ROAD has been developed with the support of the Communication and Information Sector of UNESCO, it provides a free access to a subset of the ISSN Register. This subset comprises bibliographic records which describe scholarly resources in Open Access identified by an ISSN : journals, monographic series, conference proceedings and academic repositories. ROAD records are enriched by metadata about the coverage of the resources by indexing and abstracting databases, registries and journals indicators. They are downloadable as a MARC XML dump and will be available as RDF triples in 2014.

ROAD is available as a beta version at: http://road.issn.org/

It will be developed all along 2014 (extension of the coverage, additional features…).

We hope you will enjoy it.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO, United States) is seeking comments on the draft recommended practice Open Access Metadata and Indicators (NISO RP-22-201x). Launched in January 2013, the NISO Open Access Metadata and Indicators Working Group was chartered to develop protocols and mechanisms for machine-processing metadata and identifying the accessibility or rights status.

In the green open access environment, the embargo’s length is the key for a good balance between vital incomes for the publisher and free access for the scientific community.

Jeffrey Bealls’ updated list of predatory publishers.

How do you judge how much a scientific study or academic article has been used?  Researcher Philip Davis is trying to provide some new answers to that question by taking a look at ‘usage half-life,’ in an effort to learn more about the academic publishing life cycle.

Complete study

Several publishing associations are banding together over a new set of principles to tell the legitimate journals from the crowd of questionable editorial practices.

The button, an easy-to-use browser bookmarklet, searches for alternative access to the article, identifying open access versions of articles/research on the internet while mapping where obstacles are inhibiting research advances around the world.

Women are seriously under-represented within the academic publishing system: this is the conclusion of two teams of scientists after reviewing the authorship of 5.4 million peer-reviewed articles.

Presentation of a new peer reviewing model based on the reviewers’ private thoughts. In a common process, peer reviewers may be asked to stick to an objective assessment of whether a paper’s methods look sound. And this, the author thinks, can be damaging especially in some contentious fields.

Scientists overwhelmingly support the notion of making research papers freely available, but fewer publish their work in so-called open-access journals that make papers free immediately upon publication.

Trends and challenges for the libraries in 2014: ebooks lending, new technologies, services platforms, etc.

Challenges and perspectives for 2014 by the UKSG commitee members (metadata, open access, universities’ initiatives,etc)

The main challenges of the digital preservation: research data management, digital preservation policies, financial resources.

2.7 million pages have recently been made available via the catalogue of the German National Library for free re-use and research and information purposes. Full-text searches can be performed in these documents.

Vast amounts of information and data are being generated every day through government, academic, economic and social activities. Text and data mining has emerged as a significant tool to assist individuals and institutions identify patterns, trends and anomalies in data, and to develop new efficiencies and forms of knowledge.

The document itself is available at this link.

Since 1st January 2014, all the metadata issued from the BnF catalogues (more than 12 million bibliographic records) are freely available, even for a commercial use.