The 41st Meeting of ISSN Centres’ Directors took place in Brasilia at the invitation of the Instituto Brasileiro do Informaçào em Ciência e Tecnologia, which hosts the ISSN Centre for Brazil.

Exploitation of the open access model by unscrupulous publishers can seem a threat to the future of scholarly publishing. But the situation is not  as simple as bad guys vs. good guys. This is rather a natural outgrowth of the ease of publishing on the internet and the rise of OA publishing.

Regina Reynolds, Director of the U.S. ISSN Center at the Library of Congress, presented two papers: one about the project the ISSN International Centre and ProQuest are currently engaged in ; the second about predatory publishing practices. For more information

ISSN International Centre will attend the 30th Guadalajara International Book Fair (Feria Internacional del Libro) at booth GG26 from 27 to 30 November 2016.  The featured Guest of Honor this year is Latin America.

The German ISSN Centre is hosted by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. So far, ISSN have only been assigned by the ISSN German Centre upon requests from publishers. From December 2016 on, requests from publishers will still be processed. Furthermore, library staff employed at the DNB section for Acquisition and Cataloguing will assign ISSN to serials entering national collections via legal deposit. These serials will be recorded by DNB staff in the Zeitschriftsdatenbank, the union catalogue for serials holdings supported by 4,000 libraries across Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Serial records with ISSN will subsequently be retrieved and processed by ISSN Germany before they are provided to the ISSN International Centre via OAI-PMH. This challenging project is led by ISSN Germany in close cooperation with the ISSN International Centre.

For more details, read the paper Projekt  ISSN-Integration by Christian Schütz.

 

From November 7^th to 11^th, 2016, the RDA Steering Committee held its annual meeting in Frankfurt, at the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Christian Schütz, Head of German ISSN Centre, reported on the activities of the ISSN Network.

This agreement aims at securing access to research publications and initiating open science collaboration

Jisc Collections and Elsevier signed an agreement which grants a 5-year subscription access to around 1,850 journals on Elsevier’s ScienceDirect e-platform. Furthermore, both parties have agreed to cooperate on several Open Science opportunities, leveraging Elsevier’s technology and analytics capabilities to help make science in the UK more collaborative and efficient.

 

 

A feedback from the Peer Review Week organising committee members. Their responses show a clear understanding of the importance of peer review and a firm commitment to supporting more recognition for review in future.

After receiving allegations of plagiarism confined to two journals, Springer and BioMed Central immediately commenced an extensive investigation across their entire portfolio. A total of 58 articles published across seven journals have been spotted and will be gradually retracted by the joint Research Integrity Group.

The Subject Analysis and Access IFLA section Annual report, 2016 outlines the Section’s progress and activities for the first semester.

A core concept of the National Digital Platform for Libraries and Museums is that shared digital services and tools can enable libraries and archives across the country to better leverage their resources and meet the needs of their users. Three of the recently announced National Leadership Grants for Libraries projects exemplify how these connective efforts are making an impact. Noticeably, the third grant deals with distributed preservation and descriptive metadata approaches for repositories.

How is the changing nature of research in digital environments reshaping the nature of library collections and services in academic and research libraries? Two central directions are given, each a response to the centrality of the user in a network environment. First, the library has an increasing role in managing the research and other outputs of the university (the inside-out collection). Second, the library is facilitating access to a broader range of local, external and collaborative resources organized around user needs (the facilitated collection).

The Open Library Foundation promotes opoen source projects for libraries.

The first project of the Fondation is FOLIO (the Future of Libraries is Open), which is a a community-based collaboration making open source technology available to all libraries. The project aims at developing an open source Library Services Platform (LSP) designed for innovation.

Traditionally, scientific studies are published in peer-reviewed journals, which require other scientists to evaluate submitted research to determine its soundness for publication. Peer review is supposed to be acting as a stopgap for science that is not sound ; but it has become the slowest step in the process of sharing studies. Rather than simply bypassing peer review and contributing to increase an overloaded system, how could peer review be enhanced ?

The 8^th Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (COASP) was held in Arlington, Virginia, on the 21st and 22nd September, 2016. Over 160 delegates working in scholarly publishing, librarianship, academia, government, startups, scholarly societies, consultancies and for non-profits, discussed the present and future state of open access.

All of the recordings, slides and posters are available to watch or download via the OASPA website, along with all those from previous years.

 

The campaign helping researchers navigate the scholarly communication landscape

The new campaign provides clear and simple guidance to help researchers make informed choices about their publications. The resources can also be used by librarians responsible for developing researchers’ knowledge of the scholarly communication landscape or disseminated by industry groups working to support researchers in their publishing.

OpenAIRE works to find a community-endorsed definition of “open peer review” (OPR). OpenAIRE collected 122 definitions of “open review” or “open peer review” from the scientific literature. Iterative analysis of these definitions resulted in the identification of seven distinct OPR traits at work in various combinations amongst these definitions. In this post will be described each of these OPR traits and their proposed advantages and disadvantages, with reference to evidence of their efficacy where available.

INRA, French National Institute for Agricultural Research,  has spent the last years promoting the accessibility of its scientific resources in many ways. The institution formalized its open-access policy in 2016 which involves seven main principles with a two-fold goal. INRA’s commitment to open science goes beyond just providing access to its publications. Its broad policy, which now targets manuscripts and datasets, has two main goals.

The 2016 Jisc and CNI one-day conference brought together leaders from the UK and the US academic and research communities concerned with scholarly communications. A briefing paper and report on the proceedings of the event is available separately but this report is designed to bring together into seven themes the key points from the conference. Further discussions are also reflected in this report about 2 themes: sustaining and using the scholarly record; improving the ability to re-use the scholarly record.

In October, SPARC Europe convened a meeting with high-level stakeholders from the international funding, research and library communities to discuss how to sustain some of the world’s important OA services. New funding mechanisms are being explored. After extensive essential preparatory work led by Knowledge Exchange, best concluded in the Putting Down Roots report, SPARC Europe now wants to explore the feasibility of the proposal and how to put this into action with leading decision-makers and Open Science advocators worldwide.

Topic: Libraries Powering Sustainable Knowledge in the Digital Age

Call for papers deadline: 12 February 2017

Topic: Publishing Ethics: Doing the Right Thing — Doing Things Right. The preliminary programme is online.

Digital publishing, innovations and future trends of scholarly publishing will be the topics of this 3-day event.

Talks and workshops revolve around opening data, linking data and creating tools and software for LOD production scenarios.

On the theme of Bridging the past, present and future of metadata, data and semantic technologies, the implementation of semantic technologies across Open Access Repositories, Digital Libraries, Research Information Systems and Infrastructures will be discussed.

The conference will focus on open access, open data and open science in Northern Europe.