This week Amazon takes center stage of DLTJ Thursday Threads with a report of their new Kindle Singles program for medium-form digital content and a screen-reader-aware version of the Kindle reader application for PCs. After that is a look at how scholarly discourse is changing — radically! — with the availability and use of near-real-time feedback loops. And we close out with a peek at shaky ground in the world of ISBN identifiers.

As a sidenote to last week’s comment about this blog migrating to Amazon’s service…there are still a few hiccups. For instance, last week’s edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads wasn’t published via the RSS feed until late in the day and it wasn’t until Friday that the e-mail subscribers received it. I think those issues are ironed out now, but if you notice any other problems please let me know.

Kindle Singles — Compelling Ideas Expressed at Their Natural Length — Now Available in the Kindle Store

Before the advent of digital reading, writers often had to choose between making their work short enough for a magazine article or long enough to deliver the “heft” required for book marketing and distribution. Three months ago, Amazon made a call to serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers to join Kindle in making a new kind of content available to readers—Kindle Singles. Typically between 5,000 and 30,000 words, each Kindle Single is intended to allow a single killer idea — well researched, well argued and well illustrated — to be expressed at its natural length. Today, Amazon is introducing the first set of Kindle Singles to the Kindle Store. …

The new Kindle Singles section of the Kindle Store is now available at www.amazon.com/kindlesingles. Available to both Kindle device and app users, and priced between $0.99 and $4.99, the first set of Kindle Singles include original reporting, essays, memoirs and fiction. Amazon plans to frequently launch many more Kindle Singles over time.

Is there room for commercial content between “short enough for a magazine article” and a full-fledged book? Amazon seems to think so with this announcement of the Kindle Singles program. Among the first are three works from TEDTalk speakers priced at $2.99 each. The content is only available in digital form and only in the proprietary Kindle format. This may be a problem for a library trying to acquire this content for its collection (although this is just a subset of the more general issue of acquiring content saddled in proprietary formats with restrictive digital rights management). What makes this problem more acute, though, is that Amazon is seeking high quality content for the Kindle Singles channel (“Singles will be a highly curated group of content they feel is valuable to their readers” according to the Kindle Expert website). That might make the content more desirable by patrons and more likely to be considered preservation-worthy. (You can read about one author’s perspective on publishing in the Kindle Singles program.)

Kindle for PC with Accessibility Plugin

Kindle for PC with Accessibility Plugin is a free application for your Windows PC. It provides the following accessibility features:

• Text-to-speech reading with adjustable voice settings
• Voice-guided menu navigation
• Large font sizes
• High contrast reading mode
• Keyboard navigation
• Accessible shortcuts

Because this software is an assistive technology, there are no restrictions on text-to-speech reading. In order to use the text-to-speech feature, an external screen reader program must be installed and running on the Windows PC. Tested screen readers include: JAWS and NVDA. An external screen reader is used to read aloud menus and navigation items, while book text is read by a built-in text-to-speech engine.

Although I’m hard pressed to find the formal announcement, a version of the Kindle for PC with Accessibility Plugin was made available earlier this month. The National Federation of the Blind has a review of the software with some constructive criticism that hopefully Amazon will take to heart. What is interesting is that one can use a screen reading program such as the commercial Jaws for Windows or the open source NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) to have the text of the book read aloud “regardless of a publisher’s [text-to-speech] … choice.” If you are serving a population of users with a sight impairment, this may be an option to look at to expand the universe of accessible materials to everything available in the Kindle store.

Peer review: Trial by Twitter

For many researchers, the pace and tone of this online review can be intimidating — and can sometimes feel like an attack. How are authors supposed to respond to critiques coming from all directions? Should they even respond at all? Or should they confine their replies to the conventional, more deliberative realm of conferences and journals? “The speed of communication is ahead of the sheer time needed to think and get in the lab and work,” said Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a postdoctoral fellow at the NASA Astrobiology Institute in Mountain View, California, and the lead author on the arsenic paper. Aptly enough, she circulated that comment as a tweet on Twitter, which is used by many scientists to call attention to longer articles and blog posts.

To bring some order to this chaos, it looks as though a new set of cultural norms will be needed, along with an online infrastructure to support them. The idea of open, online peer review is hardly new. Since Internet usage began to swell in the 1990s, enthusiasts have been arguing that online commenting could and should replace the traditional process of pre-publication peer review that journals carry out to decide whether a paper is worth publishing.

This article in Nature News points out the problem when commentary on scientific studies moves at Twitter speed. The old mechanisms of published peer-reviewed articles followed by commentary in later issue of the same journal in the form of published letters is being challenged by the internet world of blogs and tweets. As the author says, a new form of cultural norms is required as well as mechanisms to track the discourse. [Via Eric Schmell]

eBook Identifier Confusion Shakes Book Industry

Last Thursday, I was fortunate to be at a presentation of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) about identification of eBooks. BISG hired Michael Cairns, the principal of Information Media Partners, to do a study of the use, issues and practice surrounding assignment of ISBNs in the US book industry. Think of him as a structural engineer hired to inspect the damage to the supply chain’s supporting infrastructure after an earthquake. Cairns conducted 55 separate interviews with a total of 75 industry experts from all facets of the industry. (I was interviewed for my expertise in the use of ISBN in library linking systems).

• BISG eBook ISBN Study Findings Released Michael Cairns’ blog
• Summary of BISG Presentation From BISG, PDF 730 KB

Cairns (@personanondata on Twitter) is an industry veteran- he’s held senior executive positions at Bowker and other companies. His presentation was clear and direct, and he quickly went to the heart of the matter. He found very little support for the policy set forth by the 2005 revision of the ISBN standard regarding when to assign a new ISBN to an ebook.

Eric Hellman writes about his views of the dysfunction surrounding ISBN assignments for ebooks. “What problems?” you might ask — Eric writes has an example of how Barnes and Noble was enhancing some ebooks for their Nook platform. By itself, this activity wouldn’t result in assigning a new ISBN. But because publishers are now exerting more control over setting the prices of ebooks (the so-called “agency model“) the existence of these Nook-enhanced versions needs to cross back-and-forth between the publisher’s and retailer’s electronic systems. The only commonly agreed upon identifier? The ISBN. And this proliferation of ISBN assignments is making trouble for library’s efforts to effectively identify material — which is to say nothing about what it is doing to our efforts to shoehorn these distinctions between various works into the MARC format used by our catalogs. Is that a separate record for that manifestation with a different ISBN?

Earlier this week I received an e-mail from the director of the ISSN International Center announcing a session at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim to talk about the “linking ISSN”. Abbreviated ISSN-L, this is a new addition to the revised ISSN standard (ISO 3297, published last August) that allows for the collocation of separate ISSNs under a single ISSN-L. The ISSN standard now explicitly states that an ISSN is a unique identifier for a specific serial in a defined medium. In other words, separate ISSN should be assigned to each different medium version of a serial. The ISSN-L table brings these separate ISSNs together.

The FAQ I received that goes along with the e-mail announcement has several interesting statements. I’ve extracted the most interesting, at least from my perspective, here:

The purpose of the linking ISSN is to provide a tool for grouping, or collocating, the various medium versions of a resource, for instance, the print and online versions of a journal. … Those involved in the production, distribution, management of, and access to serial resources have expressed the strong desire that the ISSN system meet two different needs:

• The need for the ISSN to identify the various medium versions of a continuing resource, for product management purposes. To meet this need, separate ISSN are assigned to the various medium versions of a resource.
• The need for a collocating, or grouping mechanism that would bring together various medium versions, and thus facilitate content management. The linking ISSN (ISSN-L) has been defined to meet this currently unmet need.

The linking ISSN is a new function for the ISSN system — not a new identifier. … The first ISSN assigned in the ISSN Register to any medium version of a continuing resource is designated by default to function also as the linking ISSN and applies to all other medium versions of that resource identified in the ISSN Register. The linking ISSN is labelled (for eye-readable purposes) as “linking ISSN” or “ISSN-L”. A linking ISSN is designated for each continuing resource identified in the ISSN Register, even if the continuing resource is issued in only one medium. Only one linking ISSN is designated regardless of how many different medium versions of a continuing resource exist.

The ISSN-L should always be treated, for computer processing purposes, as a separate data element. For example, in MARC formats, which are used in the ISSN Register, ISSN-L is input in a separately tagged subfield in each of the ISSN Register metadata records to which it pertains. It is important to note that ISSN-L should be processed and used separately from medium-specific ISSN. In applications based on tables or indexes, ISSN-L should not be included in the same tables or indexes as medium-specific ISSN.

The designated ISSN-L is made available in several different ways:

• via a table which lists the ISSN-L and the corresponding ISSN linked to the ISSN-L. This table is available free of charge on the ISSN IC web site. [See note below.]
• via the ISSN Register: (each metadata record in the ISSN Register includes the medium-specific ISSN assigned to the resource described in the record, and the designated linking ISSN, as separate data elements);
• via the ISSN National Centres, which communicates to publishers the ISSN-L designated for newly-assigned ISSN,
• via the resources themselves, provided that publishers print or display this information according to the recommendations in the standard.

In order for the ISSN-L to work effectively, publishers will need to clearly indicate when they are using an ISSN-L as opposed to an ISSN. The ISO standard’s recommendations for printing and displaying ISSN-L are as follows: the linking ISSN shall be clearly distinguished as such by use of the label ISSN-L. In such cases, the label ISSN-L shall be written in uppercase and a space shall precede the 8 digits of the linking ISSN. Example: ‘ISSN-L 0251-1479′.

No programmatic method can be used to determine ISSN-L on the basis of one of the medium-specific ISSN, nor is there a programmatic way to determine the group of medium-specific ISSN associated with one ISSN-L. This is due to fundamental characteristics of the ISSN system: ISSN have no inherent meaning, and they are distributed sequentially. ISSN are assigned by national centres around the world, and a new medium version may appear at any time, perhaps published in a different country; this cannot be predicted and thus there is no programmatic way to associate an ISSN with its corresponding ISSN-L.

The assignment policy of the Standard now explicitly specifies that ISSN is a unique identifier for a specific serial in a defined medium. Therefore separate ISSN are assigned to each particular medium version of a serial. … If some publishers use the same ISSN for different medium versions of a serial, they deprive their users of the means to identify the medium- specific versions of that serial for ordering, claiming, etc. However, this should not interfere with the ISSN-L. The single ISSN will become the ISSN-L that can be used for collocating functions.

ISSN-L is a tool that aims at facilitating collocating functions. To perform these functions adequately, ISSN-L and the related ISSN have to be present in OpenURL knowledge bases. At this time, various scenarios can be envisaged. The desired end result is described as follows: The request must use the data available in the citation. It is the job of the resolver to match the identifier to the appropriate resource. It is the resolver that will make use of ISSN-L to relate the various medium of an ISSN to each other and find one to satisfy the request. One should be able to put in a request (for example an OpenURL) using any of the ISSN and separately and additionally request that the electronic copy is desired.

One note: I can’t find the ISSN-L table on the http://www.issn.org/ website. In a follow up discussion with Françoise Pellé (Director of the ISSN International Centre) I learned that it isn’t there yet, but they intend to put it there.

This is an interesting, well, kluge. It provides a neat amount of backwards compatibility — for publications that only have one medium, that publication’s ISSN automatically becomes its ISSN-L. The publishers (presumably) would need to take proactive action to tell the ISSN registrar that two ISSN are two mediums of the same publication; hopefully the word will get out and all affected publishers will do so.

It doesn’t effectively replace the xISSN service from OCLC because the ISSN-L table only gives current links. The description of xISSN says ISSNs are related in two different ways: different editions of same serial (such as print and online editions) and historical relationships (ISSN changes that result from title changes, mergers, splits, etc.). ISSN-L only handles the former (different editions) relationship type, not the latter (historical) relationship type. The ISSN-L table is (reportedly) free, however, and the xID service require an OCLC network membership. (While this posting was in draft form, Tim McCormick of OCLC announced that effective immediately, xID services from OCLC — that is, xISBN, and the forthcoming xISSN — will be included at no additional cost with all OCLC cataloguing subscriptions.

I hope to hear more after ALA Annual. Unfortunately, I think I have a conflict with the proposed meeting on Friday afternoon of ALA, so if anyone else hears anything please blog about it. (Trackbacks to here would be appreciated.)

Updates from Information at ALA

MARC codes were approved by MARBI a few months ago. Current ISSN-L identifiers will be put in MARC21 field 022 subfield ‘l’. Cancelled ISSN-L identifiers will be put in MARC21 field 022 subfield ‘m’. (Every record will have a subfield ‘l’ or a subfield ‘m’, even if it is in a single format.)

Retrospective designation uses lowest ISSN from the cluster linked via 776 field. As on-going ISSN assignments are made, the ISSN-L will be the first assigned out of any media. (May not always be the lowest in numerical order because of how ISSNs are allocated to ISSN centers.)

The crossreferencing linking table for ISSN-L has not yet been published. The international ISSN center is also considering a web service that would send back all of the associated ISSNs for an ISSN-L.

Launch is at IFLA in August 2008. Expected implementation before end of 2008. (There is of course some catch-up time as library automation vendors add this capability to individual systems.)

The text was modified to remove a link to http://ala.org/ala/lita/litamembership/litaigs/igstandards/standards.cfm on June 9th, 2011.

This morning I got an invitation to join ResearcherID, a new author profile service from Thomson Scientific. The service sounds nice enough — who doesn’t want to take steps to avoid confusion between authors? — and if you have access to other Thomson products (like ISI Web of Knowledge or Web of Science) it may be even nicer. I’m all for the establishment of unique identifiers so we can start to do some interesting things with co-citation analysis and mining the web of connections in journal articles, but I’m not signing up. At least not yet.

“A Unique Identifier”

A unique identifier

When you register, you are assigned a unique ID number that expressly associates you with your published works, regardless of any possible nomenclature confusion or institutional affiliation changes. These unique identifiers allow everyone who accesses ResearcherID.com to easily find a specific author’s work, avoiding the common problem of author misidentification.

With the service, I can assert that particular citations are papers that I have written. (Interesting sidebar — I wonder if the ResearcherID service attempts any sort of automated and/or manual verification of the claim that I was an author/co-author of a paper.) I do this either by uploading a list of citations (in Thomson’s RIS format only) or selecting them from ISI Web of Knowledge or Web of Science (if I’m at a subscribing institution). Then I have a nicely formatted web page with all of my papers. Granted, it isn’t the only way I can go about doing this, but the Thomson service does seem to make a point about distinguishing itself by assigning me a “ResearcherID” in the process.

There seems to be something more going on here, though. Why go through the effort of assigning me an alpha-numeric string and publicizing it if it isn’t going to be used somewhere else?

But what about the other end of the use case?

The End User License Agreement (EULA) are pretty standard stuff, but buried in the middle is this:

5.3. Except as described in this Agreement, You may not use, copy, adapt, translate, modify, sell, distribute or otherwise create derivative databases, services or works of or based on the ResearcherID Service (including the Researcher Registry) or the materials accessible in the ResearcherID Service.

That would seem to effectively eliminate the ResearcherID(tm) as a useful identifier in other systems. Presumably without paying Thomson for the right to use the identifier. And without knowing the cost of using the identifier in other systems (there doesn’t seem to be any information published on ways to use the identifier elsewhere, even though an earlier section of the EULA describes such usage for “Sponsored Services”), I’m not ready to sign onto (and therefore effectively promote) such a service.

The full End User License Agreement

ResearcherID Terms of Use and Privacy Policy

This agreement (Agreement) is a legal agreement between you, the user, (You or Your) and Thomson Scientific Inc. having its principal place of business located at 3501 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104 (TS, We or Our) and describes the terms and conditions on which you may access and use and TS will provide the ResearcherID service described in Section 1 below (the ResearcherID Service), which includes the allocation to You of a unique Researcher ID (the ResearcherID).

BY CLICKING ON THE "ACCEPT" BUTTON BELOW YOU AGREE TO BE LEGALLY BOUND BY THE FOLLOWING TERMS AND CONDITIONS. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THIS AGREEMENT, TS IS UNWILLING TO PROVIDE THE RESEARCHERID SERVICE TO YOU AND YOU MUST NOT CLICK THE ACCEPT BUTTON BELOW OR CONTINUE WITH THE REGISTRATION PROCESS.

We reserve the right to modify this Agreement at any time by posting amended terms in the ResearcherID website at the following URL: http://www.researcherid.com (the ResearcherID Website). Your continued use of the ResearcherID Service indicates your acceptance of the amended Agreement.

1. PROVISION OF RESEARCHERID SERVICE

1.1. Once you have completed the registration process for the ResearcherID Service, TS will:

1.1.1. allocate a unique ResearcherID to You, which You can use to associate articles, theses, reports, speeches, or other materials that you have written or contributed to with Yourself and Your ResearcherID;

1.1.2. maintain a database (the Researcher Registry) in which it will store information or metadata (such as metadata relating to the articles that You have associated with Your ResearcherID or to institutions or organisation with which you have an affiliation, whether past or present) that: (i) You provide during the registration process or subsequently update; or (ii) You provide or we collect in connection with You using Your ResearcherID (such as when you publish articles and include Your ResearcherID as an additional identifier for You) (ResearcherID Data); and

1.1.3. publish certain information and data from the Researcher Registry on the ResearcherID Website and in other Sponsored Services (defined in Section 1.2 below).

1.2. TS may make interfaces to the Researcher Registry available for use in connection with products or services provided by TS, its Affiliates (such as ISI Web of Knowledge and Scholar One) or certain relevant authorised third parties (such as publishers and societies) (Sponsored Services) to:

1.2.1. enable such Sponsored Services to provide additional ResearcherID Data to the Researcher Registry, which You provide or which those Sponsored Services collect in connection with Your use of Your ResearcherID in connection with those Sponsored Services;

1.2.2. create new tools for use in connection with Sponsored Services (such as tools which help users more easily identify Your articles or which enable You to find collaborators or which allow other people to find You for collaborations); and

1.2.3. enhance existing Sponsored Services (such as providing more relevant search results to improve end user experience and to enhance performance measurement applications).

1.3. TS will not allow any of Your personally identifiable information stored in the Researcher Registry to be published (whether on the ResearcherID Website, Sponsored Services or otherwise generally to third parties) where you have indicated a preference to restrict its publication. For further details of how TS will process your personally identifiable information, please refer to Section 4 below.

1.4. You understand and agree that:

1.4.1. by using the ResearcherID Service and Your ResearcherID You will be providing ResearcherID Data to the Researcher Registry and You grant a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable license to:

(a) TS, its affiliates and applicable authorised third parties to use the ResearcherID Data in the course of providing or using the ResearcherID Service, Sponsored Services and the ResearcherID Website; and

(b) TS to reformat, extract, adapt or translate any ResearcherID Data;

1.4.2. all information publicly posted or privately transmitted by You through the ResearcherID Service or through any Sponsored Services or the ResearcherID Website is Your sole responsibility and TS will not be liable for any errors or omissions in the ResearcherID Data stored in the Researcher Registry.

2. CONDITIONS OF USE OF RESEARCHERID SERVICE

2.1. You agree and undertake that You: (i) are over the age of 18; (ii) have not been removed or suspended from the ResearcherID Service at anytime; (iii) do not have more than one active ResearcherID account; and (iv) shall not sell, transfer, pledge or otherwise trade your ResearcherID to another person.

3. YOUR OBLIGATIONS

3.1. If You have not registered to use the ResearcherID Service and accepted the terms and conditions in this Agreement and/or if You do not comply with the Conditions of Use set out Section 2 above, You should not use the ResearcherID Service.

3.2. You agree and undertake that the information You provide during the registration process or which You subsequently update shall be accurate and up to date. You agree to regularly check Your profile in the Researcher Registry to ensure that it is accurate and up to date.

3.3. Your username and password are confidential to TS. You should not disclose Your login details to any third party or allow any such third parties to access the ResearcherID Service, whether on Your behalf or otherwise. You will be fully responsible for all use of Your ResearcherID account where the correct login details have been provided to access the account.

3.4. You will not:

3.4.1. falsely state, impersonate, or otherwise misrepresent your identity, including but not limited to the use of a pseudonym, or misrepresent your current or previous positions and qualifications, or your affiliations with a person or entity, past or present or falsely attribute work to Yourself where You are not the author of or You have not contributed to the work.

3.4.2. create a denial of service, hack into, make unauthorised modifications of or otherwise impede the ResearcherID Service, whether by the use of malware or otherwise, intercept the communications of others using the ResearcherID Service or falsify the origin of the Your communications or attempt to do any of these acts;

3.4.3. use the ResearcherID Services for any illegal or injurious purpose or to publish, post, distribute, receive or disseminate defamatory, infringing, confidential, obscene, or other unlawful material or to threaten, harass, stalk, spam, abuse, or otherwise violate the legal rights (including without limitation rights of privacy and publicity) of others.

4. PROCESSING OF PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION

4.1. In the course of using the ResearcherID Service, TS will collect, store and process ResearcherID Data as described in Section 1. Some of this ResearcherID Data will be personally identifiable information (personal information). If you choose not to provide any personal information where requested for the ResearcherID Service, TS may not be able to provide You with the ResearcherID Service.

4.2. You understand and agree that TS may disclose ResearcherID Data (including Your personal information) if required to do so by law or where We believe (acting reasonably) that such disclosure is reasonably necessary to comply with any legal process or to protect the rights of TS, its Affiliates or applicable third parties.

What personal information We Collect using the ResearcherID Service

4.3. When you first register to use the ResearcherID Service, You will be asked to provide certain personal information such as name (including all names and pseudonyms under which you publish articles and other works), address, affiliated institutions and organisations (and your position within those institutions and organisations), email address and other biographical information. You may also be asked to submit additional personal information, or TS may collect additional information about You which will be linked to You and stored in the Researcher Registry, in the course of Your use of the ResearcherID Service (as described in Section 1 above), such as articles you have written or contributed to, keywords and subject areas which relate to your areas of specialisation or with which You want to be associated.

4.4. We may monitor and record e-mails and telephone calls to the Thomson Scientific helpdesk. We do this for training purposes and to make sure the problems and issues You bring to Our attention are resolved promptly and correctly. We may also monitor Your use of the Researcher Registry, Sponsored Services and the ResearcherID Website to ensure compliance with this Agreement and to ensure the security and availability of the ResearcherID Service.

What We Do With the Information We Collect

4.5. We will use and process Your personal information to provide the ResearcherID Service to You including, without limitation, maintaining the Researcher Registry, for account administration purpose and for communicating general information to You about the ResearcherID Service including maintenance updates and general changes to the ResearcherID Service. We may also communicate information concerning new features, services and tools including additional Sponsored Services where you have requested to receive this information.

4.6. We may aggregate personal information into demographic data about Our users to enable Thomson Scientific to provide the most relevant and valuable services to its user community.

4.7. We may engage third parties to provide some of the processing activities described in this Agreement on Our behalf. We may allow certain third parties to access the Researcher Registry and to provide ResearcherID Data to the Researcher Registry in the course of providing Sponsored Services. We may also provide Your information to law enforcement agencies and other authorities where We are required to do so by applicable laws. Otherwise TS does not make your information available to any third parties without Your express consent.

4.8. You understand and agree that third party providers of Sponsored Service may collect Your personal information in connection with Your use of the Sponsored Service. Those third parties may have different privacy policies and practices, which You should confirm with those third parties.

IP Address

4.9. Thomson Scientific may use your IP address to help diagnose problems with its servers. Your IP address may also be used to gather broad demographic information about Thomson Scientific's population, so we can make Our services more effective. We may also recognize Your IP address as an aid to presenting appropriate welcome messages and to authenticate Your access to the ResearcherID Services.

Security

4.10. The ResearcherID Service has been designed with Your needs for privacy and security in mind. We follow stringent procedures to protect our servers from attack and use encryption techniques to protect You personal information from unauthorised disclosure, alteration and destruction.

4.11. We also implement stringent technical and organisational policies and procedures to protect Your personal information off-line. All information stored in the Researcher Registry is restricted so that only employees who need the information to perform specific tasks in relation to the Researcher Registry are granted access to personally information. Finally, the servers that we store personal information on are kept in a secure environment.

How You can correct or update Your personal information and preferences

4.12. You can change Your registration information and preferences at anytime in the Edit My Profile section for the ResearcherID Service on the ResearcherID Website or in any Sponsored Service or otherwise by contacting the Thomson Scientific helpdesk (details of which can be found at the following URL: http://scientific.thomson.com/support/techsupport/).

Complaints and Further information about Thomson Scientific's privacy policies

4.13. We are committed to working with you to resolve, quickly and fairly any complaints you may have about this Privacy Policy and/or Our processing of Your personally identifiable data. If you have any questions or comments or if you would like further information about TS's privacy policies, please refer to our Data Privacy team (dataprivacy@thomson.com).

5. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS, OWNERSHIP AND LIMITED LICENCE

5.1. The ResearcherID Service contains proprietary technology and copyright material owned by Thomson Scientific, Inc. and/or its third party licensors. All use of the ResearcherID Service and the materials accessible in ResearcherID Service are restricted and subject to Thomson Scientific's prior written consent.

5.2. 'Thomson', the Thomson starburst logo and 'ResearcherID', are trade or service marks of The Thomson Corporation or its affiliated companies. All other product and service names cited are trademarks of their respective companies.

5.3. Except as described in this Agreement, You may not use, copy, adapt, translate, modify, sell, distribute or otherwise create derivative databases, services or works of or based on the ResearcherID Service (including the Researcher Registry) or the materials accessible in the ResearcherID Service.

5.4. You may only reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble any of the software or technology contained in the ResearcherID Service to the extent expressly permitted by law, where such rights cannot be modified by agreement.

6. DISCLAIMER AND LIMITATION OF LIABILITY

6.1. TS, Its affilliates and third party suppliers make no warranty or representation as to the accuracy, completeness or correctness of any materials contained within the ResearcherID Service (including the Researcher Registry and the ResearcherID Website) or as to whether the provision of ResearcherID Service will be uninterrupted or error free nor that all errors in the rEsearcherID Service or the materials contained within ResearcherID Service will be corrected. In particular, TS, its affiliates and third Party Suppliers will not be liable for (i) any corruption, alteration, damage, loss or mistransmission (as applicable) of Your or any third party's data, software, hardware or systems; and (ii) loss or damage resulting from the inadequacy of security of data during transmission via public electronic communications networks or facilities.

6.2. The ResearcherID Service may Include Services or Internet Sites (including Sponsored Services) or contain links to Such services or Internet sites operated by third parties (other than TS or its affiliates). Where such links exist they are provided for the Your convenience only. TS does not control such third party services and Internet sites, and is not responsible for their contents or supply. TS's inclusion of links to such Internet sites or Services in connection with The ResearcherID Service does not imply any endorsement of such Services or Internet site or any information or material that is made available to you in connection with such Services or Internet sites or any association with their operators and TS makes no warranties in respect of such Services or Internet sites.

6.3. Neither TS nor ANY OF its Affiliates or Third Party Suppliers will be liable in contract, tort (including negligence) or otherwise for any indirect, special, punitive or consequential loss or damage arising out of or in connection with this Agreement or Your use of the ResearcherID Service, however such indirect loss or damage may arise.

6.4. THE MAXIMUM AGGREGATE LIABILITY OF TS, its Affiliates and third party suppliers HEREUNDER SHALL BE LIMITED TO THE FEE PAID BY YOU FOR receipt of the ResearcherID Service, WHICH IS ZERO DOLLARS ($0).

7. TERMINATION

7.1. TS may terminate this Agreement at any time without prior notice for any or no reason.

7.2. You may terminate this Agreement at any time by providing at least thirty (30) days' prior written notice to the Thomson Scientific helpdesk.

8. GENERAL

8.1. Neither You nor TS will be liable to the other for any failure or delay in the performance of its obligations under this Agreement (except for payment of money) due to circumstances beyond its reasonable control.

8.2. Failure or delay by either party in exercising any right or power hereunder will not constitute a waiver of such right or power.

8.3. You shall not assign, sub-license or delegate any of Your rights or obligations under this Agreement without the prior written consent of TS. TS may sub-contract or transfer all or any or its rights or obligations under this Agreement to any third party, provided that in the case of sub-contracting, TS shall remain responsible for the performance by its sub-contractors of such obligations under this Agreement. Any assignment, sub-licensing or delegation in breach of this Section 8.3 shall be null and void.

8.4. Any notice given under this Agreement must be in English, in writing, signed by or on behalf of the party giving it and delivered personally or sent by pre-paid post to the address of the other party or by email to the email address of the other party. Any such notices will be treated as being received on the date that the notice is recorded as having been delivered.

8.5. This Agreement contains the entire agreement between You and TS as to its subject matter and supersedes any and all written or oral prior agreements and understandings in relation thereto. You acknowledge that in entering into this Agreement You have not relied on any representations made by TS that is not expressed in this Agreement. This Section 8.5 shall not be construed as excluding either party's liability in respect of any fraudulent statements.

8.6. If any provision of this Agreement is determined to be illegal or unenforceable by any court of competent jurisdiction, it shall be deemed to have been deleted without affecting the remaining provisions.

8.7. This Agreement will be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and You irrevocably submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal and state courts located within the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

8.8. Each Party intends that TS's Affiliates and Third Party Sponsors shall be third party beneficiaries of this Agreement and, thus, entitled to enforce this Agreement as if an original party hereto. There shall be no other third party beneficiaries.

This is a report of the presentations from the LITA Standards Interest Group at the ALA Annual Conference, 24-Jul-2006, in New Orleans. Pat Stevens, interim director of NISO, moderated the panel discussion.

ISSN Regina Reynolds, Library of Congress (U.S. ISSN Center)

Structure

The ISSN International Center is located in Paris. It assigns the prefixes to ISSN centers and holds a master copy of descriptive metadata — the “Key Title” plus other metadata elements in MARC format — for every assigned ISSN. It also provides documentation, a manual (about 80-100 pages in length) and support for new centers coming on board.

Activities for ISSN matters comes from a Governing board elected by the membership. The directors of ISSN centers also meeting annuallyto resolve operational issues. An “ISSN Users Group” has recently been formed as well. The ISSN standard itself is undergoing revision now.

Funding

For the U.S. this translates to about $120K/year dues to the International Centre, plus the cost of staff salaries and benefits, office space, and operational expenses. The Library of Congress pays this out of its budget.

Statistics

The U.S. assigns about 6,000 ISSNs per year, which is considered a low number because publishers should be assigning different ISSNs to different media types.

Challenges

The assignment center receives a lot of “Vanity” ISSN requests: personal newsletters, publications of only local interest (“the town gardening club”), and those seeking a “free” standard number (since there is a fee for receiving and ISBN assignment). The rules typically applied to requests for ISSNs are based on whether the serial is “in the chain of trade” — will it be cited elsewhere or included in indexing and abstracting services or in OpenURL resolvers. Recently the blogging community have been seeking ISSNs, but this has been ruled as not an appropriate use of the ISSN standard.

Future ISSN Network Directions

One question from the audience was about the possibility of running out of numbers. Almost 10,000,00 individual numbers are available for assignment, of which only about 2,000,000 have been used. The pressure of running out of numbers may cause some structural changes to be adopted. One such change that could be considered is the addition of a suffix for media type — a journal in print and the electronic manifestation of that journal would have the same ISSN (which is different than the standard practice now) and be distinguishable from a suffix added to the base ISSN.

Brian Green, International ISBN Agency

Brief History

It has universally adopted as the key identifier for books. The standard was last rewritten in 1992 and last revised in May 2005. The 13-digit ISBN comes into being on the 1st of January next year.

By definition in the standard, ISBNs are only for books. It is a “manifestation” or supply-chain identifier. Coverage includes digital monographic publications on physical carriers (CDs) or online. A separate identifier required for each electronic version separately traded. ISBNs can also be allocated to parts of books traded separately (e.g. chapters).

The migration to 13-digit ISBNs to be encompassed in the EAN-13 standard was an interesting problem. In the EAN-13 barcode system, prefixes are assigned based on country (e.g. “Germany”), not on products (e.g. “books”). So the question was how to incorporate internationally established yet product-specific ISBN into the country-specific EAN-13 system. The answer? Create a new country, “Bookland”, and give it a country prefix 978 (with 979 in reserve). GS1 (formerly EAN Int.) and ISBN now discussing the incorporation of ISBN into RFID tags as part of EPC (Electronic Product Code) standard.

Management and Governance

In 2005, the International ISBN Agency Ltd was created, and it will take over management and governance of ISBN in 2006. The International ISBN Agency is a not-for-profit, limited by guarantee organization with the guarantors/members are the national agency (160 in all). Each national agency has one vote in the governing body with a governing board elected by the members. ISO is keen on this change because it prefers to contract with an organization to be the maintenance agency of a standard; this is now possible.

Structure and Process

The move to 13-digit ISBN means that all 160 agencies have to understand the change and tweak their systems. (Each country has their own system and software, but standard management tools are now under development.)Most agencies have worked with libraries and the book trade in their countries to facilitate change.

Unlike the ISSN international agency, there is no central repository of metadata about assigned ISBNs. ISO 2108 states that ‘publishers “shall” supply local agency or its nominee with basic information about the publication to which ISBN is assigned’ but in reality this is unenforcable once the prefix has been given to the publisher. Publishers, of course, want their items to be bought, so they generally will participate in a local books-in-print effort. The International ISBN Agency publishes a list of identifier prefixes assigned to national agencies (the Publishers International ISBN Directory or PIID). National agencies compile or collaborate in producing a local books in print (for instance, Bowker in the US, Nielsen BookData in UK). In many cases, the compilation is aligned with a national bibliography effort.

Funding

Chuck Koscher, Technology Director, CrossRef

Service Infrastructure provided by CrossRef and DOI

• Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI): Develops and maintains the Handle system. It is a technology partner to the International DOI Foundation (IDF) and an advocate for broad technical solutions.
• International DOI Foundation’s Digital Object Identifier (DOI): Develops and maintains the DOI standard and is an advocate for DOI-related technology.
• CrossRef: Operates a metadata look-up service for the registration of metadata about a DOI identifier, servicing queries to discover the appropriate DOI identifier, and redirection of resolver requests to provide a stable space for these persistent identifiers as the underlying objects move around. CrossRef also sustains a community of users (publishers, libraries, aggregators, secondaries) making use of DOIs as well as monitoring and maintaining the integrity of the resolver service (quality of metadata and links to objects).

Structure and Process

• A resolver address (http: //dx.doi.org/) which itself is not a formal part of the DOI.
• The DOI Prefix (10.1016) assigned to publishers by the DOI maintenance organization.
• The DOI Suffix (S0040-4039(01)80789-9) created by publishers.

DOIs are a special subset of the CNRI Handles; any CNRI Handle that beings with “10.” is a DOI prefix. A DOI and a CNRI Handle are technically the same thing sharing the same resolving infrastructure. One can resolve a CNRI handle against a DOI resolver (for now, may be blocked in the future) and one can resolve a DOI against a CNRI handle resolver.

To assign a DOI, a publisher sends the article metadata to CrossRef with the assigned DOI prefix and publisher-defined suffix. Systems can query the CrossRef database using citation metadata to determine if a DOI exists for that citation. If so, a user interface can present the referring article as an active link to a DOI resolver. When the user selects the link, the browser contacts a DOI resolver and receives in return a URL to the reference document.

Finances

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.ala.org/ala/lita/litamembership/litaigs/igstandards/standards.htm on June 9th, 2011.