IFLA Journal dedicates a second volume to how libraries tackle the challenge of research data management. The main goal of this special issue is to gather the latest theory, research, and state-of-the-art practices from libraries that are informing and innovating effective data services.

Both volumes are published in open access on IFLA Journal website.

See volume 42, N° 4, December 2016 about international approaches to research data services in libraries.

The Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Association of American University Presses (AAUP) are implementing a new initiative to advance the wide dissemination of scholarship by humanities and humanistic social sciences faculty members by publishing free, open access, digital editions of peer-reviewed and professionally edited monographs.

The challenge of increasing access to knowledge while reducing the cost of knowledge is addressed. Sustainable article processing charges and alternative open access models are explored. Librarians are facilitators of scholarly communications, and they must play a key role in ensuring that scholarly work can continue and that knowledge can be preserved and disseminated in a sustainable way.

In February 2017,  the libraries at University of Oregon and Oregon State University made contributions that completed a four-year fundraising effort spearheaded by Reveal Digital to develop an open access collection of alternative press periodicals called Independent Voices.  Leading academic libraries from the U.S, Canada, and the U.K. contributed the entire $1.794 million needed to cover the costs of copyright clearance, digitization, platform development and hosting, project management, outreach, and other support activities for this large multi-year project.

The Jisc Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) offers a single point of access to journal and ebook usage data, giving libraries a simple way to analyse usage trends and provide evidence of value for money. The results of the 2016 JUSP community survey are now online.

The Internet and digital technologies have profoundly affected scholarly communication, publishing, collaborative research, literature searches, and management of digital assets and data. In turn, our views of the research life cycle have changed. What does this mean for librarians in the health sciences who support or even actively participate in clinical research?

Every year, UCL Centre for Publishing organises a session about the latest ideas, techniques and products regarding discovery tools. This year, the focus was set on improved content discovery through semantic enrichment, with notably the Europeana case study.

Presentations from the conference held on 18 January 2017 are available online.

Eliminating myths and misinformation about licensing electronic content is the best way to learn how to negotiate and interpret digital license agreements. The revised edition of Licensing Digital Content, A Practical Guide for Librarians covers the basics of digital licensing for librarians in a plain-language approach that demystifies the process.

Over 2016, Librarians and Wikipedians have been working together to showcase the many successful collaborations between libraries and Wikipedia. Opportunities papers highlight the ways libraries and Wikipedia are already engaging to verify information and make it accessible. The papers focus on Academic and Research Libraries and on Public Libraries. They are a starting point for further IFLA work on the practical and policy issues raised by the rise in the number of people generating their own content online, not least through Wikipedia.