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

Open ISNI for Organizations by Ringgold

Open ISNI for Organizations is a new service to share the ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) and data for over 400,000 organizations in the world. Neither the web service proposed nor the website require registration and are free to use. Any dataset mapped to ISNIs can be linked together to provide interoperability between systems to benefit the entire scholarly community.

COUNTER releases the Report Validation Tool

The COUNTER Report Validation Tool  helps content providers in their implementations of COUNTER and SUSHI by offering a means to measure the accuracy and compliance levels of their solution. The tool also gives users of COUNTER reports an easy way to test a questionable report for compliance and report issues to the content provider concerned. A greater compliance by vendors and publishers means that libraries will get data that are more accurate more efficiently, leading to better decision making.

Ringgold to Open ISNI for Organizations to the World

Ringgold, an ISNI Registration Agency, has released a free service to provide open access to the ISNI Identifiers and data for organizations. The purpose of the ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) is to uniquely identify public figures. ISNI is an ISO international standard bridge identifier used by the ISSN International Register, Wikipedia, Musicbrainz, the British Library, Harvard University, Library of Congress, and a number of other organizations, to link data among disparate datasets. Any dataset mapped to ISNIs, whether open or proprietary, can be linked together to provide interoperability and enhance discoverability between systems to benefit the entire scholarly community.

COUNTER Code of Practice Release 5 Update

The last Charleston Conference saw a presentation on the latest developments regarding Project COUNTER. These slides from the presentation outline the progress to date with drafting Release 5 of COUNTER, and include information on new reports, metric types and related attributes, report formats, sample use cases, and the project timeline.

Redalyc innovates with XML JATS Marcalyc tool

Redalyc has undertaken a transition to the adoption of XML-JATS which provides a standardized format for describing and exchanging structured data. Redalyc is launching a new online tool (Marcalyc) for XML JATS markup—compatible with the JATS4R recommendation—as a free service for the Open Access journals indexed by Redalyc. Once having XML files, Redalyc provides enriched file formats like ePUB and intelligent readers resulting in greater visibility and accessibility for Open Access research in Latin America, lowering costs for journals and leveraging the power of new technologies.

(Article in Spanish)

NISO releases Altmetrics Recommended Practice

The National Information Standards Organization has published NISO RP-25-2016, Outputs of the NISO Alternative Assessment Project. This recommended practice on altmetrics, an expansion of the tools available for measuring the scholarly impact of research in the knowledge environment, was developed by working groups that were part of NISO’s Altmetrics Initiative. The document outlines altmetrics definitions and use cases, alternative outputs in scholarly communications, data metrics, and persistent identifiers in scholarly communications.

The Library of Congress announces the release of the 2016-2017 Recommended Formats Statement

By providing guidance in the form of technical characteristics and metadata which best support the preservation and long-term access of digital and analog works , the Library of Congress hopes to encourage creators, vendors, archivists and librarians to use the recommended formats in order to further the creation, acquisition and preservation of creative works which will be available for the use of future generations at the Library of Congress and other cultural memory organizations.

Recommended Formats Statement [PDF: 353 KB, 31 pp.]

Gathering the needles: evaluating the impact of gold open access content with traditional subscription journals

The Project COUNTER, known as the Code of Practice, is the standard that ensures vendors and publishers can provide their library customers with consistent, credible and comparable usage data. Utilizing the Project COUNTER Release 4 JR1-GOA report, two librarians explore these data in comparison to journal package subscriptions represented via the JR1 reports. The intent of the study was to assess the overall picture regarding article usage. The methodology and the initial outcomes of the study are provided, along with future plans and opportunities arising from the study findings.