Gaëlle Béquet, Director of the ISSN International Centre, will chair the 2022 ISO TC46 Annual Meeting that will again take place remotely. About thirty meetings are scheduled online to discuss current standardization initiatives in the fields of information and documentation.

The UKSG 45th Annual Conference and Exhibition will take place as a hybrid event, both online and in Telford, from 30 May to 1 June 2022.

ISSN International Centre will be represented by the Sales team and the head of the Metadata and Technical Coordination of the ISSN Network.

The programme is anounced and registration is open.

Mr Pawel Stroinski will succeed to Mr Mariusz Sielski at the head of ISSN Poland. Welcome to the ISSN Network, Pawel!

The Director of the Spanish ISSN Centre, Consuelo López Provencio, becomes Head of the Bibliographic Control of Serial Publications Department at the National Library of Spain. Patricia Martín Villalba becomes Head of the National ISSN Centre. Welcome to the ISSN Network, Patricia!

One week after launching the initiative Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO), co-organizers from Stanford University, Tufts University and Austrian Center for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage, report that the project’s Volunteers from across the world have captured over 1,500 Ukrainian museum and library websites, digital exhibits, text corpora, and open access publications. More than 1,300 cultural heritage professionals are working together to identify and archive at-risk sites, digital content, and data in Ukrainian cultural heritage institutions while the country is under attack. They are using a combination of technologies to crawl and archive sites and content, including the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the Browsertrix crawler.

Visit their collective page.

This report describes preservation activities, methods, and context for the Enhancing Services to Preserve New Forms of Scholarship project, a two-year project funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and led by New York University Libraries. Digital preservation institutions, libraries, and university presses, examined a variety of enhanced digital publications and identified which features can be preserved at scale using tools currently available.

The FAIRsFAIR Project held an online conference in January 2022 to mark the completion of its work.  It included a conversation between Ingrid Dillo, Deputy Director at DANS, and William Killbride, Executive Director at Digital Preservation Coalition, about digital preservation in the context of the FAIR principles.  The text of the interview has been published, and it is available as a recording too on the FAIRsFAIR website where there’s a lot more about the project and its outputs.

Educopia Institute, the Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) and 12 partner libraries have embarked on a two-year project to investigate, synchronize, and model a range of workflows to increase the capacity of libraries to publish open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Most library publishers have developed services in response to local needs, and initial workflows are generally home-grown and varied. The workflow model envisioned will help libraries provide a strong alternative to commercial publishing for a wider range of journals, representing a significant advance in the development of open and academy-owned scholarship. The team created and released a complete set of documentation for the twelve partner libraries.

Ce billet du blog technique de l’ABES retrace l’historique des relations entre l’ABES, le Centre International de l’ISSN et le centre ISSN France, et met en lumière l’évolution de l’écosystème bibliographique des ressources continues et les améliorations en cours.

Cette synthèse préparée par le Comité des services des bibliothèques scientifiques et des systèmes d’information (AWBI) de la Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, Fondation allemande pour la recherche) porte sur le traçage des données dans les ressources électroniques de la recherche. Elle décrit comment les éditeurs scientifiques deviennent des spécialistes de l’analyse de données, montre les conséquences pour la recherche et ses institutions, et identifie les types d’exploitation des données. Cette synthèse a pour but de présenter les pratiques en cours, de favoriser la discussion dans la perspective d’adopter une position claire sur ces pratiques et leurs conséquences pour la communauté académique.

In March 2022, ICSTI launched a new event series, ICSTI Connections, which offers ICSTI’s members an informal discussion forum for sharing experience and expertise on key topics in Science, Technolgy and Innovation.

The March Connections topic was portfolio analytics. Mary Beth West, an information technology specialist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), explained the wide array of data sources that OSTI uses to inform their researcher profile tool and wider portfolio analytics efforts, including the OSTI.GOV database and other governmental databases such as Web of Science, OpenAlex, Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), and ORCiD.

Knowledge Unlatched (KU), the central platform for Open Access (OA) financing models recently acquired by Wiley, is pleased to announce the results of the 2021 pledging round, which ended in December 2021 and saw hundreds of libraries worldwide support KU’s initiatives, including 34 institutions pledging for the first time and several new publishing partners joining the KU community. Over 670 institutions worldwide have supported KU initiatives to date. By the end of this year, KU’s total impact will number around 3,500 unlatched books — a significant jump from last year’s 2,700 — and over 60 journals flipped to OA.

Some publishers’ practices still cause difficulties for authors who wish to exercise their right to make their Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) open access immediately on publication using the Plan S Rights Retention Strategy. cOAlition S requests that publishers make their policies and contracts more transparent at the outset of the submission process. The request outlined in the letter that was sent to a large number of publishers is intended to make publisher submission workflows and processes as clear and straightforward as possible for authors and to help them meet their pre-existing grant conditions.

The incredible progress made in the past five years shows the potential of open access strategies that incorporate multiple open access routes, demonstrating that all roads, together, lead to making open the default in scholarly communication. Building on this insight, LIBER’s Urgent Recommendations for Open Access Negotiations with Publishers outline four priorities to bolster and integrate library Open Access strategies. Each recommendation comes with suggested actions to put the recommendation immediately into practice and links to additional resources that illustrate the good practice of LIBER member libraries and their partners.

In 2008 Harvard’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences voted unanimously to adopt a ground-breaking open access policy. Since then, over 70 other institutions, including other Harvard faculties, Stanford and MIT, have adopted similar policies based on the Harvard model. In 2021 the University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway (UiT) adopted an Open Access policy that came into force on 1^st January 2022. UiT members tell us about the process of creating and implementing their policy.

One response to the problem of predatory publishing has been compiling lists of journals and publishers to avoid. This appears, at first glance, to be a simple solution, but such lists are difficult to maintain and risk an inherent bias. They can also be subjective and include publishers that apply reasonable basic processes but lack resources for the best editorial or technical standards, but which have no intention to deceive. Think.Check.Submit. provides a completely different approach, by raising awareness among librarians and researchers and by giving them the tools they need to make an educated choice on which publishing venue is the most appropriate for their work. ISSN International Centre supports this initiative.

In this presentation to attendees of the Academic Publishing in Europe event held on January 11-13, 2022, Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director, talks about the ever increasing demand for interoperability and interaction with content. How can the information community develop the practices and the systems that are better able to support the needs of researchers in an increasingly sophisticated and complex network of digital native scholarly output?

The RDA Lab Series is designed to help participants understand how to apply the new RDA Toolkit created by the 3R Project. This series of 6 modules will provide hands-on experience using the new RDA and RDA Toolkit with an RDA Lab application profile. The webinars explore concepts introduced by the IFLA Library Reference Model (LRM), such as the Nomen entity and aggregate manifestations. The focus is practical, not conceptual, giving participants strategies for implementing the updated RDA in their agencies. Sessions will take place on Thursdays starting on April 28, 2022.

Registration

Since 2020, the 3R project for DACH libraries, the switch to the new RDA toolkit for the German-speaking area, is being carried out. The project is led by the German National Library and carried out cooperatively by all partner institutions. The aim is to have a common handbook for cataloguing in German-speaking countries, to be used for good practices and ​​training purposes.
All information of the element and resource descriptions is compiled in a common documentation based on Wikibase. The development of application profiles is being carried out. Another working group is developing a training concept, whose training sessions are expected to take place in the first half of 2023.

iPres 2022 will offer an in-person and an online program, including digital preservation workshops, tutorials, paper presentations, panel discussions, posters and professional visits. This year, the conference’s theme Data For All, For Good, Forever: Let Digits Flourish invites reflection and debate about how digital preservation can support communities, ecologies, economies and ideas, so that they might flourish too.

The pre-programme is online.

Early Bird Registration for the iPres 2022 conference is now open! Register now!

Crossref, AfricArxiv, and the TCC Africa are collaborating to run a three-part webinar series to increase awareness of supporting discoverability in Africa through metadata and integrations with scholarly research tools and systems. This series will include talks from Crossref staff alongside speakers from AfLia (African Library and Information Associations and Institutions), AfricArXiv (the Pan-African Open Access Portal), Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa), and AJOL (African Journals Online).

Each session will be recorded and links to the recording and materials will be shared afterward. There is no cost to attend, but registration is required: http://bit.ly/africacrossref.

ALPSP (Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers), a partner of ISSN International Centre, is the international trade association for scholarly publishing and communication. ALPSP is offering a two-session online course providing training on measuring impact and associated metrics. This course will be delivered over two sessions on Monday 23 and Tuesday 24 May 2022: 09:00-12:00 (EDT), 14:00-17:00 (BST), 15:00-18:00 (CEST).

Registration is open.

The IFLA Serials & Other Continuing Resources section is seeking proposals for papers to be presented at its Open Session at the IFLA World Library and Information Congress 2022 in Dublin, Ireland.

The theme is: “The Use of Transformative Agreements: Do They Increase Access to Research?”

If you submitted your abstract by 18 April 2022,  you can follow the notification of acceptance:

Important dates:

• 18 April 2022: Deadline for submission of abstract
• 26 April 2022: Notification of acceptance
• 30 June 2022: Deadline for submission of slides