Noteworthy

Recommended Practice on Metadata Indicators for Accessibility and Licensing of E-Content Published

NISO has published a new Recommended Practice on Access License and Indicators (NISO RP-22-2015) that defines metadata to be used to indicate free-to-read content and a link to license terms for the use/re-use of that content. Developed by the NISO Working Group on Access License and Indicators (formerly Open Access Metadata and Indicators), the recommended practice proposes the adoption of two core pieces of metadata and associated tags: <free_to_read> and <license_ref>. The first tag would indicate that the work is freely accessible during the specified timeframe (if applicable). The second tag would contain a reference to a URI that carries the license terms specifying how a work may be used.

Adoption of these two metadata designations will allow both humans and machines to assess the status of content. The combination of the two metadata tags can be particularly useful in indicating the subtle nuances of different Open Access content. The indicators include a date attribute so that content with access and re-use rights that change over time can be adequately understood. The recommended metadata tags can easily be incorporated into existing metadata distribution channels, encoded in XML, and added to existing schemas and workflow. The <free_to_read> tag can also be used to automate the display of appropriate status icons to users and for signaling or determining compliance with most funder and institutional policies.

ALI Working Group webpage: http://www.niso.org/workrooms/ali/

Access and License Indicators (NISO RP-22-2015): http://www.niso.org/publications/rp/rp-22-2015/

Mellon Grant Awarded to NISO to Explore Patron Privacy in Library and Publisher Systems

The National Information Standards Organization has been awarded a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a Consensus Framework to Support Patron Privacy in Digital Library and Information Systems. The grant will support a series of community discussions on how libraries, publishers, and information systems providers can build better privacy protection into their operations. The grant will also support creation of a draft framework to support patron privacy and subsequent publicity of the draft prior to its advancement for approval as a NISO Recommended Practice.

This project will consist of three phases. It begins with a pre-meeting discussion phase, which will consist of four virtual forums to discuss privacy of internal library systems, privacy of publisher systems, privacy of provider systems, and legal aspects influencing data sharing and policies. Each of the discussion sessions will be a three- hour web-based session designed to lay the groundwork for a productive in-person meeting at the conclusion of the American Library Association meeting in San Francisco, CA in June 2015. Following the in-person meeting, a Framework document will be completed detailing the privacy principles and recommendations agreed to by the participants, and then circulated for public comment and finalization.

Privacy project webpage: http://www.niso.org/topics/tl/patron_privacy/

Bowker to Include ISNI in ONIX 2.1

ProQuest® affiliate Bowker® will now include the ISO- certified International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) in its ONIX 2.1 data feeds to retailers such as Barnes & Noble, as well as the major search engines, ensuring that authors are accurately identified in search and discovery. ISNIs are unique 16-digit codes applied to public identities. This single identifier is leveraged across many applications, syncing alternate or disparate spellings of the same name, and eliminating confusion when names are the same or alike. ONIX 2.1 is used by the book trade to automate the exchange of massive amounts of metadata about books in any format. With more than 2.3 million authors now using ISNIs, their inclusion in ONIX will significantly boost the system’s precision.

ISNI was created just over two years ago and has topped 8 million assignments, with rapid uptake by authors and other contributors. They are in use by organizations such as Wikipedia, Digital Science, ORCID, Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), and many others who value the standard’s ability to pinpoint the correct identity.

Full press release: http://www.proquest.com/about/news/2014/Bowker-to- Include-ISNI-in-ONIX-21.html

ISNI International Agency: http://www.isni.org/

UKSG Transfer Code of Practice to be Maintained by NISO

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and UKSG announce that the Transfer Code of Practice will now be supported and maintained by NISO. The Code provides voluntary guidelines for publishers to follow when transferring journal titles between parties to ensure that the journal content remains easily accessible by librarians and readers. NISO has republished Transfer version 3.0 as a NISO Recommended Practice (NISO RP-24-2015) and has moved all supporting documentation to the NISO website. A NISO Standing Committee has been established to manage the ongoing support of the Transfer Code of Practice.

The Transfer project was initiated by UKSG in 2006 and the first version of the Code was released in 2007 in response to issues identified by the scholarly communications community when journal titles change platform providers or owners. Such transfers can negatively impact libraries, intermediaries (such as serials subscription agents, link resolver administrators, and vendors of large-scale discovery systems), and readers. Often the journal would seem to disappear and links from existing information systems to the content would break, even though the title was still being published. The Transfer Code provides publishers and platform providers with the specifics of how they can make sure that all of their stakeholders can continue to make the content available with the least amount of disruption.

A very important achievement to date for the UKSG Transfer Working Group was the creation of the Enhanced Transfer Alerting Service (ETAS). This public, searchable database helps publishers communicate journal transfers and makes it easy for librarians and readers to be notified of journal transfers and to search previous journal transfer alerts. The ETAS is currently offered through collaboration among UKSG, JUSP, Jisc, and Cranfield University with JUSP and Mimas providing the hosting environment. The current hosting arrangements for the ETAS service will remain in place for the foreseeable future.

Transfer Standing Committee’s webpage: http://www.niso.org/workrooms/transfer/

ETAS alerting service: http://etas.jusp.mimas.ac.uk/

Linked Data Platform 1.0 is a W3C Recommendation

The Linked Data Platform (LDP) Working Group has published a W3C Recommendation of Linked Data Platform 1.0. “Linked Data” refers to an approach to publishing data that puts linking at the heart of the notion of data, and uses the linking technologies provided by the Web to enable the weaving of a global distributed database.

This specification defines a set of rules for HTTP operations on Web resources, some based on RDF, to provide an architecture for read-write Linked Data on the Web. It “describes the use of HTTP for accessing, updating, creating, and deleting resources from servers that expose their resources as Linked Data. It provides clarifications and extensions of the rules of Linked Data....The intention of this specification is to enable additional rules and layered groupings of rules as additional specifications. The scope is intentionally narrow to provide a set of key rules for reading and writing Linked Data that most, if not all, other specifications will depend upon and implementations will support.”

Linked Data Platform (LDP) Working Group: http://www.w3.org/2012/ldp/

Linked Data Platform 1.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/2015/REC-ldp-20150226/

NDSA Publishes 2015 National Agenda for Digital Stewardship

The NDSA National Agenda for Digital Stewardship integrates the perspective of dozens of experts and hundreds of institutions, convened through the Library of Congress, to provide funders and executive decision makers insight into emerging technological trends, gaps in digital stewardship capacity, and key areas for funding, research, and development to ensure that today’s valuable digital content remains accessible and comprehensible in the future, supporting a thriving economy, a robust democracy, and a rich cultural heritage.

This new edition of the Agenda builds on earlier work, updating the 2014 report, and highlighting new areas of focus, specifically the selection and preservation of content at-scale. It also more clearly articulates the need for an evidence base for efficient and reliable digital preservation practice. Recent gains and observations on the technical infrastructure required for large-scale digital stewardship and the supporting policies and organizational structures required are also outlined. The report synthesizes the latest issues for funders, researcher, and organizational leaders and provides actionable recommendations for practitioners.

Executive Summary: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/ndsa/documents/2015Natio nalAgendaExecSummary.pdf

Full Document: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/ndsa/ documents/ 2015 NationalAgenda.pdf