Noteworthy

ORCID Registry Launched

In October 2012, the ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) Registry was launched, providing a mechanism where researchers can obtain a unique personal identifier that unambiguously distinguishes the individual as the author or creator of their published works in systems that adopt ORCID. Researchers and scholars can register for an ORCID identifier, create ORCID records, manage their privacy settings, and link to and synchronize their ORCID identifier with external systems, such as electronic databases of citations or full-text publications.

The ORCID ID is a 16-digit number that is compatible with ISO 27729, the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI). ORCIDs are randomly assigned by the ORCID Registry and expressed as a URI. Within the first 24 hours of the ORCID launch, over 1,000 registrations were logged.

Participating in the ORCID Launch Partners Program are research institutions, publishers, research funders, data repositories, and third party providers, including The American Physical Society, Aries Systems, Avedas, Boston University, the California Institute of Technology, CrossRef, Elsevier, Faculty of 1000, Figshare, Hindawi Publishing Corporation, KNODE, Nature Publishing Group, SafetyLit, Symplectic, Thomson Reuters, Total-Impact, and the Wellcome Trust.

Many of these organizations are already integrating ORCIDs into their systems and publication workflows. Thomson Reuters’ ResearcherID® will link to ORCID and allow researchers to synchronize their publication information. Nature Publishing Group, Hindawi Publishing Corporation, Aries Systems, Thomson Reuters, and the American Physical Society (APS) are integrating ORCID identifiers into the manuscript submission process. Elsevier has enabled researchers to link to their Scopus Author Profiles from their ORCID records, saving them time when setting up their ORCID profile and allowing Scopus to automatically keep their ORCID bibliography up to date. Next year, Scopus will incorporate ORCID data into the Scopus author profiling process to increase the accuracy of the Scopus profiles and automatically propagate work that researchers do to clean up their ORCID profiles. Through its affiliate ORCID EU, ORCID is working with DataCite to link ORCID identifiers with research datasets.

As part of the ORCID Registry, individuals can search the metadata from CrossRef and add their past works to their personal ORCID records. ORCID is also working with CrossRef and the publishing community to ensure that ORCID identifiers collected during the manuscript submission process are incorporated into article metadata. CrossRef has modified its metadata schema so that publishers can include ORCIDs with their bibliographic metadata deposits. The CrossRef system will allow querying for ORCIDs from its records early in 2013.

For more information on ORCID, visit: http://orcid.org

Leading Global Standards Organizations Endorse “OpenStand” Principles that Drive Innovation and Borderless Commerce

Five leading global organizations—IEEE, Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Society and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)—announced that they have signed a statement affirming the importance of a jointly developed set of principles establishing a modern paradigm for global, open standards. The shared “OpenStand” principles—based on the effective and efficient standardization processes that have made the Internet and Web the premiere platforms for innovation and borderless commerce—are proven in their ability to foster competition and cooperation, support innovation and interoperability, and drive market success.

The OpenStand principles demand:

• Cooperation among standards organizations
• Adherence to due process, broad consensus, transparency, balance, and openness in standards development
• Commitment to technical merit, interoperability, competition, innovation, and benefit to humanity
• Availability of standards to all
• Voluntary adoption

Standards developed and adopted via the OpenStand principles include IEEE standards for the Internet's physical connectivity, IETF standards for end-to-end global Internet interoperability, and the W3C standards for the World Wide Web. Other technologies that would be applicable to the open standards model are design- automation standards and the global smart-grid effort. The group invites technologists, inventors, developers, professionals, scientists, engineers, architects, members of academia, students, civic and governmental leaders, developers and other professionals, and organizations to affirm the principles.

OpenStand principles: open-stand.org/principles/

Source: Open Stand Press Release (http://open-stand.org/ openstandlaunch/)

ALCTS Metadata Standards Committee Formed

The Library and Information Technology Association and the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS), with the support of Reference and User Services Association (RUSA)— all divisions of the American Library Association—have formed the ALCTS/ LITA Metadata Standards Committee to develop metadata standards for bibliographic information.

The Committee plans to begin its work at the Midwinter Meeting of the American Library Association, January 2013, and will actively seek input from many groups and communities of practice in its work.

The three ALA divisions have also voted to disband the ALCTS/LITA/ RUSA Machine-Readable Bibliographic Information (MARBI) Committee, as
of June 30, 2013. The MARC Advisory Committee (MAC) is expected to continue to advise the Library of Congress on MARC development beyond this date and ALA representatives and liaisons on the MAC roster will continue to advise LC about MARC.

Source: Zoe Stewart-marshall blog posting (http://litablog.org/2012/08/new-alctslita- metadata-standards-committee/http://litablog.org/2012/08/new-alctslita-metadata-standards-committee/)

Second Edition of Open Archival Information System Reference Model Published

The International Organization for Standardization has published a revision to Space data and information transfer systems – Open archival information system (OAIS) – Reference model (ISO 14721:2012). An OAIS is an archive, consisting of an organization, which may be part of a larger organization, of people and systems that has accepted the responsibility to preserve information and make it available for a designated community. The term “open” in OAIS is used to imply that the standard was developed in open forums and does not imply that access to the archive is unrestricted. Matching text to the ISO standard is freely available as a recommended practice of The Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems.

Barbara Sierman (National Library of the Netherlands) in her blog entry, OAIS 2012 update, refers to this as “the most important standard in digital preservation.”

She identifies the main changes from the previous edition as:

• An added element for access rights information
• Discussion of emulation as a viable preservation strategy
• Greater interaction between the Administration functional entity and Preservation Planning functional entity
• Improved definition of “authenticity”
• A redefinition of “information package”
• A new definition of “other representation information”

OAIS text: http://public.ccsds.org/publications/archive/ 650x0m2.pdf

Sierman blog entry: http://digitalpreservation.nl/seeds/ standards/oais-2012-update/

New Global Subject Codes Standard Launches at Frankfurt Book Fair

Book industry representatives from 16 countries announced the formation of a new, global standard to categorize and classify book content by subject. The project, initially known as "Thema," was first announced during the Tools of Change Supply Chain Conference taking place during the Frankfurt International Book Fair. The new standard will be a general purpose classification scheme for the book industry, meant initially to work alongside existing standards such as BIC, BISAC, CLIL, etc. The long range goal is to move all markets to the global standard, helping to eliminate confusion among both upstream and downstream.

A new, independent organization created to manage Thema will be governed by a multinational Board of Directors. Countries currently participating in the Thema project include: Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Pan Arab Group, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Thema will continue the work already begun by the iBIC project managed out of the United Kingdom. Book Industry Communication (BIC) and Nielsen Book, who jointly own iBIC, have graciously donated the iBIC intellectual property to the Thema Board for the creation of the global standard.

A temporary website has been established at: www.panthema.org

Source: Thema press release (http://www.bic.org.uk/files/pdfs/THEMA%20PRESS%20RELEASE%20--%20UK%20VERSION.pdf)

New Services Provide Growing Access to Research Datasets

Both commercial and non-profit information service suppliers are making forays into providing improved access to research datasets, as illustrated by recent announcements.

Ex Libris and the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) have agreed to syndicate the metadata of the research data that ANDS makes available. Any datasets registered with Ands will also be visible to researchers who use the Primo Central index for resource discovery. this agreement is part of the Ex Libris initiative to expand the indexing of research data in Primo Central. “Providing scholarly access to research data and materials from institutional repositories is a high priority for Ex Libris,” commented David Beychok, Vice President of Discovery and Delivery Solutions at Ex Libris.

Thomson Reuters announced the launch of the Data Citation Index, a research resource within the Web of Knowledge to facilitate the discovery, use, and attribution of data sets and data studies that also link to peer-reviewed literature. this new research resource from Thomson Reuters creates a single source of discovery for scientific, social sciences, and arts and humanities information. thomson reuters partnered with numerous data repositories worldwide to capture bibliographic records and cited references for digital research, facilitating visibility, author attribution, and ultimately the measurement of impact of this growing body of scholarship. the thomson reuters white paper, Collaborative Science: Solving the Issues of Discovery, Attribution and Measurement in Data Sharing, takes a close look at the approach of utilizing the data Citation index to bridge the scholarly research gap.

JSTOR, which launched its self-service data for research website in 2008, announced a study—led by Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom of the University of Washington about gender inequality among authors of academic papers—that was based on the research articles in JSTOR's digital library. This project exemplifies the kind of research made possible by new digital technologies, enabling anyone in the world to explore the JSTOR holdings and to freely create datasets for use in their research. Today the site sees about 700 datasets created and downloaded annually. Previously, Yale University legal scholar and law librarian Fred Shapiro used data from JSTOR to document first uses of words that pre-dated the Oxford English Dictionary. The benefits of projects like the one just released by the West-Bergstrom team can reach beyond the findings themselves. The West-Bergstrom team also created an interactive tool that allows others to explore the underlying content based on the work they have done. This demonstrates how sharing large corpora of data can also lead to the creation of new ways of exploring and discovery scholarship—effectively giving researchers another lens through which to view the published literature.

Ex Libris/Australian Data Service press release: http://tinyurl. com/exlibris-australia

Thomson Reuters press release: http://thomsonreuters.com/ content/press_room/science/730914

Collaborative Science: Solving the Issues of Discovery, Attribution and Measurement in Data Sharing white paper:
http://go.thomsonreuters.com/dci_essay

JSTOR press release: http://about.jstor.org/news/jstor- enabled-data-mining-project-signals-next-wave-research

Data for Research website: http://dfr.jstor.org/

Correspondence Between ISO 25964 and SKOS/SKOS-XL Models Developed

The ISO TC46/SC9/WG8 working group for the ISO 25964 standard about thesauri have published a document defining the Correspondence between ISO 25964 and SKOS/SKOS-XL Models. The document is intended as a correction and/or update to the Appendix “Correspondences Between ISO-2788/5964 and SKOS Constructs” of the SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Primer. The update was needed because ISO 25964-1, Information and documentation —Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies—Part 1: Thesauri for information retrieval was published in 2011, replacing the earlier ISO thesaurus standards ISO 2788:1986 and ISO 5964:1985, which provided specifications for monolingual and multilingual thesauri, respectively.

In addition to mapping the elements between the ISO 25964-1 standard and the SKOS model, the document includes any comments on the related MADS/RDF (Metadata Authority Description Schema in RPD) mapping.

The Correspondence document is hosted on the NISO website at: www.niso.org/apps/group_public/download.php/9507/ Correspondence_ISo25964-SKoSXl-madS-2012-09-16.pdf