New Work Item Approved by NISO Voting Members
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announced in mid-November that their Voting Members have approved a new work item to update the 2008 Recommended Practice, NISO RP-8-2008, Journal Article Versions (JAV): Recommendations of the NISO/ALPSP JAV Technical Working Group. A NISO Working Group is being set up, and work is expected to begin in early 2021.
Publication practices have changed rapidly since the publication of the original recommendations. For example, preprints have become much more important as a publication type in many disciplines, and publishers are increasingly experimenting with new ways to publish, update, and keep research alive. All of these versions of an article are important and citable, making the concept of a single ‘version of record’ less relevant. These additional processes to support public availability make the consistent assignment of DOIs to one or more versions challenging.
The NISO JAV working group will define a set of terms for each of the different versions of content that are published, as well as a recommendation for whether separate DOIs should be assigned to them. They will address questions such as: Should there be a single DOI for an article, regardless of version? Different DOIs for each version? How are the identifiers connected and used? How do we define a version? As with all NISO output, the group’s draft recommendations will be shared for public comment before publication.
“We welcome this opportunity to update the original NISO JAV Recommended Practice,” says Associate Executive Director, Nettie Lagace, “and we are delighted at the level of interest in this initiative. The response from our voting members was overwhelmingly positive, and a number of them — including publishers, indexers, librarians, researchers, and DOI registries — have already volunteered to join the working group.”
Other interested parties can email nlagace@niso.org for more information.