At 2019 CILIP Conference (Manchester, 3-4 July 2019), Tim Devenport, Executive Director of the ISNI International Agency, and Andrew MacEwan, Head of Content and Metadata Processing at the British Library, will give a presentation about ISNIs in Publishing, Cataloguing and the Library Supply Chain. They will describe how the ISNI is linking library authority files with publisher supply chain metadata across multiple content industries. A case study will show how the use of ISNIs in the British Library’s metadata opens up new opportunities for collaboration with the book publishing industry.

The full CILIP Conference programme is online.

ISNI IA plans to introduce new  services for ISNI member organizations and other communities. These will include better partitioning of organizational vs personal ISNI identifiers, the provision of ISNI identifiers and associated metadata in the form of open linked data, and enhancements in search and API functionality. Publishers and even imprints can have ISNIs, they can be used as publisher and imprint identifiers in ONIX and in other metadata sets such as the one managed by the ISSN International Centre in its portal.

In February 2019, DOAJ tightened up procedures for article uploads. This includes checks that are carried out on uploads particularly ISSN, DOI, and full text URL information.

This means that, whether uploading article XML or JSON via the API, the metadata must include the exact same ISSN value(s) as those DOAJ holds in the journal record. If a journal title has two ISSNs on its website (one ISSN for the print version and one ISSN for the online version) and DOAJ only has one, you should contact DOAJ to have the second ISSN added. If need be, the ISSN Network can be contacted to update journal metadata.

The journal Serials Librarian has just released an article about the future of ISSN written by Gaëlle Béquet, ISSN IC Director, and John Akeroyd, consultant with CiberResearch. The article entitled Irreplaceable ISSN: from 2007 to the Future  reports on the global survey of ISSN users that was undertaken in 2018 to inform ISO experts working on the revision of ISSN standard. Article is available at https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/wser20/current .

PIE-J, i.e. Presentation and Identification of E-Journals, is a NISO Recommended Practice that offers guidelines on how journals can be presented online so as to ensure discoverability and access of content over time. A presentation will be given at NASIG annual conference in Pittsburgh, 4 – 8 June 2019, to showcase how publishers use PIE-J.

More information about PIE-J implementation was shared by Steve Shadle, Head of Serials Cataloging at the University of Washington Libraries, at ER&L 2019 Conference. His presentation can be downloaded at PIE-J Presentation-S-Shadle-ErandL2019.

The first ever RDA Meeting in Brazil was held 16 – 18 April 2019 in Florianópolis (Santa Catarina). It brought together more than 200 information science professionals who are actively teaching and researching RDA. The objective was to share information and experiences about research and application of the standard in Brazil, and discuss how to work towards adoption of RDA into Brazilian Librarianship.

The event was organized by the National Service of Commercial Learning of Santa Catarina (Senac/SC) and the State University of Santa Catarina (UDESC). The event’s program and slides are available.

In 2007, ISO 3297 introduced the mechanism of “Linking ISSN” (ISSN-L) for the purpose of supporting search and delivery functionality across all media versions.  The ISSN-L simplifies the search, recovery and delivery of data across services including, in particular, search systems and knowledge databases. The ISSN International Centre publishes an ISSN/ISSN-L matching table, updated daily and available on the ISSN International Centre’s website upon request.

Since January 2018, the “cluster” ISSN-L record type is also available through the new public version of the ISSN Portal (https://portal.issn.org) which contains more than 2,5 million ISSN records. The Portal offers users access to free ISSN essential identification metadata, which can also be reused in several linked open data formats; for subscribers, it offers a completely new range of data and services through ISSN records enriched with information from external sources that cooperate with the ISSN International Centre.

As a result of the amendments introduced by the European Directive issued on 6 November 2018, Member States of the European Union are now authorised to apply the VAT rates they apply to printed publications to the marketing of periodicals and books published online. The Italian Revenue Agency explains in which cases the reduced VAT rate of 4% also applies to databases that allow access to editorial content. The requirement for the application of VAT at 4% is the identification of the editorial product with the ISBN or ISSN. The ISSN code must identify, not so much the database itself, but the editorial contents it gives access to.

[Article in Italian]

NISO has just released an updated version of the Transfer Code of Practice that provides voluntary guidelines for publishers to follow when transferring journal titles between parties. The ISSN International Centre supports this initiative by managing the Enhanced Transfer Alerting Service.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announces the formal publication of a new update to the JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2019). The purpose of JATS is to define a suite of XML elements and attributes describing the content of metadata and journal articles while using a common format that enables the interchange and exchange of that content. The added elements and modifications made in 2019 allow greater flexibility in existing models while enabling support for emerging publishing practices. The published version of the Standard may be found at https://www.niso.org/publications/z3996-2019-jats.  Non-normative and supporting materials, including schemas and Tag Library documents, may be found at: https://jats.nlm.nih.gov.