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.

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 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)

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.

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.]

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.

Organizational identifiers provide the means for a variety of stakeholders to find and identify an organization accurately and define relationships among its sub-units and with other organizations. This OCLC report focuses on organizational identifiers from the perspective of academic institutions, and outlines several scenarios where the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) can be used to disambiguate organizations, including real-world examples.

You are invited to comment on FRBR-LRM as part of a world-wide review. Comments will be reviewed by the FRBR Review Group and by the Consolidation Editorial Group. Please send all comments to Chris Oliver (christine.oliver@uottawa.ca), Chair of the FRBR Review Group by May 1, 2016.

Since 15th April, 2016, voting is open about the systematic review of the ISSN standard.

The public survey about the ISBN standard PR NF ISO 2108 revision, has finished in April 2016. This is the second step of a three year project to publish a revised standard in 2017. The Working Group consists of over 30 international experts as well as key organisations in liaison such as GS1 and its convenor is Stella Griffiths, Executive Director of the International ISBN Agency.