International Identifier for serials
and other continuing resources, in the electronic and print world

The trouble with reference rot

Computer scientists are trying to shore up broken links in the scholarly literature. Nature presents a brief summary on the achievements and the ambitions of the “Hiberlink project”, a study which investigates how web links in online scientific and other academic articles fail to lead to the resources that were originally referenced.

Why are Authors Citing Older Papers?

Scholars are citing an increasingly aging collection of scholarship. Does this reflect the growing ease with accessing the literature, or a structural shift in the way science is funded–and the way scientists are rewarded?

Springer and Altmetric to launch new platform for book impact at the London Book Fair: Bookmetrix

Springer announced that it is becoming the first publisher to offer title and chapter level metrics across all of their books via a new platform, Bookmetrix. Developed in partnership with metrics provider Altmetric, the data captured via Bookmetrix is displayed on the book pages on Springer’s content platform SpringerLink and reports how often an individual book or chapter is mentioned, shared, reviewed or read online.

Fourth Edition of the STM Report

An overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing by STM, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers. Various subjects are covered such as the day to day management of a journal, the Open access environment, and the new developments in scholarly communication.

Twelve exciting and important developments due for release

A list of the improvements planned for the DOAJ in 2015. Among them: Google Scholar compatibility, a fully functional subject browser, a simpler display with standardised information in search results for both journals and articles, and shareable, stable URLs.

UNESCO’s Open Access (OA) Curriculum is now online

A complete set of OA modules both for researchers and for library schools is now available online. It covers topics such as interoperability and retrieval, intellectual property rights and research evaluation metrics.

CERN and Elsevier Announce Further Open Access Agreement

Thanks to this agreement, CERN results will appear as open access articles, with copyright retained by CERN and its authors, and reuse determined by Creative Commons CC-BY licenses. This allows CERN to progress further towards its stated target of 100% ‘gold’ open access for all of its physics results as of 2015.