NISO Publishes Updated Transfer Code of Practice

Baltimore, MD – April 8, 2019 – The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has published an updated version of the Transfer Code of Practice, NISO RP-24-2019, Transfer. This NISO Recommended Practice 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. The goals of the Transfer initiative are to promote a set of standards that apply under transferring conditions, and to encourage the industry to embrace these as a baseline level of quality and performance. The recommended practice document consists of several agreed overarching principles; specific roles and responsibilities for transferring and receiving publishers in various areas of work; and an extensive glossary of terms.

“The Transfer Code of Practice is concerned primarily with digital content and associated online access. This is the fourth version of the Code since it was first published in 2007, and thus represents its ability to address current considerations in the scholarly journals community. Publishers and platform providers have a vested interest in ensuring that their content remains accessible, and the Transfer Code provides them with the specifics of how they can make sure that all of their stakeholders can make content available with the least amount of disruption.” comments James Phillpotts, Head of Content Delivery, Digital at Oxford University Press and co-chair of the NISO Transfer Standing Committee.

In addition to the published NISO Transfer Code of Practice, the Transfer Alerting Service (TAS) is an online notification service hosted at the ISSN International Centre which features a searchable database of journal transfers that have taken place and an email alert system which posts to subscribers when transfers are executed.

“In this new revision of the Code of Practice, the Transfer Standing Committee--populated by publishers, librarians, and other experts--sought to address the feedback we’ve received since the previous version was published in 2013.  Specifically, updates have been made to clarify and address categories of paid customers beyond subscribers, open access considerations, perpetual access responsibilities, licensing information, and further revisions to handling journal URLs and redirects,” notes Jennifer Bazeley, Coordinator, Collection Access and Acquisitions, Miami University and co-chair of the NISO Transfer Standing Committee.

“NISO is proud to have become the permanent home for Transfer and to sponsor its update work and support following its original creation and publication by UKSG,” adds Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director. “We believe that the Transfer Standing Committee’s efforts to keep the Code up to date and to communicate its principles breeds success by fostering endorsement by publishers. This work creates trust between providers and customers in the scholarly communication ecosystem and supports further collaborations.”

The updated NISO Transfer Code of Practice is available for download at https://www.niso.org/publications/rp-24-2019-transfer.  For more information about the Transfer initiative, see https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/transfer.

About the National Information Standards Organization (NISO)

NISO, based in Baltimore, MD, fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and learning. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire lifecycle of information standards. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO website.