The World Wants Interoperability: NISO and Community-Driven Standards The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) provides a unique environment for libraries, publishers, system providers and other information industry stakeholders to meet together and represent perspectives and requirements to create and shape consensus-driven standards and recommended practices that drive our shared technology forward. Nettie Lagace, NISO's Associate Director for Programs, will provide an overview of NISO's approach to creating industry standards which support data exchange and system interoperability, including examples of recent and current NISO contributions to the scholarly communication universe such as its work in alternative assessment metrics, publication and transfer of data and other scholarly output, and user-focused discovery and delivery of digital content.

1. The World Wants Interoperability:
NISO and Community-Driven
Standards
VIVO 2015 Annual Conference
Cambridge, MA – August 13, 2015
Nettie Lagace
Associate Director for Programs,
National Information Standards Organization
nlagace@niso.org / @abugseye

2. About NISO
• Non-profit industry trade association accredited by ANSI with 150+
members
• Mission of developing and maintainig standards related to information,
documentation, discovery and distribution of published materials and
media
• Represent U.S. interests to ISO TC 46 (Information and Documentation)
and also serve as Secretariat for ISO TC46/SC9 (Identification and
Description)
• Responsible for standards such as ISSN, DOI, Dublin Core metadata, DAISY
digital talking books, OpenURL, SIP, NCIP, MARC records and ISBN
(indirectly)
• Volunteer-driven organization: 400+ across the world
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3. NISO’s Make-Up
33% Library Systems Suppliers,
Publishing Vendors & Intermediaries
33% Libraries/Library
Organizations
36 LSA Members
(non-voting)
35% Publishers/
Publishing Organizations
ANSI
Other
SDOS
ISO

4. Standards for Community Practice
Standards can be used to:
- Make sure things work together
- Ensure things are done the same way
- Help people understand what/how to do
something
- Understand what consumers/users are getting
- Build trust among suppliers and customers
and users

5. NISO Standards Development Principles
Transparency & Openness
Broad consensus
Balance / Lack of Dominance
Notification of Standards Development
Coordination & Harmonization
Consideration of views
Appeals
Written Procedures Govern

6. NISO Working Group Process
NISO Approval
Working Group formed
Scope & determine deliverables
Gather input
Produce draft output
Public review
Respond & Modify
Publish final version
Market/Educate
Maintain & Update

7. NISO Areas of Work & Example Projects
• Content and Collections Management
– JATS and STS
• Business Information
– Altmetrics Initiative
• Discovery and Delivery
– Open Discovery Initiative

8. JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite
& STS: Standards Tag Set
• Began its life as NLM DTDs, based on article
model for life science journals
• Model expanded in scope
• ANSI/NISO standard published in 2012; now
managed under a “Continuous Maintenance”
process

9. JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite
& STS: Standards Tag Set
• ISO created a JATS derivative for its own use; is
now freely available
• Variety of DTDs in use by SDOs
• Standardization desirable for further
adoption; want to be sure JATS updates will
filter into STS
• STS Working Group now forming at NISO

10. NISO Altmetrics Initiative:
Why worth funding?
• Scholarly assessment is critical to the overall
process
– Which projects get funded
– Who gets promoted and tenure
– Which publications are prominent
• Assessment has been based on citation since the
60s
• Today’s scholars multiple types of interactions
with scholarly content are not reflected
– Is “non-traditional” scholarly output important too?

11. June 26-27, 2015 11

13. June 26-27, 2015 13
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
Unimportant
Of little importance
Moderately important
Important
Very important
n=118
Community Feedback on Project Idea Themes

15. Working Groups
• A development of definitions and descriptions of
use
• Bdefinitions for appropriate metrics and
calculation methodologies for specific output
types and promotion and facilitation of use of
persistent identifiers
• C development of strategies to improve data
quality through source data providers.

16. Steering Committee

17. Calendar
• April 2015 – Group(s) start working
• October 2015 – Draft document(s)
• Fall 2015 – Comment period(s)
• November 2015 – NISO Report to Sloan
Foundation
• Spring 2016 – Completion of final draft(s)

18. The Context for ODI
• Based on a meeting at ALA Annual Conference in New
Orleans on Sunday, June 26, 2011. Recognition of the
following trends and issues:
– Emergence of Library Discovery Services solutions
• Based on index of a wide range of content
• Commercial and open access
• Primary journal literature, ebooks, and more
– Adopted by thousands of libraries around the world, and impact
millions of users
– Agreements between content providers and discovery providers
ad-hoc, not representative of all content, and opaque to
customers.
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19. General Goals of Working Group
• Define ways for libraries to assess the level of
content providers’ participation in discovery services
• Help streamline the process by which content
providers work with discovery service vendors
• Define models for “fair” linking from discovery
services to publishers’ content
• Determine what usage statistics should be collected
for libraries and for content providers
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20. Areas of Focus
• Education
• Technology
• Conformance

21. Conformance Disclosure
Content Provider Conformance Checklist – Appendix B
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22. Conformance Disclosure
Content Provider Conformance Checklist – Appendix C
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23. Conformance Statements
• Published content provider statements:
– Credo Reference
– EBSCO
– Gale
– IEEE
– SAGE
• Published discovery provider statements
– EBSCO
– Ex Libris
– ProQuest
• ODI Conformance
http://www.niso.org/workrooms/odi/conformance/

24. For regular updates from NISO

25. Standards do the Heavy Lifting!

26. Questions?
nlagace@niso.org
@abugseye