Authors lose time and effort when their manuscript is rejected by a journal and they have to repeat the submission process in subsequent journals. MECA is a NISO project which is developing a common means to easily transfer manuscripts between and among manuscript systems, such as those in use at publishers and preprint servers.

The MECA Recommended Practice Public Comment period has ended. You may access the draft document and view comments received, which will be considered by the Working Group prior to final publication.

The first ever NISO Plus conference was held in Baltimore, USA, on 23 to 25 February 2020. It was centered on scholarly communication related to standards which is of special interest to SciELO and ORCID. NISO Plus succeeded in avoiding the “sage on stage” traditional conference format, and was all about open, lively (and nerdy!) discussions. This post recaps the discussion around contemporaneous standards.

When UKSG was cancelled, ICEDIS decided to make a virtue out of a necessity, arranging a conference call round-up instead. Sixteen colleagues from a range of organizations interested in serials took part in this virtual meeting. Tim Devenport, making a brief recap about ONIX-PC and other serials standards maintained by EDItEUR, announced the decision to place ONIX-PC in ‘maintenance mode’ unless or until new requirements or novel use cases emerge. EDItEUR’s Graham Bell said more about the organisation’s work outside of serials, focusing particularly on recent progress with ONIX 3.0, Thema and EDItX.

There then followed 2 presentations on topics related to the core mission of ICEDIS:

• Nathalie Cornic (ISSN International Centre) updated the group on progress since ISSN-IC took over the stewardship of the Keepers Registry – a vital resource covering e-journal preservation that records which agencies have preserved what;
• Todd Carpenter of NISO briefed the meeting on a series of NISO, ISO and other initiatives either underway or at the planning stage.

Copies of the meeting Minutes are available from the EDItEUR website (slides used by each presenter are linked from within the minutes).

During its last two meetings, the RDA Steering Committee (RSC) drew up and adopted the RSC Action Plan 2020-2022.  This action plan was also presented at ALA Midwinter by Kathy Glenan, Chair of RSC.  In parallel, there is a Strategic Plan of the RDA Board.

New members for ISNI

Interest in ISNI membership continues to increase as the standard is adopted or rolled out more widely. A consortium of the leading university libraries in the Netherlands, represented by SURFmarket, has signed up for ISNI membership, bringing at least academic 13 libraries into the ISNI fold. ISNI also hopes soon to welcome the group of legal deposit libraries in the UK and Ireland, affiliating with ISNI in a joint effort coordinated by the British Library (which is already a Registration Agency in its own right).

Outside the library world, ISNI is also in advanced discussions with a number of organizations in the music industry, one of which Quansic (located in Switzerland) joined late in 2019. The ISNI board is keen to extend the territories where ISNI is directly represented, and have dialogues underway with prospective Registration Agencies in both South America and Australasia.

Since 1 January 2020,  the Frankfurt-based technology and information provider MVB has taken over the role of a registration agency for the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. MVB is building the new standardization service during the first half of 2020. All author information in the VLB (Verzeichnis Lieferbarer Bücher), the catalogue of books in print used in the German-speaking world, automatically receives an ISNI, provided the German National Library has clearly identified the author.  From now on, publishers who maintain their titles on vlb.de can also add ISNIs to their authors. Consequently, the number of titles with unique creator identifiers will increase significantly within a short period of time.

The conversation continued at the 2019 ALA Midwinter Conference in Philadelphia between representatives of the RDA Steering Committee and the larger BIBFRAME community, which includes the Library of Congress/NDMSO, LD4P, Share-VDE, and the organizer group of the annual BIBFRAME workshops in Europe. A possible field of future cooperation is an approach to application profiles. For the coming years, the RSC has a BIBFRAME mapping on its action plan. The group is pleased to report continuing progress and is planning to meet again at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago in June 2020. All the presentations of ALA Midwinter Conference are now online.

ISO standards regularly undergo a systematic revision process. A ballot about ISO 4 standard revision has been issued by ISO and will be closed by February 25, 2020. This ballot is intended to decide if the standard should be revised, maintained without any modification, or withdrawn. The ISSN International Centre is in favour of confirming the ISO 4 standard. Contact your ISO national member body to voice your support for the confirmation.

The following resolutions are currently submitted to vote by ISO TC46/SC9:

RESOLUTION 2020-01: Stop Publication ISO 3297

ISO/TC46/SC9 resolves to stop the publication of ISO 3297 to incorporate the missing section and make other amendments to the document resulting from the FDIS ballot closed November 29, 2019 and the translation of ISO/FDIS 3297 as contained in ISO_PUB_3297.doc.

RESOLUTION 2020-02: Launch 2nd FDIS Ballot

ISO/TC46/SC9 resolves to launch a 2nd FDIS ballot of the document with the missing text included and the other proposed changes included. Please note that a 2nd FDIS is an exception when the first FDIS resulted in approval. In this case with missing text, this is the only option to ensure a well vetted document.

Please contact your ISO national member body to support these resolutions before March 16^th, 2020.