An encounter between the representatives of international organizations operating in France was organized by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Development on 9 February 2017. In his opening speech, the Minister, Mr Jean-Marc Ayrault, mentioned France’s commitment to multilateralism, the promotion of human rights, access to education and preservation of cultural heritage. The Minister also announced some actions to ease the dialogue between French administration and international organizations to which the most favorable terms of French legislation will be applied. The challenges faced by international organizations shall be approached at the interministerial level. In her address, Ms Irina Bokova, General Director of UNESCO, rejoiced over the good cooperation  between her organization and the French Government, notably in the field of the preservation of historical landmarks threatened by armed conflicts.

The video of the presentation entitled Stewardship of the Digital Scholarly Record & of Each Nation’s Published Heritage given at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Fall Membership Meeting in Washington D.C., U.S.A. (Dec. 12-13, 2016) is now available on:
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/203130517
YouTube: https://youtu.be/9yprtDgwbEw

At 2016 Charleston Conference, Regina Reynolds, Director of the US ISSN centre at the Library of Congress, and Laurie Kaplan, Director of Editorial Operations at ProQuest, provided updates to several ongoing projects including the International ISSN Centre-Ulrich’s ISSN project, the revision of ISO-8 and the revision of the ISSN Standard (ISO-3297). Julie Zhu, Discovery Service Relations Manager at IEEE, presented the IEEE project to improve the ISSN in their metadata.

Their presentations are online.

With the implementation of RDA in Germany, the German National Library has been running a project for analyzing the possibilities of integrating the ISSN workflows by using RDA for cataloguing. The project’s aim was to merge the so far separated ISSN workflows for data and object into the general cataloguing workflow of the DNB and to reuse the metadata of the German Union Catalogue for Serials (Zeitschriftendatenbank) for ISSN records. The new workflow started at the beginning of December 2016.

IARLA fully endorsed Working Together to Ensure the Future of the Digital Scholarly Record – a statement by The Keepers Registry, a Jisc-funded service maintained by EDINA and the ISSN International Centre, that outlines the actions now required to tackle the evolving challenges of preserving and ensuring the long term accessibility of digital scholarship.

The statement sets out a series of recommended activities for publishers, research libraries and national libraries that can be undertaken to support archiving and preservation initiatives.

The French firm Progilone based in Lyons will assist the ISSN International Centre to build a new ISSN Web Portal and a Customer Extranet that will allow institutions to manage directly their subscriptions and publishers to track their ISSN requests.

On 12 December 2016,  Peter Burnhill (University of Edinburgh), Gaëlle Béquet (ISSN International Centre), Alan Darnell (University of Toronto) and Theron ‘Ted’ Westervelt (Library of Congress) gave a presentation about the Stewardship of the Digital Scholarly Record and the role of the Keepers’ Registry in the coordination of this preservation.

More about the CNI Fall 2016 Meeting

The 41st Meeting of ISSN Centres’ Directors took place in Brasilia at the invitation of the Instituto Brasileiro do Informaçào em Ciência e Tecnologia, which hosts the ISSN Centre for Brazil.

Exploitation of the open access model by unscrupulous publishers can seem a threat to the future of scholarly publishing. But the situation is not  as simple as bad guys vs. good guys. This is rather a natural outgrowth of the ease of publishing on the internet and the rise of OA publishing.

Regina Reynolds, Director of the U.S. ISSN Center at the Library of Congress, presented two papers: one about the project the ISSN International Centre and ProQuest are currently engaged in ; the second about predatory publishing practices. For more information