Authors have an increasing range of measurable guidelines and assessment targets laid upon from different sources: journals, institutions, and ethics committees. Authors know certain methodological procedures performed by ethics boards and the types of journals they should appear in. Yet, for journal editors and reviewers, there are no globally recognized structures or measures of expectations or performance. This paper discusses the work of some groups and organisations which are making progress towards establishing competency frameworks and skills training.

A document describing the Outcomes of the RDA Toolkit Restructure and Redesign Project by RSC Chair Gordon Dunsire has been posted on the RSC website as RSC/Chair/19. An announcement titled What to Expect from the RDA Toolkit beta site has also been posted on the RDA Toolkit blog.

Together, this information paves the way for the release of the beta version of the redesigned RDA Toolkit, which happened on 13 June 2018.

The PIE-J Recommended Practice has been developed by NISO to provide guidance on the presentation of e-journals to publishers and platform providers and to solve some long-standing concerns of serials, collections, and electronic resources librarians. The latest progress was discussed on 11 June 2018, during a NISO open teleconference, whose recording is now available.

More details about PIE-J.

EuropeanaTech Insight is a multimedia publication about R&D developments by the EuropeanaTech Community. This special issue is dedicated to the SWIB Conference and features articles from Fedora, Netwerk Digitaal Erfgoed, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Finnish National Library and the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB). It’s becoming clearer that LOD is not just being seen as an information specialists tool for experimentation; its true value is being derived from this work enriching user experiences and collection contextualization.

The first meetings for the Metadata 2020 projects have now taken place. They focused on the breadth and scope of each project, discussing the crossovers with other projects, the potential overlaps and need for synchronization with other metadata-related initiatives in scholarly communications. The projects are described here.

Written by Tasha Mellins-Cohen, this guide will help librarians prepare for Release 5 of the COUNTER Code of Practice. This publication provides a wealth of information about the new Metrics, Master Reports and Standard Views. It also provides a helpful section which maps the key Release 4 reports to their Release 5 counterparts. You will also find several user scenarios, that come together in a set of COUNTER Release 5 reports.

You can download the guide here in PDF format.

David Shotton describes the Open Citation Identifier scheme, created and operated by OpenCitations, which supports the assignment of Open Citation Identifiers not only to the citations present in the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC) but also to open citations present in other bibliographic databases.

More at Citations as First-Class Data Entities.

Pat Riva, Chair of the Consolidation Editorial Group that wrote the definition of the IFLA LRM model: IFLA Library Reference Model :  a conceptual model for bibliographic information.  , was invited to deliver the Lectio magistralis in Library Science at the University of Florence on March 6th, 2018.

Pat spoke about the IFLA Library Reference Model. The IFLA Library Reference Model : lectio magistralis in library science = Il modello concettuale IFLA Library Reference Model : lectio magistralis in biblioteconomia. The text of the lecture is available in English and in Italian.

The fifth and latest edition of the ISBN standard has been published by ISO (International Organization for Standardization). The new standard has been developed by an international working group of 41 experts from 14 countries who were involved with the project for three years, providing advice, feedback and discussion points as the work progressed. There are significant changes in the standard. Notably, metadata specifications have been revised to be in line with ONIX 3.0., and the scope for eligible products has been clarified. The Users’ Manual and FAQs have been revised as well and are available in English.

A working group that includes some members of the PREMIS Editorial Committee plus external Linked Data experts and preservation practitioners, is working on the preparation of a new OWL ontology. This ontology is not just an update of the previous version but rather a re-imagining of how to express preservation metadata as Linked Data. This is a work in progress, and a draft will be released soon for a period of public review and feedback.