At NISO, the Focus Remains on Value
Letter from the Executive Director, October 2026
A lot has changed since NISO leadership worked on our last strategic plan. It seems like an age since 2022, when the NISO Board of Directors approved our current plan. We’d just received a significant grant to pursue work on collaborative collections. Opportunities for future work and support for standards work seemed abundant. While there was discussion of AI during the NISO Plus Forum held in September of that year, just before the current NISO Strategic Plan was approved by the NISO Board, the future impact of AI systems hadn’t yet reached the broader population when OpenAI publicly released Chat GPT 3.5 at the end of November. Oh, how things have changed.
As we advance through the process of developing the next iteration of our strategic plan, it seems rather quaint not to have included it as a driving force for the next several years. Yet specific technologies have never been a driving force of any of our strategic plans, regardless of their importance. Even in the most frothy days of the dot-com bubble at the turn of the century, NISO’s strategic plan never focused on the web as a technology per se. In the late 1990s, NISO did support and engage in early work on ebooks and digital TV, but the new technology making them possible didn’t necessarily drive NISO’s strategic focus.
Moving forward to today, the Board of Directors is again not so much focused on a specific technology, but rather the value that NISO can provide its membership. During its meeting last month, the Board considered the new work NISO is advancing on artificial intelligence, notably the new work on provenance in AI systems and our partnership with the TRACE initiative, as well as the work of the ODI standing committee, and among the broader content industry initiatives. Obviously, NISO needs to focus attention on the development of standards related to how AI is being deployed regarding scholarly content. The demands of building an infrastructure to support agentic interactions with and consumption of content will be as profound as the development of the web was in the 1990s. However, fundamentally the focus of the conversation about NISO’s role is something distinctly broader.
NISO’s core mission is to further the “unfettered exchange of information”. Unfettered exchange doesn’t mean free or open; it means that we aim to reduce the friction between content creators, intermediaries, and consumers. We aim to make the process of creating content, selling it, discovering it, and delivering it to the readers as seamlessly and easily as possible. That process not only makes the lives of the consumers easier, but also leads to tangible financial benefits for the companies that adopt those standards. Whether through a simplified sales process (because of things like ISBNs and ISSNs), simplifying data exchange with consistent file formats (through things like JATS, KBART, or DOI) or consistent business practices such as the Open Access Business Process (OABP) or TRANSFER code, these standards provide measurable value to the implementers.
An executive might consider all of the development staff that are not required to build data interchange with other providers or customers of their content. The costs of developing an in-house XML model used to be hundreds of thousands of dollars. Today, JATS is a lingua franca in scholarly publishing, which reduces costs all around from manuscript exchange to preservation. Librarians might not think twice about the orders in renewal season that rely on identifiers for books and journals to process their subscription orders. Years ago, the process of gathering and normalizing usage statistics standards might take days, weeks, or even months of staff time were it not for standards to normalize reports through COUNTER or the reporting formats and interchange processes that NISO’s SUSHI (which grew into COUNTER’s API) project developed.
The value of adopting standards isn’t in a PR message to customers or checking a box on an RFP. The value of standards is in the trust that they engender and the cost efficiencies resulting from adoption leads. It took years to fully realize the value for scholarly publishing in the identifiers, the metadata, and the exchange protocols. For example, imagine if every publisher today had to create its own XML content model and determine what the appropriate transformation would need to be from one platform to another among all its trading partners. The DTD creation alone would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to start, and then additional programming would be required to work with every new system, every upgrade, or every new partner. A leader in the US Defense Department once noted to me in a meeting that updating legacy systems to accommodate a new identifier standard would previously cost months of downtime and millions in added costs. These kinds of costs are not obvious, particularly when they are avoided through standards and have been for years. One might notice these new methods and notice their simplification, without tallying up the myriad costs avoided because of the years of investments in standards.
NISO work as part of the TRACE project could have a similar impact. As we consider how agents access content—whether it is open or subscribed—or how we will track that usage, we get a sense of why there is so much standards-related work before us to be advanced. When reflecting on the value that NISO provides, it is not in the monthly webinars, or the networking opportunities of engaging in NISO Plus programs, or even the value of contributing to the processes. Yes, each of these represents significant added value to engaging with NISO. The most important value—which is far less obvious, but significantly greater—is found in the efficiencies that NISO standards provide and the economic return they generate. This can be measured in the fewer staff required to process orders, or in the reduced time it takes to maintain data exchange with partners, or in the greater capacity to monitor how effectively content is being used by your customers or patrons.
As we begin to enter a world where humans aren’t the only consumers of technology and we think about how standards might make the process more efficient, let us not forget the value that could be saved in controlling agents, either in greater retention of copyrighted material or more efficient use of bandwidth or token usage. If NISO can support the development of more efficient protocols for machines to access and use content, how might this affect the amount of money your organization spends on bandwidth or inference costs? More likely than not, it will be significant. That is the value of standardization. That is the value of engaging with NISO. Fundamentally, it is much more than any amount that might be shown on your invoice as you consider renewing your membership for the coming year.
The central role of value is a core element of NISO’s new strategic plan, which will be distributed in early 2027. For those of you receiving your annual renewal of NISO membership this month, I hope you’ll reflect on our value and importance, particularly as we begin work on ensuring AI provenance and interoperability along with other AI-related priorities. How much more would engaging with these systems cost without the groundwork NISO is helping to develop? We’re working to gather feedback on this question and on NISO’s core value. If you’ve received an invitation to provide feedback via our Member Pulse Survey, please respond. If you haven’t, I certainly welcome any feedback you may have on NISO’s value and role in the community. As the Board considers our next steps organizationally, the input from membership and nonmembers as well is incredibly valued. The plan will impact every organization in content distribution, after all.
Sincerely,
Todd Carpenter
Executive Director, NISO
