Mikael Wetterström, Specialist in Automated Processing of Bibliographic Data at ISSN International Centre, will participate in the ISBD webinar to be held on 26 January 2023.

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. The full programme is announced on IFLA website.

MARC21 Update No. 35 released 21 December 2022 is now available on the MARC website. The documentation includes changes made to the MARC 21 formats resulting from proposals which were considered by the MARC 21 community since the publication of Update No. 34 (July 2022), including the joint proposal from the ISSN International Centre and the National Finnish Library about the Field 856. There is now a subfield to track persistant identifiers ($g) as well as a subfield for non-functioning URIs ($h). Changes and new text appear in red on this page.

IFLA’s PAC Centres are hubs of knowledge for documentary heritage preservation and access – hosted in major institutions around the world. PAC Centres take initiative to identify and raise awareness of preservation and conservation issues within the library field. Through this network, they engage with IFLA HQ to assist in capacity building and share information relevant to the global library field. Here are some of the activities carried out by IFLA PAC Centres over the past reporting period (2021-2022).

Increasing the amount of high-quality data available through the Europeana website is a continuing priority as the Europeana Initiative starts to deploy the common European data space for cultural heritage. Explore how aggregators are using the Metis Sandbox to deliver high-quality data.

This news post is the second in a series with a focus on the Metis Sandbox.

Based on the relevant provisions of the Public Library Law of the People’s Republic of China, this article introduces the roles and functions of the  National Library of China (NLC) in 8 areas, including compilation of national bibliography and union catalogue. Furthermore, this article underlines the related work carried out by the NLC according to these functions.

LIBER, SPARC Europe, COAR, and OpenAIRE are launching a joint strategy aimed at strengthening the European repository network. The strategy lays out their commitment to work together – along with other relevant organisations – to develop and execute an action plan to reinforce and enhance repositories in Europe. As a first step, the group will undertake a survey that will enable a better understanding of the current repository landscape and identify priority areas of action. The survey will be available in February 2023.

Descubra una infografía sobre los éxitos de Redalyc y Amelica en materia de visibilidad de las revistas, acuerdos de cooperación, transición digital, consolidación del modelo AA Diamante, con muchas estadísticas.

Discover an infographic on Redalyc and Amelica’s successes regarding the visibility of journals, cooperation agreements, digital transition, consolidation of the Diamond model, with lots of statistics.

See also this article in English.

The Akamon Gate at the Hongo campus of the University of Tokyo – Image – Getty iStockphoto: Ranmaru

Springer Nature announced in November 2022 the largest transformative agreement in Japan, comprising the engagement of 10 institutions that will generate the open-access of close to 900 articles in the coming year. The University of Tokyo is among the institutions participating in the accord, and the program will allow researchers open-access publication from those facilities in more than 2,000 Springer Nature journals.

Nine of the participating institutions are members of Japan’s Research University Consortia (RUC), with the Tokyo University of Science participating following an agreement by the executive member of RUC.

The report is a product of a collaboration between STM Association and the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) focused on the bilateral sharing of ideas and best practices in OA publishing. China has become an important part of the global open access publishing ecosystem. However, China still has great potential, especially for its considerable number of scientific journals in Chinese languages. Therefore, CAST will actively develop domestic open access policies, standards, and infrastructure, and make effort on the establishment of an open access publishing system suitable for China.

Download the report

Online tools will help publishers detect fake research papers – Credit: Getty

Publishers are testing prototypes of automatic systems to flag submitted manuscripts bearing the hallmarks of paper mills — businesses that produce fake research papers.

The tools, which will eventually form part of an online integrity hub, are the result of a year-long collaboration between 24 publishers and scholarly analytics providers. Together, the companies are trying to stamp out the growing scourge of fabricated scientific articles.

COPE (the Committee on Publishing Ethics) together with STM has researched and produced a report that looks closely at Paper Mills — how they work, their history, their scale, and areas of particular concern. The report also offers concrete recommendations for addressing them moving forward.

Download the paper.

This post is a recap of the recent SSP webinar, Ask the Experts: AI in Publishing, held on 6 October 2022.

There are numerous conferences, workshops, and keynotes about how or whether techniques developed under the moniker ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) can support (or ruin!) scholarly publishing (not to mention two recent Scholarly Kitchen posts on ChatGPT and the issues it presents). But what is actually meant by AI, according to people who do this for a living? How, precisely, can this mysterious set of technologies help or harm scholarly publishing, and what are some current trends? What are the risks of AI, and what should we look out for?

A journal article dataset has been developed with metadata of articles by France-based authors in the period 2013-2020. The purpose of this dataset was to form a basis for the retrospective and prospective analyses of the total costs of APCs paid by French institutions. This article presents the main results of the retrospective analysis of the dataset regarding the numbers of APC-paid articles with a France-based corresponding author.

The guidelines that instruct Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) catalogers working in shared cataloging environments to encode all languages using MARC language codes and, optionally, also using ISO 639-3 language codes have been revised. However, it is possible that in the future, macros and other automated means will be developed to generate MARC language codes if catalogers have manually entered ISO 639-3 codes, eliminating the need for double coding.

The MARC/RDA Working Group (MRWG) is pleased to announce the release of its final report.

This report provides a background to the group’s establishment, its charge, membership, schedule of work and guiding principles. It goes on to summarize those changes to MARC 21 recommended by the MRWG and agreed by the MARC Advisory Committee in support of the RDA Toolkit following completion of the RDA Toolkit Restructure and Redesign (3R) Project. It also details those changes to RDA which the MRWG considered. In conclusion, the report analyses the limitations associated with implementing 3R in a MARC 21 context as well as the possible scope for further changes in future.

NISO will host an open webinar on Tuesday, January 24, 2023 at 2 pm Eastern to talk about the Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project (CCLP), its new grant from IMLS to support this work, and upcoming Working Groups that will be formed. The NISO Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project (CCLP) Recommended Practice will document exchange protocols that describe gathering, normalizing, and exchanging holdings information, contractual information, retention obligations, and usage data.

Please register for free.

The IFLA Information Technology Section and IFLA Artificial Intelligence Special Interest Group are pleased to invite registration and attendance at their mid-term conference hosted by National Library of Singapore. This is a hybrid conference with in-person and online attendance available. 

This webinar will be the first of a series of online events in early 2023 which will present four workflows, each of which is intended to showcase a possible future, in which persistent identifiers (PIDs) are used throughout the research lifecycle to enable automation, efficiency, new discovery tools, and analysis. Each webinar will be run in collaboration with a relevant organisation (OASPA, ARMA, UKRI, and ARDC).

This first online event on January 25 will be run in partnership with OASPA (Open access scholarly publishing association) and will raise awareness of the workflows, in particular the publishing workflow, and demonstrate the value of PID implementations to publishers as well as the costs of not implementing them.

Please register for this free event.