NASIG 2021

The ISSN International Centre has developed a suite of services for information professionals who want to identify digital journals and their publishers, and find out if these digital journals are being archived in a sustainable manner. The ISSN portal is the essential reference for obtaining controlled and updated metadata about digital continuing resources in reusable formats. Through the implementation of the ISO 3297 standard, a new version of which was published in October 2020, the ISSN International Centre and its network of more than 90 national centers identify about 50,000 new continuing resource titles each year and the ISSN database contains more than 2 million references to date. Building on this unique asset and on numerous partnerships, the ISSN International Center offers a service for tracking title transfers between publishers (journaltransfer.issn.org) and a service for reporting long-term archived titles (keepers.issn.org). This momentum will be continued as part of our 2024 Strategy, which will provide information professionals with identification services for publishers and organizations, as well as better tools to track URLs for online resources. The presentation will provide an overview of the current services and gather suggestions and opinions on our 2024 Strategy.

The presentation can be downloaded through this link.

What metrics are most useful for comparing journal packages?What data visualizations enable the most insight into the value of these packages?
How can libraries produce these kinds of reports, including data visualizations, as efficiently as possible?

Over the last several years at Minnesota State University, Mankato, we have iteratively developed standardized reports for journal collection development, outreach, and academic program support. We previously presented an early version of our package-level analysis reports, where we focused on how to use Tableau for data visualization. Now, we will demonstrate new and improved reports, with new package-level and subject-level metrics leading to additional insights, and we’ll highlight why we prefer Python/ Jupyter Notebook for data visualization. We will also stress why it is important to develop package-level analysis and comparison capabilities beyond what can be provided by UnSub or the library management system.

In addition to talking about the applications of these reports for collection development, we’ll discuss how these reports contribute to a new liaison outreach project. The goals of this new project are (1) to re-affirm the value of the journal packages, (2) to prioritize them for continuing investment, and (3) to garner testimonials. Alongside ‘elevator speech’ versions of our reports, these testimonials can be shared with our university administration in order to drive home the importance of an adequate budget to support the curriculum and student success.

Despite its public and vocal commitment to patron privacy, librarianship largely lacks functional ways to assess privacy with respect to third-party resources such as vendor-provided e-resources. "Physical-equivalent privacy" can be one such yardstick: establish what data is collected, analyzed, stored, and shared/sold when patrons interact with an e-resource, then work out what would have to happen to collect equivalent data about use of an information-equivalent physical resource. If the data practices around the physical resource would be too unethical to countenance, then -- as a matter of service equity and inclusion -- so are the online data practices. The presentation will put this yardstick into practice with real-world examples, including the 2014 Adobe data leak and the under-construction Seamless Access proposal for e-resource authentication, so that attendees can use the yardstick themselves afterward.
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On any given day, the headlines offer up another story of egregious privacy practices by a commercial entity monetizing user data without consent or even justification. Librarians can’t help but be concerned about the tools and services that they rely upon and provide to users. Are we just one headline away from being the story of the day? Ethically, privacy should be a factor in every decision made around library services and the provision of resources. With staffing stretched to the breaking point, and only more so as a result of the pandemic what strategies and tools could best help libraries ensure good privacy practices. This panel will draw upon current scholarship, grant projects, and policy making in librarianship to highlight ways that librarians are engaging with these important issues. For example, Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe is leading the charge to develop a model privacy license language that libraries can utilize in their vendor negotiations and leading a project for academic librarians to champion privacy in campus learning analytics projects.. Doreen Bradley and Heather Staines have co-edited a special issue of Serials Librarian that explores privacy concerns that range from third party services, to data privacy, to tracking, and more. Gabriel Gardner of California State University Long Beach who contributed to the special issue will address concerns around third party tracking. In this session, participants will talk about the latest concerns and what you might do in your library to assure your faculty, staff, and students that their privacy is front of mind.

Open Access (OA) output is growing year-on-year and there is widespread belief that research will function better if results are made openly available to the community.

Managing the increasingly complex network of agreements between publishers and institutions, along with the rise in number of policies associated with open access publications by academic institutions and funders poses a serious implementation challenge. As consequence, policies are not always effectively implemented and agreements not realised to the full.

This complexity, and the current administrative burden on institutions, funders and publishers, has also hindered progress in developing new business models to support a broader move to OA. From a researchers perspective, this landscape is at best confusing, and at worst impenetrable.
For a breakthrough in the transformation of the market such that OA is supported as the predominant model of publication, a joint challenge has to be addressed: the complexity around the implementation of multi-lateral OA publication-level arrangements.

The OA Switchboard contributes to the solution as a neutral, independent intermediary,
providing shared infrastructure, standards and back office services for funders, institutions and publishers. It is a tool that can be called when needed, or integrated in stakeholders’ own systems and workflows to achieve automation and scalability, as it facilitates interoperability with other systems in the OA workflow.

Following a successful 2020 project, overseen by OASPA, the OA Switchboard moved to the operational stage as of 1 January 2021, and is now run from the newly founded Stichting OA Switchboard. This structural governance and funding model ensures a not-for-profit, collectively controlled collaboration between funders, institutions and publishers, whereby neutrality and independence are preserved by legal structure, governance and articles of incorporation.

2021/2022 is regarded as a ‘launch phase’ to achieve wide adoption and widespread usage, to allow time for (technical) integration and implementation, and to further develop and improve the OA Switchboard. As we speak, participating publishers, research institutions and funders, sometimes joined by partners who provide specific systems or solutions for them, are defining use cases between them to get started with. This shows how this simple solution can be used to tackle multiple use cases. These early adopters, launching customers and founding partners meet regularly to discuss strategic, as well as (shared) implementation topics.

In this 45 minutes session at the NASIG 2021 conference, we want to share these conversations and engage a wider community. This is the agenda:

Context & Setting – Yvonne Campfens
Funder challenges & 2021 use case
Library/institution challenges & 2021 use case - Liz Ball and Jennifer Sanchez-Davies (Jisc)
Publisher challenges & 2021 use case - Alex Howat (Microbiology Society)
OA Switchboard: Reporting Made Easy - Ádám Dér (Max Planck Digital Library)
Q&A and discussion with audience – moderated by Yvonne Campfens

Recent studies in scholarly publishing show the academic publication lifecycle continues to undergo major changes. Perhaps the most significant change is that the publication process is no longer linear. Rather, the publication process has become more circular – a series of loops and connections, with some action steps repeated multiple times. Researchers, publishers, and academic librarians have all adapted their roles in response to the circular publication lifecycle, and over the past several years, these roles continue to change amidst the challenges presented by Open Access publishing, exorbitant subscription costs, transformative agreements, and other issues. Despite these challenges, however, the circular publication process represents multiple opportunities for librarians and researchers to build increasingly collaborative partnerships charged with moving authors from idea to publication. During this session, we will explore these opportunities further by examining several potential, unique methods for librarians and researchers to work collaboratively at any number of steps in the publication process. In addition to sharing collection prioritization tips and scenarios in which librarians may discuss publishing goals with researchers, we will also discuss training models in which librarians assist tenure-track faculty with other facets of the publication process beyond data access and discovery.

Unsub is a collections analysis tool that helps libraries understand and forecast the value of their serials subscription packages as they consider breaking their Big Deals. Come hear how Unsub has worked (or not worked!) to inform renewal decisions and negotiations in the real world.

This is a unique panel that includes both the creators of Unsub as well as librarians who have used Unsub in their decision-making.

We will begin with a quick demo of Unsub, then dig into the experiences of the University of Chicago, Iowa State University, and Purdue University. There will be plenty of time to ask questions of Unsub's creators, as well as the academic librarians who have used Unsub's data with their 'Big Deal' renewal/cancellation decisions.

Unsub is open infrastructure, made by the nonprofit Our Research.