Working Group Connection, September 2026: Projects via Information Policy & Analysis Topic Committee
Co-chairs of the IPA Topic Committee are: Jennifer D’Urso (Johns Hopkins University Press) and Moon Kim (University of British Columbia).
Accessibility Remediation Metadata (ARM)
Co-chairs: Bill Kasdorf (Kasdorf and Associates, LLC), J. Stephen Downie (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Jacob Jett (Association of State Floodplain Managers)
Accessibility Remediation Metadata (ARM) Webpage
Work Item Approved by NISO Voting Members
Many books, articles, videos, and other resources are often inaccessible or not sufficiently accessible to people with perceptual, cognitive, physical, or other disabilities. Schools, colleges, and universities are typically required by law to provide accessible versions of resources that students need. Similarly, government documents and other resources in the United States and elsewhere are required to be accessible. Unfortunately, most published resources are not yet provided by their publishers in fully accessible forms. This requires what is known as remediation: acquiring a publication in some available format and altering it to make it accessible, typically to a single individual needing a particular type of remediation.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded project, "FRAME: Federating Repositories of Accessible Materials for Education," was formed to eliminate redundant work and facilitate the sharing of remediated resources. As no standard metadata describing the process and results of remediation for accessibility in sufficient detail existed, the FRAME metadata model was developed to enable both discovery and deposit functions.
The Accessibility Remediation Metadata (ARM) Working Group will extend and refine the FRAME metadata model to meet the needs of the broader accessibility community, focused on individuals and organizations involved in the remediation of content for accessibility and the consumption of remediated content. This work will include writing documentation that clearly defines and describes the properties in the model, the values they can use, and the relationships between them, and developing a schema that enables validation of content conformance to the model.
The ARM Working Group has finalized the draft standard document for public comment. The document will be available on the group webpage in late September for public review and feedback through early November 2026.
ARM Working Group member Korey Singleton participated in the NISO Plus Global/Online conference in September.
Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Infrastructure Project (CCLIP) Working Groups
Acquisitions Working Group
Co-Chairs: Jesse Koennecke (SUNY Binghamton), Russell Michalak (Goldey-Beacom College)
Assessment/Data Analysis Working Group
Co-Chairs: Anne Larrivee (West Chester University of Pennsylvania), Jharina Pascual (University of California, Irvine)
Cataloging/Metadata Working Group
Co-Chairs: Gaëlle Bequet (ISSN International Centre), Jeanette Norris (Yale University)
Collections Development and Selection Working Group
Co-chairs: Eva Jurczyk (University of Toronto), Bill Maltarich (New York University)
Consortia Working Group
Co-Chairs: Robin Hastings (Northeast Kansas Library System (NEKLS), Boaz Nadav-Manes (Lehigh University)
Infrastructure Working Group
Co-chairs: Rob Cartolano (Columbia University Libraries), Kris Maloney (Big10 Academic Alliance (BTAA), Rutgers University)
Organizational Strategy and Governance Working Group
Co-chairs: Mike Gorrell (Index Data), Boaz Nadav-Manes (Lehigh University)
Work Item Approved by NISO Voting Members
CCLP Project Web Site
Publication: Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Infrastructure Project (CCLIP) (NISO RP-46-2026)
Networks of libraries have a long tradition of working together to expand their resources and provide more comprehensive coverage across all subjects through sharing of resources. As one of these strategies, larger networks of institutions have recently explored wider adoption of cooperative collections management, which this project defines as a process by which networks of institutions work collaboratively to acquire, manage, circulate, and preserve collections across the network. The Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project seeks to overcome serious barriers to wider implementations, including the lack of available vendor-neutral interoperable systems, adequate governance and decision-making frameworks, and assessment tools.
The CCLIP Recommended Practice was published in June. The Recommended Practice documents exchange protocols for gathering, normalizing, and exchanging holdings information, contractual information, retention obligations, and usage data. The CCLIP model also includes aggregation of library staff and subject matter expertise, local/consortial/group-based insights, and publisher/marketplace information necessary to support collaborative decisions at both the local and cross-institutional levels.
With the publication of the Recommended Practice, the CCLP Steering Committee will regroup to foster community-wide adoption of the best practices and advance into an implementation phase of the CCLP infrastructure.
Project co-PI, Boaz Nadev Manes, along with Steering Committee member Sebastian Hammer, discussed the Recommended Practice and the development of the CYCLOPS middleware at this year's NISO Plus Global/Online conference.
Open Access Business Processes (OABP)
Co-chairs: Yvonne Campfens (OA Switchboard), Joshua Shelly (University of Potsdam)
OABP Working Group Web page
Work Item Approved by NISO Voting Members
The increasing adoption of OA policies and mandates has shifted strategy and business practices in libraries, scholarly publishing entities, and associated organizations. Meanwhile, the operationalization of financial transactions, compliance tracking with different policies, and related workflows has yet to be normalized. In the absence of established best practices there exists a sundry assortment of individualized solutions in libraries and publishers that rely heavily on publishers' workflows, systems, dashboards, invoices, and data. A number of organizations have defined local workflows to facilitate work but a shared recommendation would be of benefit to the entire community. The Open Access Business Processes (OABP) Working Group began meeting late in 2023 and is developing a Recommended Practice on operationalizing OA business practices.
The draft Recommended Practice was available for public comment from September 2 to October 17, 2025. The draft introduced a shared glossary to eliminate confusion over terminology, clear metadata specifications to ensure information flows smoothly between systems, and guidance on reporting, financial tracking, and agreement management. Together, these elements will help stakeholders across the publishing ecosystem work together more effectively.
The working group is now evaluating this input and determining how the draft might be updated to incorporate it. When the document is finalized and approved by the working group, it will be presented to the Topic Committee for its approval before NISO publication.
Package ID Working Group
Package ID Working Group Webpage
Work Item Approved by NISO Voting Members
E-resources are frequently purchased as packages, which can range in size from a handful of titles to hundreds of thousands. Currently, these packages can only be identified by their name in the supply chain, within elements such as invoices, publisher websites, knowledge bases, etc. However, names are inherently ambiguous, so this causes problems that affect all stakeholders—libraries, content providers and platforms, knowledge base providers, and even users.
The NISO Unique Electronic Resource Package Identifiers Working Group will evaluate and create recommendations for a unique identifier to enable disambiguation between packages, which can be used across the supply chain. This identifier will allow all stakeholders to streamline and simplify their processes, and to more easily track changes. It will also provide libraries with clear information about which titles a package contains, enabling them, for example, to manage claims when journals move between publishers.
Following initial approval by NISO Voting Members in 2021, the Package ID Working Group held its first meeting in May 2026. The Working Group has begun initial discussions examining use cases and current workflows using internal package identification at member organizations and is working toward developing a work plan for approval by the Information Policy & Analysis Topic Committee.
Seamless Access
NISO provides support and expertise to the Seamless Access project in the form of leadership on several working groups and membership on the governance committee of the project. SeamlessAccess is designed to enable a more streamlined access experience for federated authentication across scholarly and research information infrastructures, and works to make all of federated authentication a better experience for users.
Since our last update, SeamlessAccess, SNSI, and other stakeholders in our community have finalized Phase 1 of a new pilot project, aimed at advancing federated identity for library e-resource access. Additionally, a web-friendly version of the Access Audit Toolkit is being created, with an eye toward integrating it into the website early next year.
At NISO Plus Global/Online 2026, John Felts, Amanda Ferrante, Heather Staines, and Albert Wu presented during the Getting Moving on Federated Identity in Libraries session. While at the ALA Annual Conference & Exhibition, an update on the group’s work was presented by Cristin Hipke as part of the NISO Standards Update session.
SERU (Shared E-Resource Understanding) Standing Committee
SERU Standing Committee Web page
Publication: SERU Recommended Practice (NISO RP-7-2012)
The SERU Recommended Practice was updated in 2012 to be more flexible for use with online products beyond e-journals, and is supported by its Standing Committee who works to publicize SERU and educate libraries and publishers via direct contacts and public presentations at industry conferences. The SERU website pages are available to help publishers and libraries understand and use the SERU material and NISO continues to add more libraries and publishers to the SERU Registry upon request.
Transfer Standing Committee
Co-chairs: Sophia Anderton (BJU International), Emilie Lavallée-Funston (University of Bristol)
Transfer Standing Committee Web page
Publication: Transfer Recommended Practice (NISO RP-24-2026)
Transfer helps publishers ensure that content remains accessible by readers and librarians when a journal or set of journals is transferred between parties, and supports a smooth process with minimal disruption. Publishers are asked to endorse the Code of Practice and to abide by its principles wherever it is commercially reasonable to do so. Supporting publishers are included in a list of endorsers on the Transfer website. The Transfer Alerting Service, sponsored by the ISSN Agency, facilitates communication about journal transfers and includes a database where details about transfers can be searched.
The members of the Transfer Standing Committee, who meet bi-monthly, are responsible for encouraging publisher endorsement and planning outreach, education, and training activities. These continue at industry conferences where members meet publishers in person and talk to them about Transfer directly.
Version 5 of the Transfer Code of Practice Recommended Practice was published in late March. Following the publication, the Transfer Standing Committee is working to plan a webinar that will cover the changes from Version 4 to Version 5 of the Recommended Practice.
U.S. National PID Strategy
Co-chairs: John Chodacki (California Digital Library (CDL), Rachael Kotarski (University of Chicago Library)
U.S. National PID Strategy Working Group Webpage
Work Item Approved by NISO Voting Members
Persistent identifiers, or PIDs, are a critical part of the infrastructure supporting scholarly communications and open research. They support research discovery and citations, allow users and systems to easily identify authors and institutions and link them to research outputs, and help ensure compliance with a growing number of government and funder mandates advancing open scholarship. To date, however, approaches to encouraging the adoption of PIDs and investment in PID infrastructure have not been coordinated, and there is little guidance available on how best to improve the implementation and efficacy of PIDs within the diverse spheres of the US research landscape. The Open Research Funders Group, building on work first begun by the Research Data Alliance, released a report, “Developing a US National PID Strategy,” in the spring of 2024. The report highlighted the need for a strategy that would build support for PIDs, increase their adoption, and help stakeholders to incorporate them into workflows and systems more easily. The NISO U.S. National PID Strategy Working Group will further expand on the work defined by the ORFG PID Strategy Working Group to create a standard advancing PIDs and open scholarship.
Since our last update, the full group is working on incorporating all sections into a draft standard, prior to making it available for public comment.
As part of NISO Plus Global/Online 2026, Todd Carpenter, John Chodacki, Kornelia Korzec, and Titusz Pan presented for the Persistently Evolving: What’s New in the World of PIDs session. While at the ALA Annual Conference & Exhibition, an update on the group’s work was presented by Rachael Kotarski as part of the NISO Standards Update session.