DOAJ, the CLOCKSS Archive, Internet Archive, Keepers Registry/ISSN International Centre and Public Knowledge Project (PKP) have agreed to partner to provide an alternative pathway for the preservation of small-scale, APC-free, Open Access journals. The recent study, authored by M. Laakso, L. Matthias, and N. Jahn, has revived academia’s concern over the disappearance of the scholarly record disseminated in Open Access (OA) journals. DOAJ will act as a single interface with CLOCKSS, PKP and Internet Archive and facilitate a connection to these services for interested journals.

Reports regarding the effective preservation of the journals’ content will be aggregated by the ISSN International Centre (ISSN IC) and published in the Keepers Registry. Gaëlle Béquet, ISSN IC Director, commented: “As the operator of the Keepers Registry service, the ISSN International Centre receives inquiries from journal publishers looking for archiving solutions. This project is a new step in the development of our service to meet this need in a transparent and diverse way involving all our partners.”

The Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) has been licensed by ISNI International Agency since 1 October 2020 as an International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) registration agency for Belgian public identities active in a creative sector, such as the publishing world.
ISNI International Agency is responsible for the creation and dissemination of identifiers, as well as the administration of the database. It promotes and leads the adoption of ISNI identification worldwide.

To improve the work process of the National Library of Latvia (NLL), a decision was made to develop a new IT system – Portal for Publishers (Portal). The goal was to create an online space where publishers could request and receive international standard numbers (ISBN , ISSN , ISMN) and barcodes generated from them, as well as UDC indexes. Publishers can also submit legal deposit copies of online publications and reports on publishing activities for statistical purposes.

Arabic Reference Citation Index (ARCI), one of the Egyptian Knowledge Bank projects, introduced an Arabic interface for the Web of Science, providing access to bibliographic information and citations to scholarly articles from Arabic journals. The primary aim of ARCI is to evaluate the quality and research output of Arabic researchers, universities and research organizations. The ISSN Egyptian agency played a key part in promoting the ISSN to be the essential check point in committee discussions, and got agreement that metadata will be re-evaluated based on Egyptian journal records in the ISSN Portal in case of data discrepancies.  For more information on selection criteria, see the brochure, and click here for more information on how to submit a journal.

The ISSN IC, as sponsor and partner of CISPC 2020, will participate in the conference “Challenges in the Scholarly Publishing Cycle 2020” on Nov. 30th, 2020 at 11:20. Gaëlle Béquet, ISSN-IC Director, and Dominic Mitchell, DOAJ Operations Manager, will give a joint presentation. The program is available.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announced on November 17th that their Voting Members have approved a new work item to update the 2008 Recommended Practice, NISO RP-8-2008, Journal Article Versions (JAV): Recommendations of the NISO/ALPSP JAV Technical Working Group. A NISO Working Group is being set up, and work is expected to begin in early 2021. The NISO JAV working group will define a set of terms for each of the different versions of content that are published, as well as a recommendation for whether separate DOIs should be assigned to them.

Kudos, the award-winning service for broadening research impact, has today provided an update on sponsors for its Brave New World research project, which will provide publishers, societies and providers of related services with vital insights to shape strategies for 2021 and beyond. The study will use desk research, teleinterviews and surveys to reveal the implications of COVID-19 for research funding policy, university budgets and practices, and researchers’ workload and workflows.

As 2020 nears its end, a counterintuitive picture is emerging for scientific output. Rather than suffering a COVID-driven slowdown, 2020 delivered extraordinary growth for journal content. To put it simply, journals are expected to grow by about 500k papers from 2019 to 2020, as much as they grew overall in the previous six years. Will a 2020 boom yield a 2021 bust? While the mechanism of this year’s growth is unclear, it may have implications for the scientific output of 2021.

IFLA compiled some key resources for libraries in responding to the Coronavirus pandemic. The information and resources are provided on a non-exhaustive basis but will be updated regularly. It is based on publicly available information, and information that is submitted to updates@ifla.org. Additional ideas, references, suggestions and corrections can be sent to this address.

There is an upcoming special issue of the IFLA Journal focused on innovations in libraries during the COVID-19 pandemic. For more information, please see the call for submissions.

Researchers, librarians and publishers all play a role in promoting research, but those roles aren’t clearly defined.  In a survey conducted in 2020 by AIP Publishing, librarians were asked about their contribution to promoting research, and what they feel their role should be. The results of the survey are presented in this whitepaper.

The Ibero-American Association for Digital Preservation (APREDIG) is a non-profit organisation whose aim is to disseminate the importance of good practices in digital preservation actions, policies and strategies for the management and comprehensive access to long-term digital archives in Ibero-American institutions and organisations.

As part of the global celebrations on November 5, 2020 of the Digital Preservation Day, APREDIG brought together specialists on the subject from Spain, Colombia, Mexico and Brazil, to analyze the challenges that digital preservation will face in 2021, and the trends on the matter for Ibero-America.

The program is mentioned here, and the video of the event is recorded here.

 

Scholastica released a first report on “The State of Journal Production and Access“ among scholarly society and university publishers. The report details the results of a global survey of 63 individuals working with scholarly society and university publishers that manage and produce academic journals independently (i.e., not outsourced to a separate publisher) about how they are currently approaching journal production and access and their future priorities. The goal of this survey report is to provide generative insights around these aspects of publishing to gauge where the digital journal landscape is moving. Read the report.

This collection of essays, arranged in five thematic sections, is intended to take the pulse of institutional repositories—to see how they have matured and what can be expected from them, as well as introduce what may be the future role of the institutional repository. By noting trends and potentialities, the final section, authored by Executive Director of SPARC Heather Joseph, makes future predictions and helps managers position institutional repositories to be responsive to change and even shape the evolution of scholarly communication.

The authors analyse a relatively recent commercial strategy adopted by the major scientific publishers, which consists in exploiting the brand image of their most prestigious journals. By transferring the symbolic capital of a prestigious journal to spin-off journals, publishers capture part of this prestige by carrying the brand of the original journal in their titles, thus transforming it into new economic capital. Through manuscript transfer mechanisms, publishers also use some of the articles rejected by their highly selective flagship journals to recycle and monetize them in the lower-impact or open access spin-off journals on their list. Download the article.

cOAlition S announced the release of the Journal Checker Tool (JCT) in beta. The JCT is a web-based tool which provides clear advice to researchers on how they can comply with their funder’s Plan S-aligned Open Access policy when seeking to publish in their chosen journal. The JCT is searchable by ISSN, notably. During this open testing phase, the community will have the opportunity to get acquainted with the JCT and provide feedback, so that the tool increases its readiness ahead of the implementation of Plan S in January 2021.

The Library Publishing Forum is an annual conference bringing together representatives from libraries engaged in (or considering) publishing initiatives to define and address major questions and challenges.

The Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) is accepting proposals until 6 December 2020.

Academic Publishing in Europe (APE) conference will go online in January 2021.

Topic: The new face of trust

The preliminary program is announced. Registration is open.

Topic: Cataloguing by entities or the big bang of  data!

The conference, organized by Bibliographic Transition in France, will deal with the notion of cataloguing by entities in three stages, through an explanation of the concept, then the presentation of the necessary tools and finally some projects or achievements in progress.

Please register before 1 December 2020

 

This edition of SemWeb.Pro will be an opportunity to highlight the synergies and complementarities between the Semantic Web and related approaches derived from graph databases (Property Graph, GraphQL, etc), which accelerate the development of concrete applications in different sectors of activity: industry, medical, culture and many others.

Please register for free for the remaining online sessions to be held until 27 November 2020.