Standards & Technology Various Topics
STEC and STM’s Future Lab have the following topics on their agenda:
COUNTER
COUNTER has started the consultation rounds on its latest proposed Code of Practice, Release 5 (COP5) and welcomes feedback from all stakeholders between now and summer 2017. From a publisher's standpoint, the currently proposed COP5 risks to significantly increase both complexity and compliance costs of customer usage reporting for STM members. As a result, this may negatively impact overall industry COUNTER compliance.
STM organised two webinars early 2017 to explain what the new proposals entail and what their effects may be. The video recordings of these webinars can be viewed here:
https://www.stm-assoc.org/counter-cop5-presentations/
Based on the feedback so far received, COUNTER has refined and improved the draft Code of Practice.
Draft 2 is now available at: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1cgpiMtDcvsm-P_qU2c1xD6JkNyLK5S-O7bPc-Wh8JCs
A summary of the changes from Draft 1 to Draft 2 is available at: https://www.projectcounter.org/release-5-summary-changes-draft-1-draft-2-counter/
COUNTER looks forward to further feedback and comments from STM members. Please send these by email to lorraine.estelle@counterusage.org
Digital Preservation
Now that STM publishing has successfully transormed into an industry for digitally born content, it is the preservation of digital information that poses the new challenge. Over time data formats or software versions to read them will change and can even become obsolete, or future users of such information and data may not know how to use or interpret the available files from the past. And the time frames in which this can happen can be years rather than centuries. This problem calls for standards and preservation policies.
The STM Association is an active participant in many forums concerning digital preservation. As one of the founding member of the European Alliance for Permanent Access, STM was part of the discussions between several different stakeholders, from library coalitions to research funders and research institutes. Important topics in Digital Preservation range from different preservation strategies (normalisation, conversion, emulation) to the establishment of persistent identifiers for preserved information and linking systems between publications and research data in e-archives, as well as the certification requirements for official deposit organisations who can serve as long term curators.
Digital preservation is frequently on the agenda of STM events and news about new developments is covered in the STM newsletter. STM was partner in several EU projects on Digital Preservation, notably PARSE.Insight and APARSEN.
More background and useful resources can be found here: Find out more
Research Data / Integration of Data and Publications
Scholarly publications and their underlying research data belong together. STM has been an active participant in the creating of the Data Citation Principles, see https://www.force11.org/datacitation/endorsements and plays a key role in the Data Publishing Group of the RDA (Research Data Alliance, see https://www.rd-alliance.org/ ). Among one of the key achievements in the area of Research Data is the launch of SCHOLIX (see https://www.stm-assoc.org/standards-technology/free-stm-webinars-learn-scholix/ ) a universal framework to link research data and publications.
Research data comes in many different manifestation forms. Publications have always contained data, usually in a very condensed, processed and summarised way via graphs, tables and illustrations. At the other end of the spectrum is raw data and original data sets which too often remain unaccessible on people’s computers, hard disks or in drawers. The Data Publications Pyramid illustrates the most common ways to make data accessible.
Data Privacy
Protection of user data privacy is subject to new regulation across the globe with new legal requirements particularly in the EU and the US. The S&T Executive Committee has formed a working group on this under the chairmanship of IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg. The topic is frequently covered in STM webinars and seminars. For more general information, the following presentations are available:
- Annual US Conference - Aalbersberg - User value and user privacy
- Annual US Conference - Carpenter - NISO Patron Privacy principles
- Annual US Conference - Scollo Lavizzari - Privacy Panel
Tech Trends
In an annual exercise, the Future Lab of STM publishes its technology trends forecast for the STM publishing industry. In a brainstorm of 25 to 30 representatives of STM member companies, mostly CTO’s, technologists, business developers and strategy directors, the main trends for the coming years are being identified that will impact the academic and scholarly publishing industry.
Text and Data Mining
Text and Data Mining is on the STM agenda for several years since the publication of Journal Article Mining under the auspices of the PRC (see http://publishingresearchconsortium.com/index.php/128-prc-projects/research-reports/journal-article-mining-research-report/160-journal-article-mining)
TDM is a computerised tool that can analyse vast amounts of content – bigger volumes than any human eye or brain could process. Like a bulldozer it crunches through documents, texts and information, deconstructing it into data and reconstructing it into new patterns and new relationships. It can find new knowledge that was previously hidden in single articles, and that could only be discovered by mining thousands or tens of thousands of articles and combining their contents.
Resource Access
Resource Access for the 21st Century (RA21) is an STM initiative aimed at optimizing protocols across key stakeholder groups, with a goal of facilitating a seamless user experience for consumers of scientific communication. In addition, this comprehensive initiative is working to solve long standing, complex, and broadly distributed challenges in the areas of network security and user privacy. Community conversations and consensus building to engage all stakeholders is currently underway in order to explore potential alternatives to IP-authentication, and to build momentum toward testing alternatives among researcher, customer, vendor, and publisher partners.
RA21’s mission is to align and simplify pathways to subscribed content across participating scientific platforms. RA21 will address the common problems users face when interacting with multiple and varied information protocols.