ISSN International Centre is a proud supporter of Think. Check. Submit. as well as a contributing organisation and long-standing committee member.

Established in 2015, Think. Check. Submit. was developed with the support of an international coalition of organisations from across scholarly communications in response to discussions about deceptive publishing and amid a growing number of new and unfamiliar publishing options available for researchers.

Think. Check. Submit. provides a range of tools and practical resources to educate researchers, promote integrity, and build trust in credible research and publications. Separate checklists for journals and books are available to guide researchers through the key criteria for selecting where to publish their research and are also invaluable to scholarly communications professionals who are advising researchers about these issues.  Translations of the checklists are also available in a number of languages.

The InterAcademy Partnership is pleased to announce the launch of its report “Combatting Predatory Journals and Conferences”! To celebrate the publication of this report, to which ISSN Network’s members contributed, IAP hosted a free online webinar on 16 March 2022. This event brought together members of key stakeholder groups to discuss the rise of predatory journals and conferences and the recommendations of IAP’s report for a global, systemic action plan to address these pervasive and damaging practices. This report is the culmination of a two-year study, Combatting Predatory Academic Journals and Conferences, funded by The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which has explored these practices more comprehensively and inclusively than any previously.

The Ukrainian ISSN Center continues to process requests for serial identification submitted by Ukrainian publishers. To contact ISSN Ukraine, please use the form available at https://www.issn.org/centre/ukraine/.

The National Library of the Philippines (NLP) through the Bibliographic Services Division (BSD) launched the use of the International Standard Numbering Systems-Philippine Online Application System (INS-POAS) on July 1, 2021. It enables an easy retrieval of data and easy access to information. NLP published a report regarding the second semester of 2021, with notably 550 ISSN assignment requests.

Regina Romano Reynolds, Director of the US ISSN Centre, Library of Congress, will give a virtual presentation at the Library Publishing Forum on 18 May 2022 at 4pm. Entitled Can THAT have an ISSN? A guide to the wide range of resources covered by ISSN, this presentation is aimed at supporting the ISSN Network’s effort to communicate the expanded scope of ISSN.  Since libraries often publish such resources as newsletters, blogs, institutional repositories, conference proceedings, this is a good forum at which to share this information.

View the program and register.

The U.S. ISSN Center is hosting three interns who are undertaking this project overseen by director of the U.S. ISSN Center, Regina Romano Reynolds, with the assistance of ISSN senior librarian, Karen Ross. The project’s goal is to explore the risk that characterizing journals as “predatory” might pose to legitimate journals from countries with less-developed publishing practices and to explore the role that the ISSN Network has in determining a journal’s quality. The interns will research scholarly and popular literature, observe U.S. ISSN Center processes and conduct interviews with the ISSN International Centre, as well as with representatives of Open Access stakeholders. The project would include whether and how having an ISSN might play a role in the ranking systems and how some new open access journals from the Global South might suffer the stigma of “predatory” simply based on their location. The report will be made available within the Library of Congress and the ISSN Network and potentially form the basis of a professional article. Read the full article.

Gaëlle Béquet, Director of ISSN International Centre, spoke about the Transfer Alerting Service during the webinar organized by NISO on 14 March 2022 about the Transfer Code of Practice, a Recommended Practice most recently updated in 2019 and being evaluated for updates.

Officially launched in February 2002, the DPC was charged with fostering joint action to address the urgent challenges of securing the preservation of digital resources in the UK and to work with others internationally to secure our global digital memory and knowledge base. Since then, the DPC has gone from strength to strength, becoming a community of support and practice for 125 different organisations around the world, and their staff. Having started with roots in the UK and Ireland, the DPC now has members in different sectors, in twenty countries and on five continents. They represent, amongst others, global corporations, national and local memory institutions, higher education and research institutions, broadcasters, strategic investors and funding bodies and professional bodies.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is delighted to welcome CLOCKSS, as they become the newest Full Member of the Coalition.

A collaboration between leading research libraries and academic publishers around the globe, CLOCKSS is a digital preservation archive for scholarly content. It focuses on content licensed or published by research libraries, and is currently entrusted to preserve more than 46 million journal articles and 260,000 books. These are held in twelve secure repositories distributed around the world at major academic institutions.

Springer Nature will partner with CLOCKSS to ensure the long-term preservation of all books published since 1815. Around 300,000 book titles crucially important for the scholarly record will now be kept safe for posterity. This includes titles in multiple languages, including English and German, and from a range of imprints including the renowned Springer and Palgrave Macmillan imprints. Titles include The Meaning of Relativity, published by Albert Einstein in 1922.

It is now 75 years ago that the “Bibliographie der Deutschen Bibliothek, Frankfurt am Main” was published for the first time, on 1 March 1947. After World War II and the political division of Germany, it was the equivalent of the Leipzig edition, which had already appeared as the “Deutsche Nationalbibliographie” since 3 January 1931 published by the Deutsche Bücherei in Leipzig. Learn more about the changeful history and successful development of the German National Bibliography, today “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”, with this blog post and in more detail with the online publication Die Deutsche Nationalbibliografie und ihre Formate: 1931 bis 2030.

The first Serials and Other Continuing Resources Section (SOCRS) virtual meeting in 2022 was held on  2 February to schedule the subject and format of presentations for IFLA WLIC 2022 session. Members consulted about “Transformative Agreements” as the topic of the upcoming session. Committee members agreed to invite speakers for the session. Details about the theme of the session and speakers will be announced in the future.

IFLA stands in solidarity with our colleagues in Ukraine – condemns all violent actions and joins the international community in their statements on the situation.

In alliance with the protest of the international Library community IFLA urgently appeals to the libraries all over the world to mobilise in favour of accurate information to be spread on the conflict as a means to support democracy and freedom of expression. IFLA also asks libraries to support any Ukrainian refugees, in collaboration with governmental and non-governmental organisations.

This article provides an idea of the themes that are likely to be at the top of the agenda this year, as well as two key ways of getting involved – through reviews of SDG implementation and engagement in key meetings.

First, we look at the key issues highlighted by the United Nations (UN) Secretary General for 2022 as priorities. There is also an update on a key focus, and the opportunity this represents to ensure the recognition of libraries.

Finally, the key UN meetings in 2022 offer a chance for libraries to raise awareness of what libraries are doing, and why it needs to be supported.

L’Abes (Agence Bibliographique de l’Enseignement Supérieur) et le réseau Mir@bel s’associent pour améliorer le signalement et les métadonnées descriptives des ressources continues publiées par l’édition scientifique française. En s’appuyant sur IdRef pour l’identification et le signalement de l’ensemble des éditeurs français concernés, Mir@bel assure au référentiel un usage large, national et international.

Le portail Mir@bel facilite le signalement des publications en série et l’accès aux contenus disponibles en ligne, et complète les données présentes du Sudoc. Mir@bel est en lien, entre autres, avec le Centre international de l’ISSN, avec ISSN France, et avec des partenaires étrangers tels que le DOAJ.

This draft document was prepared by Claire Redhead and Iryna Kuchma to focus on aspects of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science which apply to open access publishers who want to implement the recommendation, and was shared during the OASPA webinar held on 15th March 2022: Policy into Action: the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science under the spotlight – actions for publishing. Community feedback is welcome and the updated draft will be reviewed with UNESCO as a resource to support their work on the wider implementation of the Recommendation.

The presentations and videos of the OSEC 2022 conference held in Paris on 4 and 5 February 2022, are available from the OSEC 2022 website.

The online conference brought together more than 2,000 participants from five continents. The discussions on how to renovate research assessment were at the heart of these days and were a major step towards building a coalition for research assessment reform under the aegis of the European Commission, after the release of the Paris Call on Research Assessment.

Watch the videos on Canal-U:

• English version
• French version

More on the conference (in  French) by the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research).

European University Association (EUA) has signed up to the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access which aims to promote a sustainable, community-driven Diamond Open Access (OA) scholarly communication ecosystem. Published on 2 March 2022, the document is an initiative of Science Europe, cOAlition S, OPERAS and the French National Research Agency (ANR).

The Action Plan has four priority areas: efficiency, quality standards, capacity building and sustainability, following the recommendations presented in the Open Access Diamond Journals Study. EUA and other stakeholders attended a dedicated online workshop on 2 February 2022 to discuss the draft proposal and provide input to the final Action Plan.

2021’s Trends in Academic Publishing looked at how the academic publishing industry was changing after a tumultuous COVID-19-hit 2020.The results of the 2021 survey revealed how the skills that publishers need were diversifying and, although confidence across the industry was high, evidence of immediate meaningful change was low, even though the survey did suggest that change may be coming. Deanta is running this survey again in 2022 to see whether the on-going Covid crisis has changed working practices, altered individual attitudes towards technological innovation or brought the industry as a whole any nearer to a tipping point for digital transformation.

The survey will be open until 8 April 2022, after which the responses will be collated and a full report will be made available.

EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) has released FSTA® with Full Text. FSTA is the definitive abstract and indexing database for research in the sciences of food and health. FSTA with Full Text offers an extensive collection of full-text journals from a wide variety of sources, including more than 200 active full-text journals, with more than 300 active full-text journals to be available by December 2022.

ScienceDirect is collaborating with the American Chemical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, Taylor & Francis and Wiley on a six-month pilot project. Over 15 million researchers worldwide use the platform and customer feedback was that research would be easier if more publishers collaborated and shared content. During the pilot, researchers will be able to search and browse more than 70,000 articles in 35 journals from these participating publishers, alongside Elsevier’s content on ScienceDirect. All ScienceDirect users will be able to view abstracts of the new pilot content.

Believe it or not, MARC can be indexed using SPARQL. Granted, RDF triplestores cannot index MARC/XML directly, but a literal transformation of MARC/XML into a standard RDF serialization is not that hard, and can prove to be a swift and direct way to retain MARC-originating data values for querying. The use cases may not be immediately obvious, but the analysis below is a starting point that provides evidence of the utility and efficiency of this approach for anyone seeking to try these methods out. To be clear, though, the proposal here is not to manage or exchange data directly in this form; only to enable query access to existing MARC data.

In October 2021, the ISNI Library Sector Consultation Group, in which the ISSN International Centre participates, held its first-ever Open Meeting. The Consultation Group has since launched two ISNI Working Groups: ISNIs in the Book Supply Chain; and ISNI Data Model for Publishers & Imprints. Updates on the work of these new Working Groups will be presented at the next Open Meeting, which will take place on Thursday 7 April 2022. If you’d like to find out more about this meeting or would like to volunteer to take part, please email info@isni.org for further information. All ISNI Member organisations and Registration Agencies will be warmly welcomed.

Thanks to the joint efforts from Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) institutions and the Library of Congress RDA (Resource Description and Access) project team, the Metadata Guidance Documentation (MGD) project was completed on January 31, 2022. MGD documentation will be used with the Official RDA Toolkit and the accompanying LC-PCC Policy Statements. MGD documentation gives detailed instructions and examples, expanding on the instructions in the Toolkit and the LC-PCC PSs. The PCC Task Group will test the Official RDA Toolkit to ensure that PCC catalogers can use the Toolkit to accurately catalog materials in various formats in both MARC and BIBFRAME. The decision to implement the Official RDA Toolkit will not be made before October 2022.

The Library of Congress is pleased to announce the latest annual call for input from stakeholders involved in the lifecycle of creative works for the upcoming annual revision of the Recommended Formats Statement. The significant changes made in recent years in developing the ‘RFS 2.0’ represent the Library’s understanding of the growing importance of the Statement, which is used as a crucial tool in implementing the Library’s new Digital Collecting Strategy.
The Library of Congress is looking forward to hearing your thoughts by April 15, 2022 about how the latest version of the RFS is working and what might be improved, in order to better meet the needs of particular groups of users. The upcoming revision of the Statement is due out on June 30, 2022.

This year marks the return of the in-person format for the Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting, which will be held June 1-3 2022 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. The theme, fittingly, is “Building a More Connected Scholarly Community” and will offer educational sessions centering on the ways our content, data, and collaboration enable connections, while also serving as a venue to connect face-to-face with friends and colleagues. The Early Bird registration deadline is approaching on April 22, 2022.

Planning for the 37^th annual NASIG conference continues at full steam! Onsite and virtual options are available and registration is open! The onsite conference will be held at the beautiful Baltimore Waterfront Marriott. Stay tuned for frequent schedule updates and don’t forget to register and book before May 6, 2022 to receive the discounted registration.

After two years of virtual events, the London Book Fair 2022 is returning to its in-person format at Olympia and hopes to welcome more than 25,000 publishing professionals to London for three days – to network, to learn, and to do business with publishers from around the globe. The Research and Scholarly Publishing Forum tackles Open Access by looking at the issues shaping the future of academic publishing. Participants gain an overview of the new infrastructure and service developments that underpin research information.

#MUSEmeets2022 – a Virtual Event on April 5-6, 2022, connecting the scholarly publisher, librarian, & researcher communities together. Registration is free & all sessions will be open to any individuals with an interest in digital scholarship. The 1.5-day event will feature general Project MUSE updates, including on key initiatives in journals, books, tech, and sales/marketing happening at MUSE, and panels featuring MUSE staff in conversation with librarians and other industry leaders about innovative digital initiatives, Open Access, and the sustainability of humanities and social sciences publishing in the aftermath of covid-19, among other topics.

The ICSTI Connections series offers members an informal discussion forum for sharing their experience and expertise.

Please Register to join the webinar at 14:00 UTC (10am US EDT, 4pm Europe CEST, 10pm China CST) on March 30 to discuss challenges and issues around research portfolio analytics. This ICSTI Connections event will be hosted by Mary Beth West, Information Technology Specialist at the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI). Mary Beth will introduce the discussion topic and share OSTI’s researcher profile assessment prototype tool, which aggregates both open source and commercial data to create researcher profiles showing impact metrics, co-author networks, etc.

This is a free, members-only event open to 1) all staff at ICSTI member organizations, and 2) members of any of ICSTI’s partner and associate organizations. Registration is required and will be reviewed and approved by ICSTI staff.