Developing Standards Across the Scholarly Information Chain
Developing Standards Across the Scholarly Information Chain
Bev Acreman
BioMed Central
Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Recommended Citation
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Article 5
Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/atg
v OLUME 23, NUMBER 1
TM
FEBRUARY 2011
ISSN: 1043-2094
“Linking Publishers, Vendors and Librarians”
Developing Standards Across the Scholarly
Information Chain
by Bev Acreman (BioMed Central, London, UK)
<> www. biomedcentral.com
If Rumors Were Horses
Tternational organisation — the UKSG
he focus in this issue is on how an
in(www.uksg.org) — fulfils its remit to
span the wide range of interests and activities
across the scholarly information community
of librarians, publishers, intermediaries, and
technology vendors. One way we do this is
through funding research projects which look
to address issues that affect all players in the
community. I am grateful to Ed Pentz of
CrossRef and Sarah Pearson of the
University of Birmingham, UK for gathering together
such a solid collection of articles covering the
topics of ProjectTransfer and KBART — a
valuable research project looking at
standardising the metadata for online resources by setting
standards for knowledge-bases which underpin
technologies such as OpenURL. To
comple
Let’s see. Another ProQuest rumor to start
this off! As its new search platform rolls out
to libraries around the world, ProQuest
announced at the ALA Midwinter meeting that
they had acquired ebrary. Founded
in Palo Alto in 1999, ebrary
is a fast growing leader in
the rapidly evolving eBook
industry, having increased
its 2010 revenue by more
than 30 percent over the
previous year. ProQuest
plans continued investment
in ebrary’s products and
services for the academic,
corporate, and public library
markets. ProQuest will also
expand ebrary’s selection of research tools
and ability to support new eBook devices as
well as broadening language coverage from its
current support of major European languages
to include Chinese, Arabic and others. ebrary
founders Christopher Warnock and Kevin
Sayar will remain to lead the business in its
ment the KBART articles, Adam Chandler
of Cornell University Library discusses
the NISO IOTA project. This project looks
to overcome the problem of incomplete or
inaccurate OpenURLs which lead to an
unacceptable rate of request failures. Both projects
are critical for publishers and intermediaries
to get right as librarians increasingly seek to
put quality metrics into their negotiations with
publishers.
I know from co-caretaking the
lis-e-resources discussion list (http://www.uksg.org/
serials#lis-e-journals) just how infuriating
librarians find it when journals move
publisher and platforms at short (or no!) notice.
The series of Transfer articles within this
issue explains the rationale behind the project,
which seeks to bring order to the seemingly
Palo Alto headquarters.
http://www.proquest.com/
http://www.against-the-grain.com/2011/01/
proquest-acquires-ebrary/
More recent news! Just learned last night
that the bubbly Jill Emery is pregnant!
Congratulations, Jill! Hoo-ha! And
there is all sorts of news and kudos
about the ER&L conference on her
Facebook page. Congrats, Jill, on
many accounts!
And speaking of Jill’s,
noticed an article on
Information Today’s Website by the
awesome Jill O’Neill, once of
Elsevier among other places,
who is director of planning and
communication at NFAIS. The post is entitled “Amazon
Raises the Stakes in your Reading Experience:
The Platform War Continues,” and is about a
recent announcement by Amazon of upgrades
to the Kindle. Right-o, we know all about that
continued on page 6
neverending movements of individual or
entire lists of journals. Publishers need
to sign up to the code of practice (30 have
already joined since its inception
representing 10,000 journals), and librarians need to
insist that publishers comply with the code to
limit the nuisance that sudden loss of access
causes. As Nancy Beals states in her article,
“the issue of titles moving from publisher to
publisher not only affects patron access to the
title on the user side, but the movement of
an electronic journal title also plays a major
role on the librarian and staff side.”
A critical part of the UKSG’s mission is
education and training, and two articles outline
the different approach we take to this. First,
we have Graham Stone from the University
continued on page 14
What To Look For In This Issue:
Back to the Future: Old Models for
New Challenges................................. 38
First Sale Doctrine – Mountains From
Molehills ............................................ 52
Falling Prices in the Out-of-Print
Book Market...................................... 54
A Lifetime in Library Supply: 45 Years
of Change .......................................... 69
Is Free a Very Good Price?............... 71
Interviews Joyce Dixon-Fyle .............................. 45 Douglas H. Wright ........................... (...truncated)