The Federation of Russia has recently acceded to the Statutes of the International Centre for the registration of serial publications which was established in Paris as a result of an agreement between UNESCO and the Government of the French Republic. After signing the working agreement on December 3rd with the ISSN International Centre, the ISSN centre of the Federation of Russia is now operational and is hosted by the Russian Book Chamber in Moscow.

 

 

On 20th January, 2016, ROAD, the Directory of Scholarly Open Access Resources, was presented at UCL Centre for Publishing / Department of Information Studies / University College London, in the framework of a seminar around Discovery and Discoverability.

Delegates heard about enhancing discovery systems, how new tools are being deployed and used and how to make their content more findable. ROAD presentation made part of the case studies highlighted.

ROAD presentation is sharable on ISSN IC Slideshare.

After being approached by some editors for identifiers during the grant application process for researchers and authors, ORCID was asked to help them in providing information and tools for a common low-barrier user experience.

The last IFLA Metadata newsletter includes an article about the 40th anniversary of ISSN network, making a balance of the past and envisaging the future.

This newly official edition is a revision of ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2012, also known as JATS 1.0, first published in July 2012. JATS 1.1 includes changes based on comments from users made on JATS 1.0 through February 2015, which have been addressed by the NISO JATS Standing Committee. The Journal Article Tag Suite provides a common XML format in which publishers and archives can exchange journal content. The JATS provides a set of XML elements and attributes for describing the textual and graphical content of journal articles as well as some non-article material such as letters, editorials, and book and product reviews.

The French digital Republic bill was presented to MPs on 19 January, for a a public session examination. The National Union of Publishing /Syndicat National de l’Edition and the National Federation of Specialized Information Press / Fédération nationale de la presse d’information spécialisée denounced a project that would jeopardize the French Scientific Research. If the researchers and the publishing community claim for a real discussion, the government representatives assert that the economic risks have been taken into account.  [Since the publication of this article, the amendment has been adopted]   (Article in French)

Education minister Sander Dekker will push to make more journal papers free to bring the Netherlands’ presidency of the EU Council. The aim is to confront the inequality of scientific research publishing in Open Access domain and the budget they diposed to do so.

The importance of blogging and twitting about journals articles – even old ones – makes a difference in the regularity of a journal and on how often they are read and cited. That debate was initiated by Melissa Terras, Director of University College London’s (UCL) Centre for Digital Humanities. The benefits for both scholars and journals are presented.

The Netherlands is leading what it hopes will be a pan-European effort in 2016 to push scholarly publishers towards open-access (OA) business models: making more papers free for all users as soon as they are published.

A close review is made on the situation in The Netherlands and the UK, as well as some other proposals coming from other Northern European countries. In the end, may be a successful push for immediate OA would ultimately need to be global — not limited to Europe.

The University of Liège bases its Open Repository and Bibliography Institutional directory on the “mandat à la liègeoise“. This mandate makes compulsory the deposit of publications that matches a powerful incentive, since only publications deposited on ORBI are taken into account in the evaluation within this university.       (Article in French)

Ex Libris has formed a program to help Ex Libris harness Linked Data technology in its resource management and discovery solutions. The Linked Data Collaboration Program aims to ensure that Linked Data will best fit the needs, use cases, and future plans of the academic community.

The program is online.

The central role of libraries in the growing shift toward Open Access, Open Education and Open Data will be explored.