From 27 to 29 October 2026, the second edition of PIDfest, an international event dedicated to persistent identifiers (PIDs), took place at the Naturalis museum in Leiden, the Netherlands. Organised by SURF, a Dutch organisation dedicated to digital services for higher education and research, and DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services), this event followed on from the first edition, hosted in 2024 in Prague by the National Technical Library of the Czech Republic (NTK).

The event brought together numerous stakeholders from the international ecosystem of persistent identifiers to discuss technical developments, their uses in research, and the challenges relating to their governance and funding.

An ever-evolving ecosystem of identifiers

A significant part of the programme was devoted to identifiers associated with the DOI (Digital Object Identifiers) ecosystem, featuring presentations by Crossref, ROR (Research Organisation Registry), ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) and ARDC (Australian Research Data Commons), which is developing the RAID (Research Activity Identifier).

These presentations provided an opportunity to assess the progress made in linking identifiers and research infrastructures. They also highlighted the value of continuing dialogue between the various communities in order to foster a broader and more complementary approach to identification systems.

Artificial intelligence featured prominently in the discussions. Several speakers emphasised that AI tools do not yet take sufficient account of the persistent identifiers used in scientific research. Meanwhile, representatives from Crossref and ROR outlined the opportunities offered by these technologies to improve the quality, consistency and enrichment of metadata.

The long-term financial sustainability of infrastructures: a shared challenge

Representatives from the NTK presented the activities of their National Centre for Persistent Identifiers, which receives funding under the CARDS (Czech Academic and Research Discovery Services) project, supported by the European Johannes Amos Comenius Operational Programme for the period 2023–2028. This initiative supports the development and adoption of persistent identifiers within the Czech research ecosystem, complementing national initiatives linked to the EOSC (European Open Science Cloud).

The speakers discussed, in particular, the use of identifiers by Czech research institutions and research information systems (Current Research Information Systems, CRIS). They also presented ePIC (Persistent Identifier Consortium for eResearch), a persistent identifier infrastructure based on Handle technology, which enables the long-term identification of various types of digital objects, including datasets, documents and research samples.

Discussions centred on the prospects for funding activities beyond 2028, highlighting the importance of sustainable resources to ensure the continuity of services. This concern was also expressed by representatives of RAID, whose current funding is set to expire in 2028.

These discussions serve as a reminder that the sustainability of persistent identifiers depends not only on reliable technical solutions, but also on economic models and governance mechanisms capable of ensuring their long-term maintenance. The NTK will also host the 52nd meeting of the directors of the National ISSN Centres in Prague in October 2027.

ARK identifiers and the importance of link maintenance

Several presentations focused on ARK (Archival Resource Key) identifiers, which enable the long-term identification of digital and heritage resources. The Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) presented its work on implementing these identifiers for its digitised collections and archives.

In France, these identifiers are used in particular by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) to ensure the long-term identification of its digital resources and bibliographic records. The Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education (Abes) also utilises the ARK identifiers assigned by the BnF to strengthen the interconnection between records in Sudoc and those in the BnF’s General Catalogue, particularly for serial publications. The use of this identification system is also among the options being considered in national initiatives on the permanent identification of research organisations.

John Kunze, the founder of the ARK system, led a workshop on the fundamental principles of persistent identifiers. In particular, he emphasised that no identification system can, on its own, guarantee the permanent availability of a digital resource. The stability of identifiers depends, in fact, on the maintenance of links and the updating of the addresses to which they redirect.

This observation highlights the importance of actively managing identification infrastructures, which is essential for ensuring continuous access to resources. ARK’s decentralised model, which relies on naming agencies, is also of particular interest in a context where issues of digital sovereignty, data control and the autonomy of research infrastructures are playing an increasingly significant role in public policy.

Metadata quality and identifier reliability

The presentations on ROR provided an opportunity to review the origins and development of this international register of research organisations, which was initially compiled using data from the GRID (Global Research Identifier Database) register.

One workshop, in particular, addressed methods for improving its metadata, combining contributions from the organisations concerned, validation procedures and artificial intelligence tools. The discussions also highlighted the difficulties faced by identifier managers when dealing with requests from organisations whose status or scientific activities require in-depth verification.

These situations underscore the importance of transparent and rigorous procedures to maintain trust in identifier registries. The assignment of an identifier cannot, in itself, constitute recognition of an organisation’s scientific quality or institutional legitimacy.

Towards more inclusive national identifier strategies

Several countries, notably France and Germany, are gradually developing national strategies for persistent identifiers in research. These initiatives represent a significant step forward in strengthening the interoperability of information systems, facilitating the circulation of metadata and improving the visibility of research results.

It is nevertheless essential that these strategies take into account the full range of identifiers that underpin the scientific information ecosystem, going beyond those most frequently used in research infrastructures.

In this regard, the ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) and the ISBN (International Standard Book Number) play a role that complements that of other persistent identifiers. They contribute to the reliable identification of scientific publications and to the interlinking of bibliographic data with other components of the research ecosystem.

The ISSN International Centre wishes to encourage greater consideration of these complementary aspects in national and international strategies relating to persistent identifiers. Through its network of National Centres, it intends to continue the dialogue with research stakeholders, standardisation bodies and digital infrastructure managers in order to promote an open, interoperable and sustainable approach to the identification of scientific resources.

Participation in PIDfest 2026 thus provided a unique opportunity to strengthen exchanges with other identifier communities and to highlight the ISSN network’s vital contribution to the reliability and longevity of scientific information.

Jayshree Mamtora, Tracy Creagh, Caitlin Savage, Lucy Walton and Donna Coventry

This article is based on a presentation at the IFLA World Library and Information Congress 2026 that was included in the session: The Transformative Power of Diamond Open Access: Building Knowledge as a Global Good

Diamond open access publishing is gaining momentum across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, with more than 200 journals now operating across the region. Supported largely by university libraries, these community-driven journals are free for both readers and authors. A growing Australasian Diamond Journal Publishing Community of Practice is helping institutions share expertise, develop standards, build publishing capacity, and strengthen advocacy for non-commercial scholarly communication. Examples from Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand universities demonstrate that successful Diamond publishing can begin with practical support, shared infrastructure, and collaboration, rather than large-scale investment.

Diamond open access (OA) publishing is gaining momentum across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, supported by a growing network of institutions, libraries, and scholarly communities committed to making research freely available to both readers and authors.

A Growing but Uneven Landscape

Open Access Australasia describes Diamond OA as a publishing model in which journals are free for readers to access and free for authors to publish in. These journals are typically community-driven and supported by institutions or national infrastructure rather than commercial publishers.

While Diamond publishing has a long history in Australasia, support for it has often developed in isolated and piecemeal ways, with limited national coordination. Recent data, however, indicates that the sector is substantial and growing. There are now at least 200 Diamond journals operating across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, with the majority published or supported by the tertiary education sector.

In Australia, just under half of all universities support Diamond journals, while in Aotearoa New Zealand the figure is slightly higher, with just over half of universities and tertiary institutions involved in supporting Diamond publishing initiatives.

University libraries play a particularly important role in this ecosystem. Many act as journal hosts, provide publishing advice, or maintain open publishing infrastructure. Others are still exploring what it means to take on a publishing role within their institution.

The most commonly used platform is PKP’s open-source software Open Journal Systems (OJS), although institutions also make use of university websites, custom-built publishing solutions, and commercial platforms such as Scholastica.

The Value of a Community of Practice

The diversity of approaches across the region highlights the need for greater collaboration and knowledge sharing. It was this need that led to the establishment of the Australasian Diamond Journal Publishing Community of Practice in 2024.

The initiative emerged from discussions following a satellite webinar held alongside the first Global Diamond Open Access Summit in 2023. Participants recognised that many librarians and publishing support staff were working independently with Diamond journals and could benefit from sharing expertise, experiences, and resources.

Today, the Community of Practice has grown to over 80 members, representing 31 Australian universities, seven New Zealand universities, and several external organisations. Most members work in libraries, although academic colleagues also contribute their expertise.

Meeting virtually every two months, the group provides an informal forum for discussing challenges, sharing solutions, and learning from one another’s experiences supporting Diamond journals.

More broadly, the community reflects increasing awareness of alternative scholarly publishing models and a growing desire within the sector to reduce reliance on commercial publishers.

Beyond Discussion: Building Sector Capability

The Community of Practice serves as much more than a discussion forum. It is increasingly becoming a mechanism for capacity building across the Australasian higher education sector.

Work focuses on developing shared language, evidence, standards, advocacy, and practical resources that can support institutions regardless of their publishing maturity. Members are also working to map Diamond journal activity across the region, providing a clearer understanding of the scale and impact of community-led publishing.

A range of practical resources is being shared, including governance frameworks, service model templates, and guidance documents. The community is also promoting standards relating to quality assurance, licensing, and good publishing practice, while providing peer support to libraries at different stages of developing publishing services.

Examples of Diamond Publishing in Practice

Across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, several institutions demonstrate what established library-supported publishing services can achieve.

Deakin University Library hosts and supports a range of Diamond OA journals edited and managed by academic staff through its Open Journals at Deakin platform. These journals are freely accessible and indexed across multiple databases, helping to increase their visibility and discoverability.

The library also maintains access to discontinued titles, ensuring valuable scholarly content remains available to researchers and the wider community.

At Queensland University of Technology (QUT), the library-based QUT Open Press supports the publication of open textbooks, journals, and other open educational resources.

A dedicated journal manager provides support for a number of Diamond journals, while editorial responsibility remains with academic staff. This model demonstrates how libraries can combine publishing expertise with academic leadership to support sustainable open publishing.

Diverse Pathways to Participation

Importantly, institutions do not need to establish comprehensive publishing programs from the outset.

James Cook University, for example, supports journals through hosting services, guidance on OJS, and the development of formal agreements such as Memoranda of Understanding. The University of Melbourne provides support for scholar-led journals through publishing advice, DOI registration, and clear guidance distinguishing Diamond OA from Read and Publish agreements. Meanwhile, Western Sydney University is building complementary capability through initiatives such as Western Open Books, which provides fee-free open publishing services.

These examples illustrate that universities can enter the Diamond OA space at different points and develop services gradually over time.

Tuwhera: A Diamond Success Story

One of the region’s most notable examples of Diamond publishing infrastructure is Tuwhera Open Access at Auckland University of Technology (AUT).

Launched in 2016 with just two journal titles, Tuwhera has expanded significantly and now hosts more than 25 journals. As AUT’s central hub for open access publishing, the platform also supports the university’s institutional repository, open books and monographs, and conference proceedings. The ecosystem continues to grow, with the recent addition of a centralised research data repository and plans to introduce a Pressbooks platform for open educational resources.

Tuwhera’s success has been underpinned by a strong institutional commitment to open-source technologies, supported by collaboration between the library and the university’s IT services. By maintaining and hosting its own infrastructure, AUT has been able to develop a flexible publishing environment capable of supporting a wide range of publication types and fostering greater bibliodiversity.

Looking Ahead

The experiences of institutions across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand demonstrate that scaling Diamond OA does not require every university to build a fully developed journal publishing service from day one.

Instead, growth can begin with shared expertise, practical support, and collaborative infrastructure that empowers academic-led publishing. As the Australasian Diamond Journal Publishing Community of Practice continues to mature, it is helping to create the foundations for a more connected, sustainable, and community-driven publishing ecosystem across the region.

Jayshree Mamtora, James Cook University, Australia
Tracy Creagh, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Caitlin Savage, Deakin University, Australia
Lucy Walton, Western Sydney University, Australia
Donna Coventry, Auckland University of Technology, Aotearoa New Zealand

WOLFcon 2026 brought together members of the Open Library Foundation community, as well as other professionals involved in developing open-source technologies and infrastructures for libraries. The conference provided a platform for discussing the evolution of systems such as FOLIO and related applications, alongside broader issues concerning open infrastructures, artificial intelligence, metadata, collaborative collection management, and the long-term stewardship of scholarly resources.

Throughout the conference, the need for libraries to retain greater control over the technological infrastructures on which their activities increasingly depend was a recurring theme. In her opening address, Professor Ellen Euler situated this discussion within the broader concept of the knowledge commons. She identified three major threats to these commons:

Enclosure: resources or infrastructures that were previously shared become restricted.

Extraction: data and other resources generated by communities are appropriated by third parties.

Capture: the value produced collectively is ultimately controlled by a limited number of actors.

Artificial intelligence can exacerbate all of these phenomena. At the same time, however, measures intended to prevent large-scale extraction must not prevent legitimate users from accessing information. Therefore, the question of governance arises: libraries must establish mechanisms that protect common resources while ensuring they remain usable. Procurement policies were identified as a means by which libraries can demand greater transparency, interoperability, and control over vital infrastructure. However, the appropriate governance models for knowledge commons remain to be determined.

Several sessions examined the increasing use of artificial intelligence in library operations. The session “Beyond the Chatbot: Agentic AI and the Future of Library Workflows”, presented the SCOPE framework for evaluating potential AI applications. The framework’s five components — Suitable, Content, Oversight, Permissions, and Evaluation — provide a structured method for determining whether AI is appropriate for a particular workflow, and importantly, who remains responsible for the process and its supervision.

Technical presentations also explored the interaction between AI agents and library systems. The difference between APIs, which provide a defined entry point to information systems, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) layers, which enable AI agents to interact with APIs, was explained. Experiments conducted in the United States have tested the use of AI to transform MARC21 bibliographic data into BIBFRAME. This work contributes to the development of Blue Core, an open bibliographic data repository, the minimum viable product of which is expected in spring 2027. Other related initiatives include Index Data’s bibsync conversion tool and the Library of Congress’s Modern MARC project, which aims to bring MARC closer in line with RDA concepts. Nevertheless, these experiments demonstrate the considerable computational and token costs associated with large-scale, AI-assisted metadata transformation.

Another important conference theme was open bibliographic metadata. While the Swedish National Library has moved away from MARC for its catalogue and the LIBRIS national union catalogue, Stanford University currently operates in a hybrid MARC/BIBFRAME environment. Stanford is also participating in the Blue Core initiative. The discussions highlighted the uncertain copyright status of bibliographic metadata in the USA, primarily due to long-standing copy-cataloguing practices. In response, Stanford University has developed an Open Metadata Policy Toolkit and established a Center for Open Metadata. The conference presented a broader direction towards releasing bibliographic metadata under CC0 wherever possible. Following the presentation by Rochelle Lundy and Tom Cramer from Stanford University, the ISSN International Centre introduced its freemium model to the audience, explaining that it actively collaborates with DOAJ and Latindex by providing them with free access to its database, enabling them to reuse the metadata. Furthermore, the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources contains over 60,000 records which are also made available free of charge to the community.

Collaborative collections and rescue collecting

The ISSN International Centre took part in one of the main sessions at the conference, titled “Designing for Collective Agency: Shared Collections, Cyclops, and Consortial Action”, which was presented by Gaëlle Béquet (ISSN IC), Boaz Nadav Manes (Lehigh University), and Sebastian Hammer (IndexData). The session focused on the Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project (CCLP) and its associated prototype, CYCLOPS.

The CCLP brings together around 80 representatives from libraries, consortia, publishers, aggregators, and service providers. The project aims to redefine collaboration throughout the library collections lifecycle, as well as developing the necessary governance, standards and software infrastructure to support coordinated decision-making. The ISSN International Centre contributed to the Cataloguing and Metadata Working Group of the project, which examined the descriptive, transactional, holdings and preservation metadata required for identifying and managing different categories of resources.

The Prague presentation used endangered Ukrainian scholarly journals as a concrete example of how authoritative metadata can support rescue collecting. Since 2014, and especially since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukrainian universities and research institutions in occupied areas have either been displaced or reorganised. Some of the journals originally published by these institutions have subsequently been republished or re-registered by institutions operating under Russian occupation authorities. This may involve the reuse of titles and ISSNs, the replication of archives, the association of new identifiers with publications that claim continuity with Ukrainian predecessors, or changes to publisher and institutional information.

In these situations, ISSN metadata can provide valuable evidence. While an ISSN does not establish ownership or copyright, ISSN records document titles, publishers, places of publication, relationships between earlier and later titles, and related editions. They therefore provide a bibliographic chronology that can help to distinguish between competing claims concerning a journal’s identity and history. Ukrainian researchers have found this information useful for tracing displaced and appropriated publications.

The approach presented at WOLFcon combines local expertise with international bibliographic infrastructure. Ukrainian researchers and journal editors, along with the ISSN National Centre for Ukraine, use institutional records, registration information, journal websites, archived sites, PDFs, DOI metadata and ISSN records to identify potentially problematic publications. Any cases requiring clarification can then be reported to the ISSN International Centre, where relevant bibliographic records will be reviewed and, where necessary, corrected or supplemented with historical notes¬¬.

However, the central challenge is to move from identification to preservation. While the ISSN Network can establish what a journal is and document its bibliographic history, it is not an archive itself. CCLP provides a complementary framework through which libraries and consortia can collectively decide who should acquire, harvest, digitise or preserve endangered material. The proposed workflow runs from detection and bibliographic verification, through authoritative description and metadata sharing, to coordinated preservation by participating libraries.

CYCLOPS is intended to provide the middleware through which these collaborative intentions and decisions can be implemented. The broader CCLP approach emphasises optional and flexible cooperation, rather than requiring fully integrated consortial structures. Through CYCLOPS, institutions can share information about their collection intentions, coordinate acquisitions and preservation decisions, reduce unnecessary duplication, and optimise the use of distributed expertise and resources. The Ukrainian case study shows how such an infrastructure could respond quickly to scholarly and cultural heritage at risk due to geopolitical events.

WOLFcon 2026 therefore showcased an important convergence of developments currently impacting libraries, including the need to control critical digital infrastructures, the responsible integration of AI into professional workflows, the opening up of bibliographic metadata and the development of new collaborative stewardship mechanisms. CCLP and CYCLOPS are particularly relevant to the ISSN International Centre because they demonstrate how authoritative ISSN metadata can evolve from identification and discovery to providing an actionable signal that supports coordinated collection development and preservation.