Noteworthy

Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles

The Force11 Data Citation Synthesis Group has published the final version of its Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles. As stated in the preamble:

Sound, reproducible scholarship rests upon a foundation of robust, accessible data. For this to be so in practice as well as theory, data must be accorded due importance in the practice of scholarship and in the enduring scholarly record. In other words, data should be considered legitimate, citable products of research. Data citation, like the citation of other evidence and sources, is good research practice and is part of the scholarly ecosystem supporting data reuse.

In support of this assertion, and to encourage good practice, we offer a set of guiding principles for data within scholarly literature, another dataset, or any other research object.

The eight principles address the issues of importance, credit and attribution, evidence, unique identification, access, persistence, specificity and verifiability, and interoperability and flexibility.

Many groups, including the CODATA-ICSTI Task Group on Data Citation, have contributed to the development of these principles. The group is calling on individuals and organizations that care about the place of data in research communications to endorse these principles and provides an endorsement “button” on the principles webpage.

Force11 is a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders that has arisen organically to help facilitate the change toward improved knowledge creation and sharing.

Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles: www.force11.org/datacitation

BnF Is First National Library Appointed as an ISNI Registration Agency

In January 2014, the Bibliothèque national de France (BnF) was appointed by the ISNI International Agency as a Registration Agency for the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI), becoming the first national library in the world to assign ISNIs.

The ISNI standard (ISO 27729) was published in March 2012 to provide a new identifier for the public identities of parties involved in the creation, production, management, and content distribution chains. Although originally intended for assignment to individuals, its use has been expanded to institutions as well. The ISNI International Agency and its authorized registration agencies have assigned over 7 million identifiers to individuals and 490,000 to organizations.

The aim of the ISNI Registration Agency at the BnF will be “to improve data interoperability across communities, both from public and private sector, and to promote trustful data created by libraries on the web of data.” Their emphasis will be on French publications, particularly those subject to legal deposit mandates, but they are also committed to ISNI assignments to parties throughout the French media content industries and cultural heritage organizations.

The ISNI will also be implemented with the Library’s linked data project, data.bnf.fr.

The initial assignment of ISNIs by the International Agency was done using ingested data from the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), which included BnF authority data. BnF personnel also participated on the ISNI quality team to evaluate and validate data and ensure disambiguity of identifier assignments.

Bowker and Ringgold are also ISNI Registration Agencies.

ISNI Registration Agency at the BnF: www.bnf.fr/en/professionals/isni_about/s.isni_registration_agency.html?first_Art=non

ISNI International Agency: www.isni.org/

New Edition of Field Guide to Fixed Layout for E-books Available from BISG

The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) has released a revision of its popular Best Practices publication, Field Guide to Fixed Layout for E-Books. It is designed to aid in both the decision-making of when to use fixed layout and in providing practical guidance on creating fixed layout formats. Included in the guide are use of the EPUB standard, accessibility issues, synching of text and audio, interactivity and JavaScript, and a discussion of various retailer standards.

The 1.1 version of the guide includes updates throughout to reflect the latest in Reading System display capabilities with guidelines and mechanisms for creating content for each.

This revision also includes a new chapter, written by Garth Conboy of Google, on developing content that addresses the issues commonly encountered with each Reading System, to ensure a consistently good reading experience across the various Reading Systems.

The Field Guide to Fixed Layout for E-Books was authored by the BISG Content Structure Committee. It is available for free download in PDF from the BISG website. An EPUB version is available for BISG members.

Field Guide to Fixed Layout for E-Books: https://www.bisg.org/ publications/
field-guide-fixed-layout-e-books

Journal Usage Half Life Study Used in Debate Over Open Access Embargo Periods

An independent study, commissioned by the Association of American Publishers analyzes the usage pattern of articles published in over 2800 academic and professional journals. It identifies the “half-life” of journals—the amount of time it takes for articles in a journal to receive half of their lifetime total downloads—and is the first major broad-based report conducted on this topic.

Phil Davis, Ph.D., an independent researcher and former science librarian, analyzed lifetime usage data from 2812 journals representing the works of 13 scholarly publishers in 10 distinct scholarly disciplines including life sciences, engineering, social sciences and the humanities.

Key findings in the study were:

Journal article usage varies widely within and across disciplines.

It takes significant time for journals to experience half of the lifetime downloads (“half-life”) of their articles.

Articles in the majority of journals receive more than half of their lifetime downloads three or more years after publication.

Only 3% of journals in all fields have half-lives of 12 months or less.

Health sciences articles have the shortest median half-life of the journals analyzed, but still more than 50% of health science journals have usage half-lives longer than 24 months.

In fields with the longest usage half-lives, including mathematics and the humanities, more than 50% of the journals have usage half-lives longer than 48 months.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has called for evidence-based procedures to be used to set appropriate embargo periods for public access to articles reporting on federally funding research. The AAP feels the study data shows “that a one-size-fits-all embargo period for scholarly works will not fairly address disparities in journal usage, and, in turn, damage the sustainability of high-quality, peer-reviewed science communication.”

SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, argues that the half-life metric should not be used for determining embargo periods.

“Publishers’ main objective in lobbying for the inclusion of embargo periods in federal public access policies is to prevent journal subscription cancellations. There is no connection between the notion of article usage half-life and journal cancellations. ...Library subscriptions constitute the vast majority of journal publishers’ revenue—and libraries do not use the “Usage Half-Life” metric to determine journal subscription cancellations.”

AAP Press Release: www.publishers.org/press/124/

Journal Usage HalfLife study: www.publishers.org/_attachments/ docs/journalusagehalflife.pdf

SPARC Talking Points on “Usage Half-Life” and Embargo Periods: www.sparc.arl.org/sites/default/files/SPARC%20TP%27s%20 on%20AAP_Davis%20Usage%20Half_Life%20Study.pdf