Created in France in 2009 by library and documentation professionals, Mir@bel aims to enhance the content of scientific periodicals accessible online. Mir@bel facilitates access to journals by providing links to full text online, abstracts, summaries or article indexing and allows you to bounce back to many complementary sites.

The ISSN Portal exposes its data in linked open data. From now on, nearly 15,600 records of the Mir@bel portal are linked to the records of the corresponding resources of the ISSN portal.

Discover these records: https://portal.issn.org/?q=api/search&search[]=MUST=srcname=MIRABEL

The ISSN International Centre has been contributing to the Keepers Registry (keepers.issn.org) since its inception and started hosting it on the ISSN Portal in December 2019.

Keepers Registry acts as a global monitor on the archiving arrangements for digital and digitized continuing resources.

The ISSN International Centre wants to set up a Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) that will meet twice a year, oversee the development of the service and submit plans to the ISSN IC Governing Board. Core TAC membership is to comprise three representatives from the Keeper organisations and three volunteers from the user community, i.e. representatives from libraries’ and/or publishers’ associations, plus the ISSN IC Director (ex officio).

If digital preservation and serial publishing are key issues for the association you represent and you want to share ideas and opportunities, please contact Gaelle Bequet (gaelle.bequet@issn.org) to submit your candidacy for the TAC. ​

Since its inception, Sudoc (the collective catalogue of French academic libraries)  has been supplied with records of the ISSN Register. The partial release of ISSN data since January 2018 now allows a wider exposure of these data to ABES users. ABES (the French Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education) can now expose in RDF key ISSN data released as Linked Open Data, via the Sudoc catalogue from the perennial URL of the record. ABES reaffirms that the widest possible opening up of the data is one of the main thrusts of its developments in the coming years. The unique collaboration between ISSN International Centre and ABES for the production and management of bibliographic data with high added value must be enhanced by the widest possible exposure, and ABES will endeavour, in the years to come, to further promote these developments.

[Article in French]

The ISSN International Centre participated in the 2020 LD4 free online Conference on Linked Data in Libraries. Deanna White, ISSN IC Project Officer, gave a presentation entitled “Liberté, Egalité et Free Données : The Use of Linked Data at the ISSN International Centre”. She shared information about the data model implemented in the ISSN Portal.

ISO standard 3297 – ISSN is currently undergoing a systematic revision process which is about to be terminated with a second FDIS ballot that opened on June 26th, 2020 and will close on August 21st. Through this ballot, ISO member organisations will vote on the amendments to the ISSN standard and approve the publication of the sixth version of the standard.

ISNI-IA has set up two ‘consultation groups’ open to interested stakeholders in the recorded music and library sectors, and each group has established regular meetings to discuss how ISNI can best meet any sector-specific needs. The groups centre around the Registration agencies and Member organisations, but are open to others with particular interests.

As of the beginning of June 2020, ISNI has introduced a largely rebuilt and redesigned website.

The site navigation and the way that much of ISNI’s reference material is presented were enhanced. Over the coming months more improvements are planned, such as facilitating the accessibility of the site to the visually impaired.

With 27 ISNI Registration Agencies and 26 ISNI Members at the time of writing, the usage and uptake of ISNI continues to increase, both in domains such as the library community where it has long been established and in other sectors such as the music industry and organizations active in rights management and collections.

The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) Editorial Policy Committee (EPC) is a ten-member international joint committee of OCLC and ALA. Six exhibits will be discussed at the Editorial Policy Committee online meeting 142B, taking place during July 2020. You can find the text of all six proposals to revise Dewey at oc.lc/deweyexhibits.

Despite the various lockdowns, work has been ongoing; virtual activities are planned throughout the year, notably virtual Standing Committee meetings will be organised during this summer. This issue notably reports about Dewey updates (p. 6), the new French National Library website (p. 10), the new Director General of the German National Library and various projects (p. 11), projects and developments on name authority control and identity management led by the Cooperative Committee for Chinese Name Authority (CCCNA) (p. 9). Advances on RDA are also reported p 29.

The MARC Advisory Committee (MAC) advises the MARC Steering Group concerning changes to the MARC 21 formats. The MAC Annual Meeting was held online from 30 June-2 July 2020. The recordings are now available. Three discussions are specifically related to continuing resources:

• Changes to fields 008/21 and 006/04 for type of continuing resource in the MARC 21 bibliographic Format (Discussion Paper No. 2020-DP10),
• Defining subfield $0 (Authority record control number or standard number) in field 022 in order to provide a place in the ISSN field for the ISSN URI (Discussion Paper No. 2020-DP11),
• The modernization of field 856 in the MARC 21 formats (Proposal No. 2020-03).

IFLA received a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation as part of the WikiCite project.

The objective of the WikiCite project is to improve citations in Wikimedia projects through the development of open bibliographic data on Wikidata. Wikidata itself is a multilingual, open source repository of structured data and is playing an increasingly large role in supporting Linked Open Data initiatives in libraries.

IFLA’s Committee on Standards and Linked Data Technical Subcommittee (LIDATEC) are pleased to announce the launch of IFLA Namespaces.

This website allows for linked data access to various IFLA Standards, including:

• The FRBR Vocabularies
• The ISBD Vocabularies
• The UNIMARC Vocabularies
• MulDiCat

The next standard to be included will be the LRM (Library Reference Model).

DataCite announces the launch of the new persistent identifier (PID) services registry available at https://pidservices.org, a new service to find services built upon different PIDs from core technology providers and those who integrate from across a variety of disciplinary areas. This is a combined effort across multiple organizations as part of the EC-funded FREYA project grant with the aim of furthering discoverability of PIDs and the services that are built upon them.

Hindawi has launched a new author services section of its website, providing authors with the ability to take advantage of a wide range of tools and services to help them make the most of their research throughout the publication process. Among the service providers that have partnered with Hindawi on this initiative are Editage and Impact Science, both solutions offered by Cactus Communications, a technology company accelerating scientific advancement.

In October, books, literature and authors are traditionally the focus of life in Frankfurt. To ensure that remains the case in the year of COVID-19, Frankfurter Buchmesse (14–18 October 2020) has developed a wide-ranging digital programme to complement the face-to-face meetings that will take place on the fairgrounds and at the many events in the city. The digital programme of Frankfurter Buchmesse 2020 will be co-created by publishers and will be accessible by trade visitors and literature fans all around the world. The digital events and services of Frankfurter Buchmesse 2020 will be available free of charge thanks to funding provided by Germany’s Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Minister of State Monika Grütters.

SPARC is releasing The 2020 Update  to its comprehensive Landscape Analysis and accompanying Roadmap for Action, on a new interactive website designed to make taking action easier for librarians and campus administrators. The 2020 Update provides suggested actions for the community to consider, with a particular emphasis on establishing strong principles to guide the purchase of any data analytics related product or service.  it also provides additional deep detail on the financial performance of key academic publishers in 2019 and 2020, as well as their response to changes in their respective marketplaces.

In March 2019, Florida State University loses its access to Elsevier. Without renewing a $2 million annual license agreement, 6,000 researchers and 40,000 students cannot access the 1,800 journals of the world’s leading publisher. Articles must now be purchased individually, which is about $20-30 for a PDF. A year later, the balance sheet is quite different. The big deal is still the preferred negotiation framework between the 5 major publishers and universities. However, licenses have been increasingly cancelled since 2015 and may well reach record figures in 2020. This briefing note reviews the development and characteristics of the economy of the big deal from 1995 to 2020.

[Article in French]

How do libraries decide which titles to keep when they cancel the Big Deal? What do the results look like? A look at seven libraries that walked away.

In this short video recording, Nick Poole, the CEO of CILIP – the Library and Information Association, in the United Kingdom, discusses about the IFLA Strategy.

IFLA Journal has just released a special issue about Information literacy, from practice to research and back again. The aim is to look beyond standards and processes, engaging instead in the potential for developing knowledge to guide information literacy practice across disciplines, contexts and environments.

Scientific journals are run by researchers, experts in the discipline, who work, in this framework, for scientific publishing houses. Some researchers have also understood the value of offering these publishing giants new scholarly journals which they propose to “manage” in order to make their activity and their field of research flourish. Two cases of system drift are explained.

Publishers commonly require authors to sign exclusive publishing agreements which restrict what authors can do with their research findings, including making articles Open Access in line with their funders’ requirements. To address this problem, cOAlition S has developed a Rights Retention Strategy, which will empower their funded researchers to publish in their journal of choice, including subscription journals, and provide Open Access in compliance with Plan S.

OPERAS is pleased to announce that they have been awarded the tender for a study to explore collaborative non-commercial Open Access publishing models for Open Access (a.k.a. Diamond OA) announced by cOAlition S in March 2020. To perform the study, OPERAS will coordinate a consortium of 10 participating organizations. The study will be delivered by the end of 2020, and regular public updates on progress are planned along the way. The study is financially supported by Science Europe. All data collected will be shared under a CC0 license.

Theme: the legacy of COVID-19 on scholarly communication.

It will run over three sessions from 16‑18 September, with the ALPSP AGM and Awards Finalists session on 8 September.  Programme details will be announced soon.