Library Technology Guides

NISO Welcomes New Board Members for 2025 - 2026. The National Information Standards Organization announced the results of its recent Board elections for the term beginning July 1, 2025. Jonathan Clark, (Principal, Consultant and Managing Agent, The DOI Foundation) will transition to the role of Chair of the NISO Board, having served as Vice Chair for the past year. He is replaced as Vice Chair by Jill Morris of the Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration and Innovation (PALCI), who will assume the role of Chair for 2026–27 next July. Robert Wheeler (Director, Publishing Technology, American Society of Mechanical Engineers) rotates to the position of Past Chair, having served as NISO Chair for 2024–25. [Full Announcement].

NISO's Draft Revision of the Transfer Code of Practice now open for public comment. The National Information Standards Organization announced that its draft revision of the Transfer Code of Practice (NISO RP-24-202X) is now available for public comment through May 2, 2025. The Transfer Code of Practice is a NISO Recommended Practice to ensure continuing access to journals when titles transfer from one publisher to another. Compliance with the code helps publishers make journal content easily accessible to librarians and readers when there is a transfer between parties. It also enables the transfer process to occur with minimum disruption to manuscript submission and production processes. Over 90 publishers have endorsed the Transfer Code of Practice since it was first established as a NISO Recommended Practice in 2015. [Full Announcement].

The DOI for Scholarly Publishing is the inaugural winner of the Rosenblum Award for Scholarly Publishing Impact. NISO joins The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, the Association of University Presses, the Society for Scholarly Publishing, and the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers in announcing the Rosenblum Award for Scholarly Publishing Impact. Named in honor of Bruce Rosenblum, the award celebrates innovations that have transformed the scholarly publishing ecosystem, focusing on technologies, standards, or practices that have become indispensable to its operation, and its inaugural winner is the DOI for Scholarly Publishing. [Full Announcement].

RDA-US and NISO to collaborate on US National PID Strategy. The Research Data Alliance-United States and the National Information Standards Organization announced today their intent to collaborate in the development of an ANSI/NISO standard for a US national Persistent Identifier (PID) strategy. The Working Group formed to achieve this goal will operate within NISO's standards development structure. [Full Announcement].

Cristin Hipke Joins NISO as Standards Program Manager. The National Information Standards Organization announced that Cristin Hipke has joined the organization this month in the role of Standards Program Manager. Cristin will help to advance NISO's mission of developing authoritative standards for the information community by leading volunteer working groups and committees and providing them with organizational, logistical, and promotional support. In her new position, she will work closely with her colleague and fellow Standards Program Manager, Keondra Bailey. [Full Announcement].

Dr. Timnit Gebru is the 2025 Miles Conrad Awardee. NISO announced that Dr. Timnit Gebru, Executive Director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, will be the recipient of the 2025 Miles Conrad Award, NISO's lifetime achievement award for those working in the information community. She will receive her award and deliver the 2025 Miles Conrad Lecture virtually during the NISO Plus Baltimore conference. [Full Announcement].

Join us December 17 for a public forum on Advancing Digital Accessibility for Scientific and Technical Publications. The DAISY Consortium, the World Wide Web Consortium, and the National Information Standards Organization announced that they are partnering to support and advance the accessibility of scientific and technical publications to people with disabilities through a series of virtual public forums. Building on work initiated in 2024 by the US White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, these meetings will seek to advance the goal of ensuring the digital accessibility of content. Recognizing that advancing accessibility is a community effort, the three organizations will work to bring representatives from publishers, research societies, libraries, US Federal Agencies, institutional and government repository hosts, and others around the world together to share knowledge and support best practices. With a long history of leadership in both promoting accessibility and engaging the information and publishing communities, DAISY, W3C, and NISO are well positioned to pursue the vision for a more open, accessible, and inclusive future for science and innovation. [Full Announcement].

JATS-Con to be hosted in Baltimore as a NISO Plus 2025 Pre-conference. Next year's JATS-Con, the user conference for the Journal Article Tag Suite Standard will be held as a pre-conference day associated with the annual NISO Plus Baltimore meeting on February 10, 2025 at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront. This is the first JATS-Con since 2023 and the first to be held in person since 2019. [Full Announcement].

Cindy Hohl to give opening keynote at NISO Plus 2025 in Baltimore. NISO announced that Cindy Hohl will deliver the opening keynote address at the NISO Plus 2025 conference in Baltimore on Tuesday, February 11, at 9:30 am ET. Hohl is director of policy analysis and operational support at the Kansas City (Mo.) Public Library and the 2024–2025 president of the American Library Association. She has also served in a number of other leadership roles in the library community. She is past president of the American Indian Library Association and a board member of the ALA-affiliated Freedom to Read Foundation. She also serves on the Standing Committee of the Indigenous Matters Section of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). [Full Announcement].

NISO publishes update to Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) Standard 1.4. NISO announced publication of an update to the Journal Article Tag Suite Standard (1.4), ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2024. Last revised in 2019, JATS defines a suite of XML structures describing the content of journal articles using a common format that enables the exchange of that content between publishers and archives. It is intended to preserve intellectual content of journals independent of the form in which the content was originally delivered, and to enable an archive to capture structural and semantic components of existing material. JATS has been adopted widely by journals publishers from around the world and is required or supported by many archives as well as web-hosting and conversion vendors. The updated standard introduces important changes to meet evolving needs and practices in scholarly communications. [Full Announcement].

NISO to represent the United States on ISO Technical Committee for Cultural Heritage Conservation. The National Information Standards Organization announced it has been appointed by the American National Standards Institute to manage the accredited US Technical Advisory Group to the International Organization for Standardization's new Technical Committee on Cultural Heritage Conservation. [Full Announcement].

Survey on Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and Web-Scale Discovery from the NISO Open Discovery Initiative. The NISO Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) aims to define standards and/or best practices for the web-scale library discovery services that are based on indexed search. As discovery services increasingly explore ways to include generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) into their products, the NISO ODI Standing Committee is interested in your expectations and concerns about Generative AI in web-scale library discovery. [Full Announcement].

NISO approves working group to develop a US national PID strategy. Voting members of the National Information Standards Organization have approved the formation of a Working Group to develop an ANSI/NISO standard for a United States national PID strategy, which will increase the adoption of PIDs and provide critical support to open research. NISO is currently seeking members from across the information community, including representatives from federal agencies, PID providers, academic libraries, publishers, and software providers, to join the resulting Working Group. Persistent identifiers, or PIDs, are a critical part of the infrastructure supporting scholarly communications and open research. They support research discovery and citations, allow users and systems to easily identify authors and institutions and link them to research outputs, and help ensure compliance with a growing number of government and funder mandates advancing open scholarship. To date, however, approaches to encouraging the adoption of PIDs and investment in PID infrastructure have not been coordinated, and there is little guidance available on how best to improve the implementation and efficacy of PIDs within the diverse spheres of the US research landscape. [Full Announcement].

Rachel Bruce to deliver opening keynote at NISO Plus Global/Online. NISO announced that Rachel Bruce, Head of Open Science at UK Research and Innovation, will deliver the opening keynote, “Open research, incentivizing change, and underpinning infrastructure: A UK Perspective,” at the NISO Plus 2024 Global/Online conference, September 17–18, 2024. [Full Announcement].

Preliminary program for NISO Plus Global/Online now available. The 2024 NISO Plus Global/Online conference (September 17–18) is just over two months away! As with all NISO Plus events, the focus is on identifying problems in the scholarly ecosystem that the community can solve together, and the format will foster conversation during the sessions, empowering attendees to be a part of any solutions that might emerge. And as the early bird registration deadline (August 9) approaches, we are excited to announce that our preliminary program is now available. [Full Announcement].

NISO Publishes Recommended Practice for the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern. The National Information Standards Organization announced the publication of the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern Recommended Practice. Funding for the CREC Working Group as well as for research at the University of Illinois' Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science project, which aided Working Group deliberations and decisions, was generously provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. [Full Announcement].

Ginny Barbour to deliver keynote address at NISO Plus 2024 Global/Online. We are delighted to announce that Professor Virginia Barbour, Editor-in-Chief of the Medical Journal of Australia and Adjunct Professor at Queensland University of Technology, will deliver one of two keynote addresses at the NISO Plus 2024 Global/Online conference. [Full Announcement].

Call for Participation for NISO CCLIP Consortia Working Group. The IMLS-funded Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project and its associated Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Infrastructure Project continue to build greater community collaboration in smart collection management and promote access to collections by improving institutional efficiency through partnership. The CCLP seeks to overcome serious barriers to broader implementations of cooperative collections management, including the lack of available vendor-neutral interoperable systems, adequate governance and decision-making frameworks, and assessment tools. [Full Announcement].

NISO Welcomes New Board Members for 2024-25. The National Information Standards Organization announced the results of its recent Board elections for the term beginning July 1, 2024. Robert Wheeler (Director, Publishing Technology, American Society of Mechanical Engineers) will transition to the role of Chair of the NISO Board, having served as Vice Chair for the past year. He is replaced as Vice Chair by Jonathan Clark (Principal, Consultant and Managing Agent, The DOI Foundation), who will assume the role of Chair for 2025–26 next July. Karim Boughida (Dean of University Libraries, Stony Brook) rotates to the position of Past Chair, having served as NISO Chair for 2023–24. NISO Voting Members have also re-elected Trevor A. Dawes (Vice Provost for Libraries and Museums and May Morris University Librarian, University of Delaware) and elected three new directors: Jenny Mathias (Global Marketing and Operations Director, Cambridge University Press and Assessment), Jill Morris (Executive Director, PALCI, the Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration and Innovation), and Emily Singley (Vice President, North American Library Relations, Elsevier) [Full Announcement].

NISO's Draft Revision of the Journal Article Version (JAV) Recommended Practice now open for public comment. The National Information Standards Organization announced that its draft revision of the Journal Article Version (JAV) Recommended Practice is open for public comment through July 7, 2024, at the project web page. First published in 2008, the JAV Recommended Practice was developed to describe different versions of online scholarly content. Since then, publishing practices have continued to evolve, and with changes such as the rapid growth in preprint publications, the concept of a single version of record has become less relevant. Questions about citations for different versions and version labeling, for example, have highlighted the need for standardization of terms as well as recommendations for how to manage, track, and index multiple versions. The NISO working group was formed to address these challenges and develop a revised JAV Recommended Practice including an appendix with multiple examples illustrating a variety of use cases for those looking for guidance. [Full Announcement].