The 47th ISSN Centre Directors’ Meeting is being held from November 20-24, 2022 in Cairo, Egypt, at the kind invitation of the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology (ASRT) and the Egyptian National Scientific and Technical Information Network (ENSTINET). Egypt has been a member country of the ISSN Network since 1990.

The ISSN International Centre, located in Paris, France, has put together a dense agenda of presentations that will be attended by 28 member countries including 10 African countries.

This annual meeting of ISSN National Centre Directors is an opportunity for colleagues from ISSN Member Countries to exchange information on their activities, to establish cooperation and to receive technical training.

Several important topics are addressed during this meeting, including predatory publishing, persistent identifiers in open science, and bibliographic standardization for the identification and description of print and online continuing resources, e.g. journals, blogs, academic repositories.

Training will be provided by the ISSN International Centre in the use of its new metadata production tool, which was implemented in June 2022, to ensure that colleagues within the ISSN Network take ownership of it. This tool is the production base underlying the ISSN portal, the global index for continuing resources (https://portal.issn.org).

At the end of this meeting, resolutions will be voted that will guide the activities of the ISSN network for the year 2023.

A warm welcome to all delegates of the ISSN Network !

About the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology (ASRT)

The Academy of Scientific Research & Technology (ASRT) was established in September 1971 by the Presidential Decree No 2405 as the national authority responsible for science & technology in Egypt. In 1998, ASRT was reorganized by the Presidential Decree No 377 that further defined and strengthened its mission, function and activities. ASRT is the Egyptian house of expertise. It brings together outstanding Egyptian scientists and experts from universities, research institutions, private sector, NGOs, policymakers and prominent Egyptian scientists in Diaspora to deliberate country problems, propose and carry out scientific studies and future strategic basic plans to tackle these problems.

About the Egyptian National Scientific and Technical Information Network (ENSTINET)

ENSTINET provides IT and marketing services to raise information awareness and manpower development. Its objective is to assist Egyptian problem solvers and decision makers to access and apply quality data and relevant current information to development. ENSTINET wants to become the national information service facility equipped with the latest information Technology, run by the best staff members who render the most efficient services to the scientific community. Its mission is to bring knowledge to bear on human problem solving for the socio-economic development of Egypt by raising the standards of locally produced scientific literature.

About the ISSN International Centre (ISSN IC)

Officially created in Paris in January 21^st, 1976, the ISSN International Centre is an intergovernmental organization under the auspices of UNESCO that coordinates the activities of 93 ISSN National Centres hosted in its member countries.  The ISSN IC publishes the ISSN international database of serials and continuing resources and provides several online services, i.e. ISSN Portal, the Directory of Open Acces Scholarly Resources (RAOD) and Keepers Registry. The ISSN Portal contains to date more than 2.5 million ISSN records with about 60,000 new ISSN records added annually by the ISSN Network. Please visit https://portal.issn.org to learn more about our services.

Scholarship is changing and this is affecting what needs to be preserved and what preservation means to the future of knowledge discovery. The diversification of outputs means that knowledge exists in a network of contextual metadata, data, software, standards and publications—requiring multilateral management of this complex knowledge graph. Preservation demands new skills, technologies and resources from librarians, publishers, funders and institutions—and more joined-up thinking about archiving.

Now that artificial intelligence (AI) tools are being widely used across academic publishing, how can we make informed assessments of these utilities? We need evaluations of AI tools within the context of how they are actually used – by checking with users. Information professionals are ideally placed to carry out these evaluations. The author suggests an outline of where AI is currently being used successfully, and outlines a methodology for assessment of new tools. The goal is not to endorse or to discredit AI, but to enable us to make intelligent and informed appraisals, without the need to learn coding.

A recent white paper describes the three key challenges faced by information professionals when working with R&D groups, along with tips on how to tackle these challenges. Springer Nature partnered with information industry expert, Bates Information Services, who interviewed four information professionals working within STEM fields, to learn more about their experiences of working with R&D departments. The findings from those interviews were brought together not only during the Special Libraries Association session 2022 Annual Conference, but also in a new white paper, addressing some of the key challenges faced by information professionals when working with R&D groups.

The new IAP Annual Report provides an overview of activities of the InterAcademy Partnership (IAP) in 2021, 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 2021 IAP Annual Report here.

The OSTP Nelson Memo’s Public Access policy guidance has caused quite a stir in scholarly communication circles. Many publishers are understandably concerned about how an accelerated US transition to open access will impact their revenue. Yet several publishers believe they are prepared for this policy shift and that there is a sustainable path forward for them. Some are confident that they have the right frameworks already in place for their institutions. For others, there appears to be substantial uncertainty about how academia will adapt. How will academia handle the zero embargo?

Moving from a scientific publication model in which the subscriber pays to access content to a model in which the author pays an article processing charge has the potential to affect publication quality. In subscriber-based models, journals have incentives to publish high-quality work because better articles should lead to more subscribers. In open access models based on author publication fees, the publishers make more money by publishing more articles. Quantity incentives increase while the relative importance of the quality declines. The publishing industry must work to counteract this potentially harmful incentive structure.

Launched in 2021 by cOAlition S, the Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) aims to help authors use their own intellectual creation as they choose, and be compliant with their cOAlition S funder’s OA policy where this is required. Reflecting on the implementation of the strategy a year after its launch, cOAlition S Ambassador Sally Rumsey, Jisc’s OA Expert, outlines the aims of the RRS, its success to date and the potential for the wider application of the RRS across other institutions. RRS Resources for librarians may be useful to you.

OASPA is organizing a webinar on the subject, Rights Retention for Books and Book Chapters, to be held on Wednesday 23 November 2022, from 4 – 5 pm UK/UTC. The webinar will be chaired by Sally Rumsey and speakers include Lucy Barnes (Open Book Publishers), Per Pippin Aspaas (University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway) and Peter Suber (Harvard University).

Please register for free.

Nicola Nugent is the strategic lead for quality and impact across journals and books at the Royal Society of Chemistry. She provides her reflections on Peer Review Week 2022, which took place from 19-23  September, celebrating the theme of “Research Integrity: Creating and supporting trust in research.”

Read also the Peer Review Week blog series and the Research Information blog posts series about this event.

The Predator Effect is the first book to chart the rise and impact of deceptive publishing. The book looks at history, development and impact of predatory journals, putting their rise in context of wider issues such as open access and publication ethics. By shining a light on the murky world of predatory journals, readers will learn how to identify and avoid them in their activities – benefiting their own work and research. Download the book (open access).

This article explores a journal’s turnaround time (TAT) trends across ten of the largest publishers that, as of 2020, accounted for more than 2/3 of all journal papers. It utilizes the timestamps of articles that were published in the period 2011/12 compared to the period 2019/20. The author explains why publishing speed matters to authors and why the production stage and the peer review have become faster in the last 10 years. The author concludes that slowing down is evitable and points out an example showing it is possible to have high editorial standards and be fast at the same time.

La BnF et l’Abes lancent l’élaboration de l’ontologie RDA-FR en septembre 2022, dans le cadre du programme Transition bibliographique. Librement disponible sur le web, cette ontologie permettra aux agences bibliographiques nationales et éditeurs de SGB (systèmes de gestion de bibliothèques) de créer et de diffuser leurs données structurées. L’enjeu est d’assurer la visibilité de celles-ci et de faciliter leur exploitation par tous, au-delà des bibliothèques.

Todd Carpenter, Executive Director of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), argues that policies on identifiers are too vague and need to be specific. Within the sphere of scholarly communications, there is a common understanding of the value of PIDs, metadata. It is past time that we all agree on a core set of identifiers and basic metadata elements and begin to encourage researchers to use them at scale when communicating their results. In order to facilitate this, funders, publishers, and systems providers need to ensure that ease of use and seamless interoperability are achieved so as not to create barriers to adoption.

The National Library of Medicine and GreyNet International organize the 24th International  Conference on Grey Literature to be held online on 5 December 2022, on the topic: Publishing Grey Literature in the Digital Century.
The conference programme is online.

The attendance is free, but the registration is required sending an e-mail to conference@textrelease.com.

The proceedings of the 21st Grey Literature Conference are available.

Please register to attend ICSTI’s virtual Annual Conference on Thursday, 1 December 2022 . The conference theme is Global Progress in Open Science Implementation. Conference workshop sessions are open to non-members, and the entire conference is free to attend for members and non-members alike.

The conference schedule is announced.

A major revision of the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) was decided in 2018 by the IFLA Committee on Standards and the IFLA ISBD Review Group, aiming at aligning the ISBD to the overarching conceptual model provided by IFLA, the IFLA Library Reference Model (LRM). The ISBD for Manifestation Task Force is working out an alignment of the ISBD with LRM at the Manifestation level (ISBDM).

Join this webinar on 26 January 2023, from 3 to 6 pm CET (GMT/UTC+1)!

Attendance is free, but registration is required.

Further information about the programme and the registration will be provided soon on IFLA website.