Heading into September, NISO is Back to Full Throttle
Letter from the Executive Director, September 2024
“It’s been a minute.” It certainly has. Moving into September, we return from a summer respite in the northern hemisphere to the hectic pace of travel, meetings. and project work. We are all excited about the prospect of the community convening for our next NISO Plus Global Online event later this month. More generally, there are many things happening this fall that will be our focus.
Here are just some of the things you may have missed over the past few months.
NISO members recently approved a new project to develop a US national persistent identifier strategy. This summer, with the help of the RDA-US TIGRUS project, we contributed to a series of short videos on the report released earlier this year that served as the precursor to this project.
At the FORCE11 conference last month, Véronique Kiermer from PLOS described enhancements to infrastructure and more ideal interoperability across the scholarly ecosystem during her keynote talk on ways to remove barriers to access and participation in open science publishing.
Artificial intelligence discussions continue to dominate the landscape—a number of licensing deals to provide content to large-language model developers have been announced, and authors have critiqued those deals. It will be interesting to see what the impacts of those licenses are on the many lawsuits that are ongoing in the community, as well as how the license terms may impact the use and applications of those systems.
Following a successful first conference in July, PIDfest has issued a call for hosts for 2026.
Finally, Google has announced that it has paused its deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome in favor of other approaches. The SeamlessAccess project, which NISO is a founding member of, is closely monitoring these developments and is working with the browser community to ensure library user experiences aren’t negatively impacted by these changes by Google or other browsers’ privacy updates. While this pause will give users of SAML-based authentication more time to adapt to these changes, it is likely that a more complex solution may be required.
Things are certainly also changing internally at NISO. After 13 years at NISO, Nettie Lagace will be leaving NISO later this month. From her very first day, Nettie has been quick to jump right into the most challenging of projects. In May 2011, Nettie joined me for the ISO TC 46 plenary meeting in Sydney, Australia. It was her first day on the job, and it couldn’t have been a more overwhelming way to enter our community. She leapt directly into the deep end of NISO’s work by representing US interests at the meeting. As she has continued to do time after time, she quickly got up to speed with complicated procedures, new technologies, and new communities of volunteers and effectively set about advancing our work.
It is hard to overstate Nettie’s contributions to NISO. She has onboarded more than 700 volunteers into NISO projects. When Nettie began working on the NISO standards portfolio, we had published only eight recommended practices. Today, we are working on our 49th. We have published eight completely new standards and have revised or reaffirmed every one of the standards in our portfolio during her tenure. I can’t begin to count the number of articles, webinars, and presentations she has produced about NISO’s work. All the while, she has been a force that has made NISO’s standards work the highly recognized and impactful program that it is today. We wish her the very best in the next stage of her career journey.
Despite this staffing transition, we expect the pace of our efforts will not slow. In addition to NISO Plus Global Online in September, NISO is hosting a valuable training program on Open Research later this month. Facilitated by Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer, the program will cover pre-registration, integrity issues, preprints, open peer review, assessment, and open data. As NISO’s Cooperative Collection Development initiative enters its third year, work on that project is nearing peak activity level, with the launch of a seventh Working Group. In all, we certainly are back in the groove and will keep things moving through the end of the year. We hope you enjoy the ride!
Sincerely,
Todd Carpenter
Executive Director, NISO
