Standards

Standard developments are of crucial importance in digital environments. In the crossmedia-era of today the ubiquitous ISBN and ISSN have gotten company of the ISTC (text code) and the ISNI (name identifier), and while some publishers may wonder whether they should adopt these and for what purpose, there are also new developments for better access control and use of webpages by crawlers, such as ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol), and new machine readable protocols for licensing terms and other electronic data interchange between trade partners, such as ONIX.

An important standard, always supported and promoted by STM, is the DOI -  Digital Object Identifier (see www.doi.org/) a crucial element in the reference linking between STM publishers worldwide, via the Crossref organisation (seewww.crossref.org/ )

Publishers interests are guarded by the STM Association on a wide spectrum of different standard developments. STM engages in standards work within the International Publishers Association IPA (see  www.internationalpublishers.org/ ) and in Editeur (see  www.editeur.org), as a  member of both organisations and represented in several boards and committees. In the newly formed Management Committee of Editeur, STM and FEP (see www.fep-fee.be/) are jointly represented by one Board member.

Contact: Eefke Smit, Director S&T, smit@stm-assoc.org