The ISSN International Centre is currently updating its services which will include a new interface to request ISSN assignment and a new web portal to access ISSN data more easily. A presentation will be given on Wednesday 23 August at 1.00 p.m. at IFLA Expo Pavilion / Lab on stand A120.

The ISSN IC will participate in the 9th Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (COASP) to be held in Lisbon on the 20th and 21st September, 2017.  Community and collaboration is at the heart of open access publishing, and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) is excited to gather all stakeholders working in open access around the world, noticeably publishers and librarians. Panel topics this year are: The market for APCs; Open infrastructure in scholarly communications; Research evaluation and assessment; Open peer review in both journal publishing and in open access books and monographs publishing.

The preliminary program is available. Registration is still open.

OpenEdition Books is now using the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) author identification system.

This new functionality is part of High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science Infrastructure (HIRMEOS), a European project that aims to enrich and enhance five European open access publication platforms in the human and social sciences.

In scholarly publishing, one of the ways to measure a return on investment is to assess circulation and usage statistics. COUNTER is an industry-wide standard made for counting the use of electronic resources.  The second draft of Release 5 will be incorporating significant changes in response to the feedback received from both publishers and librarians through a survey.

Besides, a UKSG seminar was held on the same subject on 17 July 2017, and you may download the slides as well as these resources:

The Friendly Guide to Release 5 for Providers

Transition Timeline

E-book usage: counting the challenges and opportunities (Insights article)

Some publishers strive to improve their metadata with the goal of providing a better discovery experience. Mike Roberts describes Emerald Publishing’s extra step: publicizing its improved metadata using product-specific checklists and NISO’s Open Discovery Initiative (ODI).

In many disciplines, data are highly decentralized across thousands of online databases (repositories, registries, and knowledgebases). A group of US scholars outline 10 lessons they have learned about the identifier qualities and best practices that facilitate large-scale data integration. Specifically, they propose actions that identifier practitioners (database providers) should take in the design, provision and reuse of identifiers.

To share a better understanding of author’s perspectives on APC payments, Knowledge Exchange has carried out a study among authors of six research organisations in Northern Europe. It was concluded that OA publishing is supported by authors because of the larger exposure and the freedom of reuse of the article. As a result, their discretionary research funds are often used to pay the APCs.  Thus, authors need to be supported in areas such as Financing APCs, Administrative procedures for APCs and Communication about OA publishing.

Both reports are freely available :

• Financial and administrative issues around article publication costs for Open Access
• Paying for Open Access: The Authors perspective

Using Springer Nature as a case study, it is shown that major challenges exist around the integrity, efficiency and speed of research communication. Supporting researchers and advancing discovery systems could facilitate publishers efforts to develop policies, practices and solutions that help scientists to publish robust and insightful research, support the development of new areas of knowledge, and make ideas and information accessible to all.

The Library of Congress and the National Archives announced their agencies have joined the PDF Association, which promotes adoption of international standards for portable document format technology, as partner organizations. Both federal agencies collect, and produce, numerous documents as PDFs.

“The Library’s participation will foster enhanced relationships with industry, providing more opportunities for the Library to communicate its needs to the community that develops the software which content producers and publishers use for digital documents and more,” said Mark Sweeney, Associate Librarian for Library Services at the Library of Congress.

Fifty HathiTrust member libraries have proposed to retain more than 16 million volumes for 25 years under the HathiTrust Shared Print Program. These volumes correspond to more than 4.8 million individual book titles held in the HathiTrust Digital Library (about 65% of all HathiTrust digital monographs). This is a significant step toward the primary goal of the program: to ensure that print copies of all HathiTrust digital holdings remain available to scholars for many years to come. The Shared Print Program is a core program of HathiTrust, supported by and benefiting all of the 120 HathiTrust members.

John Tuck, Royal Holloway University Library and head of LIBER’s Working Group on Leadership and Workforce Development, is reporting on the latest LIBER Journées. This is a key initiative for LIBER, and it is part of a broader leadership development programme for librarians. Highlights of the training programme held at Sciences Po Paris in May 2017 can be seen in this video.

The United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library (DHL) and IFLA held side event titled : 2030 Vision: How Libraries Support the UN’s Work on Sustainable Development during the High Level Political Forum in New York. In the context of the official launch of the Development and Access to Information report on 17 July, this event was an opportunity to celebrate the role of libraries in delivering access to information at the global level. It underlined the importance of collaboration between libraries to build a global knowledge society. That is why laws, regulations, investments, infrastructure and librairies will need to coordinate themselves.

NASIG held its annual conference in Indianapolis June 8-11 2017. The conference theme was Racing to the Crossroads. Presenters positioned their talks around what librarians are racing toward and which crossroads concern them. Sessions covered include topics about identifying core competencies for e-resource librarians and breakout sessions on the nuts and bolts of collection assessment.

This article describes the results of a systematic review of peer-reviewed, published research articles about discovery layers, i.e. user-friendly interfaces or systems that provide single-search box access to library content. Focusing on articles in LISTA published 2009–2013, a set of 80 articles was coded for community of users, journal type, research method, and results. This study demonstrates that the scholarly communications surrounding discovery systems or layers are evolving, moving from technologists to a converging of general responsibilities and concerns, but with a pronounced focus on academic institutions. Nevertheless, there is little research published uniquely about public library users, more specifically about how discovery layers affect public libraries or children.

DIVE+ has been awarded the Grand Prize at the LODLAM Summit, held at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in June 2017. The summit brought together a hundred of experts in the community of Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives and Museums. DIVE+ is an event-centric linked data digital collection browser aimed to provide an integrated and interactive access to multimedia objects from various heterogeneous online collections. It enriches the structured metadata of online collections with linked open data vocabularies with focus on events, people, locations and concepts that are depicted or associated with particular collection objects. DIVE+ presentation is online.

The current format of pre-publication peer review offers little or no incentive for the selfless behavior of peer reviewers and provides little guarantee of efficiency and transparency in the process. This observation is in line with numerous other studies that share the notion that a thorough review of the current format of peer review is necessary to restore credibility, efficiency and transparency, while providing scholarly communication the desired celerity.

See also the article in Spanish and Portuguese.

COPE’s European Seminar 2017 held in May 2017, in London was the opportunity to celebrate 20 years of COPE, with a special programme reflecting on past challenges and future outlook for research and publication ethics.

The seminar included invited talks from international speakers, as well as a panel discussion on how new technolgies and new models might help in the future.

The presentations are online.

Dissemin is a tool encouraging researchers to publish their articles in open access. It allows researchers to measure the accessibility of their publications and put their pre-prints online in a few clicks. The metadata are automatically filled in by Dissemin. This functionality is made possible by harvesting two main sources: BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) and Crossref.

On 12 July 2017, OASPA hosted a Twitter chat with Caroline Sutton (Head of Open Scholarship Development at Taylor & Francis and member of the OASPA Board), Rebecca Kennison (Principal of K|N Consultants and the co-founder of the Open Access Network), Dr Jennifer Edmond (Research Fellow and Director of Strategic Projects for the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Trinity College Dublin and co-director of the Trinity Center for Digital Humanities) and Ron Dekker (Director of CESSDA).

A full account of the discussion can be viewed on the Twitter hashtag #OASPAChat, and a summary is posted on Storify. This Twitter Chat extended the webinar held in June 2017 with the same panelists.

The full program of the 13th conference on Linked Data and the Semantic Web is available and registration is open.

The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers will celebrate its 10th Anniversary.

Two keynote speakers will talk about Trust, Truth and Scholarly Publishing.

Registration details and programme are online.

The event will be hosted by the Library of Congress and will precede the 80th Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) to be held from 27th October-1st November 2017.

Preleminary program is online.

Check #icstiGA2017  and ICSTI website for updates.

Registration is open.

Topic: What’s Past is Prologue

Preconference schedule available now.