March 2021
NISO Open Teleconference
Standards-Specific Ontology Standard
Monday, March 8, 2021, 3:00pm - 4:00pm (Eastern Standard Time, US & Canada)
NISO and ISO are not the only standards producers out there, and standards are not only produced for publishing and library interchange! Hundreds of standards development organizations (SDOs) worldwide produce countless standards to support crucial tools and applications in all walks of life. As SDOs and their distributors aim to help their end users save time and effort, expose the data “locked” within standards, and create more dynamic products, support for more sharing across the standards development and publication world is needed.
The NISO SSOS (Standards-Specific Ontology Standard) Working Group is developing a high-level standards ontology, beginning with a common framework to define define standards’ lifecycle states. This ontology will support greater interoperability of standards and standards data, which will in turn aid standards users, standards discovery, functionality, and publishing processes.
Working Group co-chairs Robert Wheeler of ASME and Cord Wischhöfer of DIN will join NISO Associate Executive Director Nettie Lagace to chat about this project, which has been underway for about six months, and its collaboration with Access Innovations in creating an ontology which will help harmonize a varied publishing ecosystem.
NISO Webinar
Building Trust: Credibility of Content
Wednesday, March 10, 2021, 11:00am - 12:30pm (Eastern Standard Time, US & Canada)
The information community is well aware of the need to establish that content is credible, authoritative, and trustworthy. However communicating this is increasingly challenging in a world where technology can make fake information “plausible” or when the need for rapid dissemination precludes the usual safeguards of peer review. How can we communicate these important limits and nuances to those who search for and use the information we provide? How can we best handle provenance tracking? Who is responsible for, and who should be held accountable for verification processes? Do we need better guidelines and, if so, who should be at the table negotiating those? In this roundtable discussion, experts across the information community will share their concerns and success stories.
Participants include Michele Avissar-Whiting, Editor in Chief, Research Square; Bahar Mehmani, Reviewer Experience Lead, Elsevier; Sian Harris, Communications Specialist, INASP; and Eleonora Presani, Executive Director, arXiv; and Dr. Darla Henderson, Independent Consultant.
NISO Virtual Conference
Community Owned Infrastructure: Partnerships & Collaboration
Wednesday, March 24, 2021, 12:00 Noon - 4:00pm (Eastern Standard Time, US & Canada)
Infrastructure -- from transportation systems to information platforms -- is inevitably costly to build and maintain. It entails ongoing investment and long-term technical support. How can we ensure that community-owned information infrastructure is successfully managed? Who are the stakeholders and how do you balance the needs of different groups? What represents the minimum viable product, and what does it take to make it a reality? ? Who is funding the infrastructure and is there a plan for long-term sustainability? What are successful examples of community-owned platforms, and how confident are we that they will be sustained over the long term? We’ll hear from those who provide, fund, and use our community-owned infrastructure about what’s working, what isn’t, and how best to ensure its long-term success.
Confirmed speakers for this event include: Laurie Arp and Megan Forbes, both of LYRASIS; Helena Cousijn, DataCite; Bohyun Kim, University of Rhode Island; Boaz Nadav-Manes, Lehigh University; Ann West, Internet2, and Ralph Youngen, American Chemical Society.
April 2021
NISO Webinar
Meaningful Metrics (First of Two)
Wednesday, April 14, 2021, 11:00am - 12:30pm (Eastern Standard Time, US & Canada)
It’s time to revisit metrics. How can they be made more meaningful and illuminative? Publishers, librarians, and their vendors use similar vocabulary (such as usage) but what they mean by their terminology (downloads, referral, etc.) and how they interpret it may differ. What data needs to be collected? How long is it retained? What are appropriate data-sharing practices? How should providers measure use of open educational resources? Or use of open access monographs? Can we come to agreement on the meaning of the behavioral data that may be automatically gathered in? In short, how can we make metrics more meaningful?
Participants in this two-part webinar will examine and discuss these issues and more from a variety of perspectives.
NISO Virtual Conference
Preprints
Wednesday, April 21, 2021, 12:00 Noon - 4:00pm (Eastern Standard Time, US & Canada)
Research during the pandemic accelerated discussions surrounding the value of preprints. Preprint services, such as the venerable arXiv and more recent bioRxiv, are accepted steps in the publication pathways. Are existing models sustainable? What issues are there with regard to infrastructure? Should there be some process for validation or rejection? How much understanding of the limitations of preprints is properly communicated to journalists or other interested parties? This virtual conference follows up on the 2019 preprint event sponsored by NISO. What progress has been made?
NFAIS Forethought Strategic Summit
Transforming Content Through Transformed Systems
Tuesday, April 27, 2021, 10:00am - Thursday, April 29, 2021, 2:30pm (Eastern Standard Time, US & Canada)
Historically, scholarly publishing has focused on technology and platforms that primarily supported the handling of text. Systems were built to facilitate submission, review, editing, formatting, organization, storage, distribution, and discovery. Resources were poured into these systems and they became increasingly sophisticated.
Now, we are seeing the emergence of technology and systems optimized for support of the new content types, formats, and interactions that are of increasing importance and visibility in scholarly communication. Traditional publications are still with us, but users need and expect more.
New systems are required, but those striving to justify and build them face numerous challenges. Transformation requires extensive advance planning and buy-in from a variety of internal stakeholders. And it’s complicated. For example, over time, there may have been home-grown customization — who remembers now what that code or its associated metadata looks like? How many schemas might have been brought in at different times? How do you manage — and meet — the needs of multiple stakeholders, internal and external? Collaborative effort is essential even before any new system is introduced.
In this program, we will explore the challenges from both a management and a technology perspective to consider how the information community can develop systems that continue to add value to scholarly communication and success