The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) supports NISO’s (National Information Standards Organization) efforts to harmonize the expression of open access and re-use rights for publications. Among the 5 solutions submitted, COAR insists on the necessity of a common vocabulary and widens the scope of recommendations to research data.

The Library of Congress participates in the NISO project PESC (Protocol for Exchanging Serial Content) which aims at developping a recommended practice for exchange and archiving of serial publications.

FOSTER (Foster Open Science Training for European Research) is an EC-funded project aiming to help young researchers learn about Open Science, OA and more.

Representatives of research and academic libraries across the USA have written an Open Letter in which they contest the conclusions of a study promoting this new metric. According to the signatories, half-life reports provide an interesting metric for comparing journal downloads across disciplines, but this study fails to provide any evidence that journal subscription rates will decline as a result of public access policies.

Springer announced that it has added altmetrics information to every article available on SpringerLink (link.springer.com), the publishing company’s online platform. The data is provided by Altmetric, a London-based start-up which tracks and analyzes the online activity around scholarly literature.

Copyright issues between some publishers and their authors. How to disseminate scientific articles without infringing the laws?

Despite the recent criticism on this method, systematic anonymity for reviewers seems essential for Michael McCarthy, researcher at the University of Melbourne.

A recent report on the market for social sciences and humanities (SSH) publications has been released: Global Social Science & Humanities Publishing 2013-2014 . The author underlines some of its important points: language and media used, funding, relevance in the open access environment, etc.

Common in journalism, public speeches or collective works, ghostwriting is also considered to be a form of plagiarism, an unethical behavior in the world of academic studies in general and the field of research in particular.

Most books published in Norway before 2001 are going online for free thanks to an initiative that may have found the formula to reconcile authors with the web.
The National Library of Norway, responsible of this unprecedented project, is digitising tens of thousands of titles. Even the copyright-protected books will be available free online – with the consent of the copyright holders – at the website bokhylla.no.

Since the start of 2014, several French Universities have cancelled their subscriptions to notorious scientific journals and databases because of the combined effect of budget cuts and important price increases. Researchers, although comprehensive, are worried.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the British Library are launching a two-year research project which will explore the future of academic books in the context of open access publishing and continuing digital change.

OCLC Research has released a new report, “Understanding the Collective Collection: Towards a System-wide Perspective on Library Print Collections”. One important trend is that libraries and library service providers will devote more attention to system-wide organization of collections —whether the “system” is a consortium, a region or a country.