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Later this month, it will be ten years since I joined NISO. It is truly amazing how quickly "time flies when you're having fun." For all the ups, downs, challenges, and successes over the past decade, I look back happily on the time. There is much to be proud of.

Back in 2006, NISO was in the midst of a challenging period. A Blue Ribbon Panel prepared a report for the NISO Board of Directors in 2005 describing an organization in a dire shape, with mismatched membership, challenges regarding international engagement, inadequate relationships with other organizations, a lack of technical infrastructure, and a process that was plodding and slow.

Some of the ideas the panel considered, such as certification, didn't make sense to pursue. Some ideas were tested and then dropped as unsuccessful. Other suggestions the group made, such as developing an educational program, have been tremendously successful. Some very strong recommendations, such as deployment of an improved infrastructure, were quickly adopted and have made a significant impact.

NISO has navigated many economic challenges over the past decade, including the Great Recession and the consolidation waves in our community. Even in this challenging environment we have been able to expand our resources and to add staff to the team in order to boost our portfolio. We have attracted both new voting members and more than a hundred new Library Standards Alliance Members. NISO has also opened up new channels of funding for our standards-development work through obtaining ten grants in the same number of years. With all these resources, we have attracted an ever-increasing number of contributors and new project ideas, and we have been able to get our work done more quickly than previously.

While this month is my anniversary, the success we have had over this decade is certainly not an honor for me alone. There are a great number of people who have been involved in these developments and many deserve a great deal of recognition. NISO is a community effort and literally hundreds of people have contributed to these changes. Dozens of Board members have served the community and we owe them a debt of gratitude for their leadership. The staff that have joined me on this journey also deserve recognition. Finally, the volunteers who have served on leadership and working groups to create our standards and best practices are the real heroes in this tale.

If there were time, I would like to send a personal note to each of you who helped us to arrive this anniversary. Even though August is a slower month than others, in reality, the success we have had means that we hardly have a slow period any longer. Since I don't have the time to reach out directly to the hundreds of you, please take this 120th Newsline introduction as my personal thank you. For me and the staff, there are several reports to write, grant applications to craft, new working items to prepare, presentations to plan, and budgets to draft. The reward for success is often more work. And it is that additional work that leads me to believe that the next decade will be just as fun as the last.

Thank you to all of you for listening, for engaging, and for contributing.

Sincerely,

Todd Carpenter

Executive Director

NISO Reports

New and Proposed Specs and Standards

Version 1.2 of Thema Now Available

EDItEUR reports that Version 1.2 of Thema, the international, multilingual subject category scheme is now available at http://editeur.dyndns.org/thema, and on the EDItEUR website, where users can find the scheme in various formats.

EDItEUR also notes that upcoming changes include those by national groups responsible for maintaining each Thema language. Updated translations for Spanish, Swedish, Polish, and German are already available, notes the organization, with more to come over the next couple of months. In addition, a full Chinese translation of Thema 1.2 is expected to be published this month.

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W3C Invites Implementations of Mixed Content

W3C's Web Applications Security Group has released a Candidate Recommendation of Mixed Content. The document addresses the problem that when a user contacts a secure, authenticated website, that website may request sub-resources over an unencrypted channel; the encryption and authentication status of material so received is unknown. This specification discusses how user agents should handle fetching this unreliable content, tackling topics such as opting in, modifications to WebSockets, and UI requirements.

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Library of Congress Releases Recommended Formats Statement

The Library of Congress has released its latest Recommended Formats Statement, which "identifies hierarchies of the physical and technical characteristics of creative formats, both analog and digital, which will best meet the needs of all concerned, maximizing the chances for survival and continued accessibility of creative content well into the future."

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Media Stories

Have You Looked at This?: Yewno

Scholarly Kitchen, July 13, 2016; by Jill O'Neill

NISO's Educational Programs Manager, Jill O'Neill, recently test-drove Yewno, the new search engine that created buzz at the ALA Annual Conference in Orlando. Writing about the service for Scholarly Kitchen, O'Neill concludes that Yewno has worthwhile aims and that readers try it out for themselves.

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Measuring Up: Impact Factors Do Not Reflect Article Citation Rates

PLOS Blogs KnightBlog, July 5, 1016; by Veronique Kiermer and Catriona MacCallum

Though impact factor and other journal-level metrics fail to reflect the performance of individual articles in those journals, many researchers and research assessment panels continue to rely upon them. Using data regarding their own publications, Kiermer and MacCallum aim to show that such reliance is a mistake.

NISO Note: NISO will soon publish a Recommended Practice created by the Altmetrics Initiative working groups.

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Introducing the New Sector Agreement for Open Research Data

Jisc Blog, July 28, 2016; by Rachel Bruce

The various stakeholders involved in producing, using, and publishing research data now recognize, says Bruce, that open availability of that data is a positive force. However, "while funders and universities have their own policies, and in some cases mandates, in place for open research data," she explains, "what hasn't been so apparent is that these key stakeholders are working together towards shared goals and are aligned." One result of that alignment is the new Concordat on Open Research Data.

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NSF Commits $35 Million to Improve Scientific Software

National Science Foundation Press Release, July 29, 2016

The software that scientists rely on for simulations, data crunching, and more will benefit from two awards announced by the National Science Foundation on July 29, 2016. The awards, the purpose of which is to enable the establishment of Scientific Software Innovation Institutes, will support the Molecular Sciences Software Institute and the Science Gateways Community Institute. While these two bodies are the direct recipients of the $35 million dollars that is earmarked for five years of work, Rajiv Ramnath, program director in the Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure at NSF, notes that the new institutes will ultimately effect thousands of researchers.

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SocArXiv, COS Partner on New OA Social Science Archive

Library Journal, July 29, 2016; by Lisa Peet

On July 9, the steering committee of open-access, open-source repository SocArXiv announced plans to partner with the Center for Open Science. The two organizations plan to develop a preprint server that enables data and code to be shared. The work also creates, says Peet, the potential for post-publication peer review.

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Rewarding open access scholarship in promotion and tenure: Driving institutional change

College and Research Libraries News, July/August 2016; by Jere Odell, Heather Coates, and Kristi Palmer

The National Science Foundation's (NSF) Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (ACI) Division "supports and coordinates the development, acquisition, and provision of state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure resources, tools, and services essential to the advancement and transformation of science and engineering." Starting in 2013, NSF positioned the OCI within the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. Now that this arrangement has been in place for several years, the foundation is assessing the situation, and seeks science and engineering community input on several questions.

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Meet Moxie Marlinspike, the Anarchist Bringing Encryption to All of Us

Wired, July 31, 2016; by Andy Greenberg

Moxie Marlinspike, creator of the encrypted messaging app Signal who for a time led Twitter's security team, strongly believes that encryption is important in keeping government out of our lives. "So far," says Greenberg in this lengthy profile of the anarchist, "governments aren't having much luck pushing back."

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