The current format of pre-publication peer review offers little or no incentive for the selfless behavior of peer reviewers and provides little guarantee of efficiency and transparency in the process. This observation is in line with numerous other studies that share the notion that a thorough review of the current format of peer review is necessary to restore credibility, efficiency and transparency, while providing scholarly communication the desired celerity.

See also the article in Spanish and Portuguese.

COPE’s European Seminar 2017 held in May 2017, in London was the opportunity to celebrate 20 years of COPE, with a special programme reflecting on past challenges and future outlook for research and publication ethics.

The seminar included invited talks from international speakers, as well as a panel discussion on how new technolgies and new models might help in the future.

The presentations are online.

The ISSN International Centre and its network are updating their services which will include a new interface to request ISSN assignment and a new web portal to access ISSN data more easily.

IFLA Committee on Standards (CoS) invited IFLA standards review groups as well as practitioners from international standards organizations (ISBD, UNIMARC), and national libraries (Latvia, France, Australia) to talk about the implementation of IFLA Library Reference Model (LRM) and give some updates on ISBD and UNIMARC.

An important role for libraries is to further the sharing and exchange of data within and outside its sector. In the cataloguing world, this means the creation and development of new data models, where entity description gives better opportunities to cluster resources and reuse metadata, ultimately serving the user experience. It can also mean active work with linked data, promoting open data licensing and open source solutions. Metadata is a valuable commodity. To enable its sharing and reuse is both an act of solidarity and a way to make most of our investment. Four representatives from European national libraries and an academic libraries network -the Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education (ABES) will present their projects.

This session aims to highlight some of the international and national efforts and cooperation taking place to safeguard cultural heritage in all its forms. Important projects like the #unite4heritage Campaign, Memory of the World and UNESCO PERSIST will be presented to illustrate how UNESCO is acting to fulfill its objectives. The cooperation on IFLA’s Cultural Heritage Programme will also be discussed.

Old and new media are the foundation for culture and science. Digitization and long-term preservation determine the quality and availability of information and knowledge in the future. Speakers from eight countries will share their best practice experiences. Themes like data protection, audiovisual media and newspapers will be discussed.

Four different visions of open access to research will be discussed. A Dutch scholar imagines a sustainable “locked open” ecosystem where scholars and companies can cooperate rather than compete, while another speaker will explain how mining the scientific literature is a form of new research. China’s efforts towards Open Science will be presented by the Chinese Academy of Sciences as an example of a Chinese academic library to introduce its Open Knowledge practice. More generally, SPARC Europe will provide leadership to Europe’s research community to enable more research to become accessible to all.

Created to measure research impact on the web, Altmetrics are now growingly valuable to scientific journals and libraries who are using them to evaluate and promote themselves. How are altmetrics used in libraries and why are they important when working with scholarly communication, serials and other continuing resources issues? The present and future potential impacts and uses of altmetrics will be examined, with a special focus on Iran, South Africa and China.

Held as an Associated Event with the Research Data Alliance (RDA) 9th Plenary meeting, ICSTI 2017 Annual Members’ Meeting & Workshops took place on 4 April 2017. The programs of the Information Trends and Opportunities Committee (ITOC) and the Technical Activities Coordinating Committee (TACC) of ICSTI were respectively chaired by Margret Plank (TIB) and Carly Robinson (DOE/OSTI). The presentations given at ITOC and TACC workshops are available online.