NISO (a non-profit standards organization) is working on several projects related to scholarly information including recommended practices around access and license indicators, open discovery initiatives, journal transfers between publishers, and altmetrics standards. The presentation provides an overview of NISO's mission and processes for developing standards as well as details on the specific projects. Membership in working groups for each project involves representatives from libraries, publishers, and other organizations.

1. NISO Community Contributions to the
Scholarly Information Landscape
Nettie Lagace
Copyright Clearance Center
April 2, 2015

2. Agenda
• About NISO
• Projects:
– Recommended Practice: Access & License
Indicators
– Recommended Practice: Open Discovery Initiative
– Recommended Practice: Transfer
– Altmetrics Initiative
• Questions & Discussion

3. 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
3

4. CCM
BUSINFO
D2D
A
C
who is NISO?
4
NISO BOARD

5. NISO Topic Committees
Content and Collections Mgt

6. NISO Topic Committees
Content and Collections MgtBusiness Information

7. NISO Topic Committees
Content and Collections MgtBusiness InformationDiscovery to Delivery

9. Standards
• Standards facilitate trade, commerce and
innovation
• Standards reduce costs
– Create a community
• Standards support better communication and
interoperability across systems
9

10. ANSI standards
• Openness, lack of dominance, balance =
everyone affected has a voice
• Notifications, consideration of views and
objections
• Consensus votes and appeals
• ANSI patent policy, commercial terms and
conditions
• Publication and maintenance
• Credible & have Integrity
10

11. Standards Creation Cycle
Idea
Working
Group
Formed
and
Works!
Draft for
Public
Comment
Publication
Standing
Committee &
Maintenance
NISO
Approval:
Topic Committee
& Voting Member

12. Definitions and Principles
Balance: no single interest category constitutes a majority of
the membership / voting pool / working group: producer, user,
general interest
12
Recommended PracticeStandard
Consensus: respond to all comments and make efforts to resolve
negative votes, even if proposal is approved
Open process: allowing members and the community to
have confidence in NISO standards.
KBAR
T

13. Considerations
• Value to be gained
• Feasibility
• Community(ies) affected
• Stakeholders (Vested interests)
• Participants required/desired
• Timeframes
13

14. NISO Working Groups

16. ALI Working Group’s Objectives
1. A specified format for bibliographic metadata and
possibly, a set of visual signals, describing the
readership rights associated with a single scholarly
work
2. Recommended mechanisms for publishing and
distributing this metadata
3. A report on the feasibility of including clear
information on downstream re-use rights within the
current project and, if judged feasible, inclusion of
these elements in outputs 1 and 2
4. A report stating how the adoption of these outputs
would answer (or not) specific use cases to be
developed by the Working Group

17. ALI Working Group Membership
Co-chairs:
• Cameron Neylon, PLoS
• Ed Pentz, CrossRef
• Greg Tananbaum, Consultant
(SPARC)
Members:
• Tim Devenport, EDItEUR
• Gregg Gordon, Social Science
Research Network (SSRN)
• Julie Hardesty, Indiana
University Library
• Paul Keller, Europeana
Licensing Framework
• Cecy Marden, The
Wellcome Library
• Jack Ochs, American
Chemical Society
• Heather Reid, Copyright
Clearance Center
• Jill Russell, University of
Birmingham
• Chris Shillum, Elsevier
• Ben Showers, JISC
• Eefke Smit, STM
Association
• Christine Stohn, Ex Libris
• Timothy Vollmer, Creative
Commons

18. “open access” politically fraught
• Won’t use this label
Factual information:
– Is a specified work free to read – can it be
accessed by anyone who has access to the Web?
– What re-use rights are granted to this reader?
• Minimal set of metadata needed
• Decided not to create/recommend a logo

19. <free_to_read> Tag
• Indicates content can be read or viewed by
any user without payment or authentication
• Optional start and end dates to accommodate
embargoes, special offers, etc.
<free_to_read start_date="2015-02-03"/>
<free_to_read start_date="2013-02-03"
end_date="2013-10-03"/>

20. • Content of this tag would include a stable identifier
expressed as an HTTP URI
• URI would point to license terms that are human and/or
machine readable
• Multiple URIs can be listed if article exists under specific
license for certain period of time and then changes
<license_ref start_date="2014-02-
03">http://www.psychoceramics.org/license_v1.html</li
cense_ref>
<license_ref start_date="2015-02-
03">http://www.psychoceramics.org/open_license.html</
license_ref>
<license_ref> Tag

21. Distributing Metadata
• Who? Publishers, aggregators, content
providers
• Include the metadata in all standard metadata
sets
– Intended that this population/distribution will
become part of standard editorial and production
workflows
• Could also include in alerts such as e-TOCs and
RSS feeds and A&I feeds

22. ALI Schema

23. What’s Next?
• NISO Publication as a Recommended Practice
• Setting up discussion mailing list and NISO
Standing Committee
– JATS Standing Committee determining how ALI
will be incorporated into JATS

25. What is Transfer?
• Previously a UKSG initiative
• Now a NISO Recommended Practice
(NISO RP-24-2015)
“The Transfer Code of Practice responds to the expressed needs of the scholarly journal
community for consistent guidelines to help publishers ensure that journal content
remains easily accessible by librarians and readers when there is a transfer between
parties, and to ensure that the transfer process occurs with minimum disruption. The
Code contains best practice guidelines for both the Transferring Publisher and the
Receiving Publisher. Publishers are asked to endorse the Code, and to abide by its
principles wherever it is commercially reasonable to do so.”

26. http://www.niso.org/workrooms/transfer/

27. Governance
• Group of librarians, publishers, other experts
• Standing Committee activities
– Transfer Code of Practice
– Enhanced Transfer Alerting Service
– Educational & Support Activities

28. Transfer Standing Committee
Co-chairs:
• Alison Mitchell, Palgrave Macmillan
and Nature Publishing Group
• Elizabeth Winter, Georgia Institute of
Technology
Members:
• Magaly Bascones, JISC
• Jennifer Bazeley, Miami University
• Nancy Beals, Wayne State University
Libraries
• Rochelle Belanger, Wiley
• Anna Creech, University of
Richmond
• Tim Devenport, EditEUR
• Laura Jenkins, Emerald Group
Publishing Limited
• Audrey McCulloch, ALPSP
• Shelly Nuttall, Elsevier
• Niamh O'Connor, Portland Press
• Pappaparvathi Patham, ProQuest
• Ed Pentz, CrossRef
• James Phillpotts, Oxford University
Press
• Dani Roach, University of St Thomas
• Lucy Robinson, Sage
• Adam Rusbridge, EDINA, University
of Edinburgh
• Heather Ruland Staines, SIPX
• Melanie Watts, EBSCO Information
Services
• Tamara Welschot, Springer
Science+Business Media
• Helen White, Taylor & Francis

29. Enhanced Transfer Alerting Service
• http://etas.jusp.mimas.ac.uk/
• Librarians: search transfers, subscribe to
ETAS RSS feed
• Publishers: submit transfer form or bulk
upload

30. ETAS Entry

31. Email Notification

32. More Info
• Transfer at NISO
http://www.niso.org/workrooms/transfer/
• Transfer Code of Practice Version 3.0
http://goo.gl/JiSQHf
• Publishers who endorse Transfer
http://www.niso.org/workrooms/transfer/transfer_p
ublishers/

35. More than just popularity
Research is pointing to the fact that there is a
modest positive correlation between
early-signal metrics (altmetrics) and
later-signal metrics (citations)
Do altmetrics correlate with citations? Extensive comparison of altmetric indicators with
citations from a multidisciplinary perspective by Rodrigo Costas, Zohreh Zahedi, Paul Wouters
Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services by Mike Thelwall , Stefanie
Haustein, Vincent Larivière, & Cassidy R. Sugimoto
(2006) Earlier web usage statistics as predictors of later citation impact by Brody T, Harnad S &
Carr L
February 23, 2015 35

36. What are the
infrastructure elements
of metrics we need
standards for?

37. Meeting Lightning Talks
• Expectations of researchers
• Exploring disciplinary differences in the use of social media in
scholarly communication
• Altmetrics as part of the services of a large university library
system
• Deriving altmetrics from annotation activity
• Altmetrics for Institutional Repositories: Are the metadata
ready?
• Snowball Metrics: Global Standards for Institutional
Benchmarking
• International Standard Name Identifier
• Altmetric.com, Plum Analytics, Mendeley reader survey
• Twitter Inconsistency
February 23, 2015 37
“Lightning" by snowpeak is licensed under CC BY 2.0

38. February 23, 2015 38

39. February 23, 2015 39

40. 30 One-on-One Interviews
February 23, 2015 40

44. Working Groups
• A development of definitions and descriptions of
use
• B definitions 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.

45. Steering Committee

46. 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)

47. http://www.niso.org/topics/tl/altmetrics_initiative/
Thank you!
Questions?
nlagace@niso.org
@abugseye