainable development goals, Governance of open science and Science discoverability.

Dr. Gaelle Bequet, Director of the ISSN International Centre, gave a presentation on 8 December 2021 about the Project JASPER that aims to provide sustainable archiving solutions for OA journals.

The conference program is available at https://force2021.sched.com/.

The ISSN International Centre is glad to announce that the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford – Open Scholarship Support have just endorsed the July 2016 statement Working together to Ensure the Future of the Digital Scholarly Records that summarizes the principles that guide Keepers Registry’s development.

The Bodleian Libraries (UK) is the latest to join all those that have already shown their support for KR, namely the Library of Congress (USA), Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (USA), International Alliance of Research Library Associations, Ivy Plus Libraries Collections Group (USA), Rede Cariniana Network (IBICT, Brazil), Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL) (Canada), Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC, Australia), King’s College London (UK) and Faculdad de Ciencias De La Comunicacion Turismo Y Psicologia (Peru).

The CISPC 2021 event comprises a series of three free-to-view webcasts reflecting current ‘hot topics’ in scholarly publishing. The webcast series, featuring high-level speakers from the world of scholarly communications, will also be available to watch on ‘catch-up’ for the following 12 months.

The ISSN IC Director, Dr. Gaelle Bequet, was a panelist on CISPC 2021 webinar held remotely on 2 December 2021 about Sustainable development goals and scholarly communications. This one-hour panel discussion’s goal was to find out why (and how) libraries, research bodies and publishers alike should embrace the UN’s sustainable development goals to benefit the global community.

ISSN IC sponsors this professional event that includes more webinars about Diversity in academic publishing and The future of hybrid events.

In January 2022, HathiTrust will celebrate the Public Domain Day. Titles published in 1926 will enter the public domain in the United States, including more than 42,000 items in the HathiTrust collection. Readers will also gain public domain access to 54,000+ titles published in 1896, and up through 1901 if published in Canada or Australia.

1926 Publications Collection

Worldwide Collection January 2022

PKP is sharing an important update on Project JASPER, in partnership with DOAJ, Internet Archive, CLOCKSS and Keepers Registry. Project JASPER (JournAlS are Preserved forevER) is an initiative to preserve open access journals. It was launched on World Preservation Day 2020 and is in response to research that shows that online journals—both open and closed access journals—can just disappear from the internet. This happens because of a lack of awareness amongst smaller publishers around the need for long-term digital preservation and/or the resources to enroll a journal in a long-term digital preservation scheme.

LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche – Association of European Research Libraries) Strategy Update was recently published. It gives an extensive overview of LIBER’s  achievements and challenges of the past year and thereafter highlights what LIBER members will deliver in the months ahead.

OCLC Research interviewed 29 library leaders from 11 countries to capture their experiences during the pandemic and understand what they envision for their libraries moving forward. This high-level report synthesizes findings and recommendations within the context of work experiences, collections experiences, and engagement experiences. And within each of these contexts, it identifies New Model Library transformations occurring because of four areas of impact.

Metadata in the Digital Library is a complete guide to building a digital library metadata strategy from scratch, using established metadata standards bound together by the markup language XML. The strategy laid out in this book will ensure that a digital library’s metadata will support all of its operations, be fully interoperable with others and enable its long-term preservation. It assumes no prior knowledge of metadata, XML or any of the standards that it covers. It provides both an introduction to best practices in digital library metadata and a manual for their practical implementation.

The study demonstrates that while data deposit can be accommodated by the existing metadata requirements of multi-purpose IRs, their metadata practices do little to prioritize data deposit or to promote data discovery. Evidence indicates that data discovery will benefit from additional metadata elements.

On 20 September 2021, FAIRsFAIR organised the workshop “Learning lessons from FAIR data implementation. Good practices from universities across Europe” during the Open Science Fair 2021. The event offered participants the opportunity to discuss a preliminary analysis of good practices from universities across Europe that are being gathered by the project partners, highlighting the drivers, impact and implementation steps behind initiatives taken by institutions to integrate Research Data Management (RDM) and FAIR data skills in university curricula.

The new IAP Annual Report provides an overview of activities of the InterAcademy Partnership (IAP) in 2020, with specific sections on activities by affiliated regional networks AASSA, EASAC, IANAS, and NASAC. The Report also gives evidence of IAP’s focus on providing science advice and promoting cooperation and capacity building among its membership – the world’s merit-based academies of science, medicine and engineering.

You can download the full 2020 IAP Annual Report here.

cOAlition S is pleased to announce that work has commenced on building the Journal Comparison Service to help the research community better understand if the publishing fees they pay are commensurate with the services delivered and to gain better insight into the elements of those services. Beginning in Spring 2022, cOAlition S plans to release the Journal Comparison Service in a phased approach, starting with accepting data from publishers. The online service will be accessible to authorised users later in Summer 2022.

The theme for the International Open Access Week in 2021 was ‘Building Structural Equity’. Equity for everyone is a challenge in publishing in general. However, it is a task that needs to be dealt with for open access publishers as their business models, in general, need to include equal opportunities for authors. Equity was also the focus at the OASPA conference in September 2021. The Stockholm University Press is sharing reflections on the importance of building structural equity in open access publishing.

A new white paper published in October 2021 from Springer Nature builds on the growing body of evidence that shows that Gold open access (OA) is best for authors and researchers. This white paper presents the findings from that analysis, which show a clear advantage in reach and impact for articles published open access (OA) in hybrid journals compared to non-OA articles in the same journals, and for the first time also an advantage for full (Gold) OA articles compared to subscription articles where an earlier article version (such as an accepted manuscript or preprint) has been self-archived in an OA repository. The white paper can be read here. More information on the white paper and Springer series of OA white papers can be found here.

Berlin-based De Gruyter, a mid-sized publisher with a strong focus on humanities scholarship, describes the digital transformation of its business.  The Managing Director explains that in a near future, they will no longer acquire books or journals as product formats, but rather content in which conventional format thinking no longer plays a role. Launching their new platform was just the first step of the digital strategy, including the optimisation of software systems, workflows and digital products that will further enable the publishing house to deliver excellent user-focused experiences and services to the scholarly communities.

In one month, there were two corporate acquisitions involving library services products: Clarivate, a major academic metrics company, bought ProQuest in spite of protests and Federal Trade Commission filings from librarians and advocacy groups, and Wiley bought Knowledge Unlatched, a crowdfunded open access provider. Librarians and researchers have watched dozens of academic journal publishers dwindle to a small, powerful publishing oligopoly that controls the research market. Invest in Open Infrastructures community believes that projects and services serving the open landscape need to be responsive to the research practitioners and knowledge communities they serve, rather than orienting their work solely around profit margins.

This article analyses the impact and visibility of scholarly journals in the humanities that are publishing in the national languages in Finland, Norway and Spain. Three types of publishers are considered: commercial publishers, scholarly society as publisher, and research organizations as publishers. Indicators of visibility and impact were obtained from Web of Science, SCOPUS, Google Metrics, Scimago Journal Rank and Journal Citation Report. The results obtained from the analysis of the humanities journals of the three countries allow to draw interesting conclusions broken down in terms of thematic category of publication, publisher type, open access distribution, citations in international databases, …

FORCE11 has historically drawn one of the more diverse communities in scholarly communication. Participants come from the publishing community and the library community, as well as systems suppliers and most importantly, researchers, with deep engagement from each community. Todd Carpenter, Executive Director of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), is reporting  on the conference held online in early December 2021.

COPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) was launched in November 2019. Funded by Research England and Arcadia Fund, COPIM is an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers who are building community-owned, open systems and infrastructures to enable open access book publishing to grow and flourish, according to the principles of scaling small. Put simply, library members pay a small annual fee to get DRM-free, unlimited access to a selection of a publisher’s backlist, with perpetual access after three years; the membership revenue is used by the publisher solely to produce new OA monographs. Read the first annual report and the second one.

Support Needs and Challenges for Universities

Ithaka S+R’s Research Support Services program explores current trends and support needs in academic research. This report provides a detailed account of how big data research is pursued in academic contexts, focusing on identifying typical methodologies, workflows, outputs, and challenges big data researchers face. Full details and actionable recommendations for stakeholders are offered in the body of the report, which offers guidance to universities, funders, and others interested in improving institutional capacities and fostering intellectual climates to better support big data research.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announced the publication of its Recommended Practice, NISO RP-38-2021, Content Platform Migrations, which provides guidance to improve processes and communication between all parties, with suggested steps involved before, during, and after the migration of content from one platform to another. This new Recommended Practice, developed by the librarians, publishers, and content platform providers on the Content Platform Migrations Working Group, intends to streamline the process and clarify the communications needed to ensure seamless transitions. The final version incorporates feedback received from the wider community during the public comment period earlier in 2021.

The NISO Plus conference will take place from 15-17 February, 2022.

Check out the preliminary program — and register at the early bird rate!

You can view the full program here.

Between 25 and 27 January 2022, FAIRsFAIR partners and stakeholders will meet for a series of concluding meetings to deep-dive into the results of FAIRsFAIR. The impact on the European Research Community will be analyzed, as well as the tools, guidelines and best practices produced and delivered to multiples stakeholders. The recommendations and the lessons learnt will be left as a legacy for future activities to come.