The Recommended Practice is the product of a working group made up of cross-industry stakeholders formed in spring 2022. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation generously provided funding for this Working Group as well as for research at the University of Illinois’ Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science (RISRS) project, which has informed Working Group deliberations and decisions.

The draft Recommended Practice, with commenting capability, is available at https://niso.org/standards-committees/crec from October 18 to December 2. NISO also hosted a recent public webinar discussing the work and the public comment period and has made its recording available.

In late 2022, Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) and Media Growth Strategies undertook a thorough examination of metadata management across the research lifecycle. CCC is sharing this analysis with the scholarly communications community to spark dialogue and to drive action. This living infographic depicts the significant impact that a fragmented metadata supply chain has today on researchers, institutions, funders, and publishers. Stakeholders recognize that new strategies, inclusive policies, and a robust network of interoperable data and systems are essential for making critical infrastructure improvements, and much progress is underway.

Think.Check.Submit, an initiative to which ISSN International Centre contributes, has just published a video for researchers wishing to identify journals for their manuscripts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdM6fxP2Zk

This video is a guide for all librarians who are supporting researchers in finding the right home for their work and avoiding predatory publishers.

The Council of the European Union adopted on May 2023 conclusions on the ‘high quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing’, calling for immediate and unrestricted Open Access in publishing research involving public funds (Council conclusion).

OPERAS welcomes this official positioning of the council on diversity and equity in publishing academic results and the emphasis on “that immediate and unrestricted open access should be the norm in publishing research involving public funds, with transparent pricing commensurate with the publication services and where costs are not covered by individual authors or readers”. Read Council conclusion p. 5.

In June, APA (American Psychological Association) added 76 new terms to its Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms® to provide more effective searching on current topics. This Thesaurus update also includes 55 new cross-referenced terms and 76 revised scope notes. 

New terms from this summer update will initially be applied to current content only; following the fall release, the majority of new postable terms for 2023 will be back-mapped to older records. You can see the full list of Thesaurus changes on APA website.

PsycINFO® is among the ROAD data sources.

OPERAS Innovation Lab’s website has been launched! The Observatory will feature case studies, discussions, resources and guidelines about innovation in scholarly communication.

The Innovation Lab is part of OPERAS, Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in the European Research Area. It is coordinated by the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN).

STM Solutions, the operational arm of STM, has launched a paper mill detection tool as part of its Integrity Hub. The MVP (minimal viable product) is a web application that can be used to upload submitted journal manuscripts and scan them for pre-identified indications of potential fraud. If any potential issues are noted, the system generates a message alerting the research integrity managers and editors, allowing them to investigate and take action if needed.

By analyzing 25,671 journals largely absent from common journal counts, as well as Web of Science and Scopus, this study demonstrates that scholarly communication is more of a global endeavor than is commonly credited. These journals, employing the open-source publishing platform Open Journal Systems (OJS), have published 5.8 million items; they are in 136 countries, with 79.9% in the Global South and 84.2% following the OA diamond model (charging neither reader nor author). A substantial proportion of journals operate in more than one language (48.3%), with research published in 60 languages (led by English, Indonesian, Spanish, and Portuguese). The journals are distributed across the social sciences (45.9%), STEM (40.3%), and the humanities (13.8%). For all their geographic, linguistic, and disciplinary diversity, 1.2% are indexed in the Web of Science and 5.7% in Scopus. On the other hand, 1.0% are found in Cabell’s Predatory Reports, and 1.4% show up in Beall’s (2021) questionable list.