Standards as Scholarly Solutions
Scope
Scholarly communication, as a community encompassing many stakeholder groups, relies heavily on the "communication" aspect, as we work together to develop the processes, tools, and policies needed to improve throughput and effectiveness. Development and application of standards and best practices are a huge part of ensuring that scholarly communication supporters aren't "reinventing the wheel" — that we are finding sustainable, interoperable, consensus-developed solutions wherever possible.
But how are information standards and best practices developed? How can scholarly communications professionals identify what standards are needed, contribute to their development, foster their adoption, and assure their maintenance? This series of training videos examine the ingredients that make industry standards as effective and useful as possible to the broader scholarly community.
Some of the topics covered by NISO staff in these training videos include:
- An introduction to information standards, standards development organizations (SDOs), and the role that consensus plays - why, what, how?
- Building consensus in information standards development — with guest lecturers representing the three main NISO stakeholder groups - librarians, publishers, and the vendors who serve them. Additional discussions will take into account stakeholders in other industry SDOs.
- Information standards in the community - who’s using what and why, exemplars from an array of SDOs and different stakeholder groups
- How to be an “information standardista” - what are the right standards for you and your organization to adopt, what do you need to implement them, where can you find more information, what else do you need? How do you know when it’s necessary, or better, to propose a new standard?
This video workshop was originally formulated as part of the program for the Force 11 Scholarly Communication Institute which took place July 26 - August 5, 2021.
