{"id":3956,"date":"2020-04-16T14:00:43","date_gmt":"2020-04-16T17:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/?p=3956"},"modified":"2020-04-16T17:19:42","modified_gmt":"2020-04-16T20:19:42","slug":"sage-not-on-stage-or-a-recap-on-the-first-niso-plus-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/2020\/04\/16\/sage-not-on-stage-or-a-recap-on-the-first-niso-plus-conference\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cSage not on stage\u201d or a recap on the first NISO Plus conference"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Gabriela Mejias and Carolina Tanigushi<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Standards are\nembedded at all stages of the information creation and dissemination processes,\nand hence play a crucial role in scholarly communication. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

NISO<\/a> is the\nUnited\nStates\u2019 National Information Standards Organization, responsible for \u201cdevelop[ing], maintain[ing] and publish[ing] technical\nstandards related to publishing, bibliographic and library applications<\/a>\u201d,\nsuch as JATS, KBART, MARC, and more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In some of these\ncases, NISO maintains living standards, such as JATS, which SciELO uses as a\nbase for the SciELO Publishing Schema. The use of living standards allows for\nscalability, sustainability, and adaptation of the standards, thus making sure\nthey don’t become obsolete and\/or outdated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first ever NISO Plus conference<\/a>\nwas held in Baltimore, USA, on February 23 to 25. The event brought together\nlibrarians, archivists, publishers, service providers, product managers,\nmetadata specialists, and many others. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As part of the\neffort to make the conference more inclusive and thanks to additional funding\nfrom the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, it was possible for the NISO Plus committee\nto offer twelve scholarships<\/a>, divided into two\ncategories: Early Career and Equity & Diversity. (Disclaimer: the authors\nwere both Equity and Diversity scholarship awardees).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Infrastructure\nwas a recurring theme in the conference, from the inaugural speech to the very\nlast sessions. The inaugural speech was given by Dr Amy Brand, Director of MIT\nPress, who discussed Open Access and Open Science talking about \u201cwho owns the\ninfrastructure\u201d, meaning a OA journal might be using proprietary and therefore\n\u201cclosed\u201d technologies. Open content might be in a \u201cclosed\u201d infrastructure and\nvice-versa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the next sections we will\nrecap the key issues related to discussion around contemporaneous standards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engaging\nwith NISO<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Todd Carpenter, NISO\u2019s Executive Director, made a point in saying that the real work \u201cbegins on Wednesday\u201d, following the conference. This rings particularly true for this session, which introduced the participants to the social function of information standards in establishing trust between content providers and users, and how NISO engages with many different stakeholders to discuss, define, and improve best practices and solve challenges in the information community. NISO offers many different ways to participate and thrives in making sure all voices can be heard. There are many options to contribute: organizations can join NISO<\/a> as institutional members, and individuals can participate in focus groups, events<\/a>, committees<\/a>, surveys, and it\u2019s also possible to send a request<\/a> to be added to their Newsline list. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

JATS<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The SciELO Publishing Schema<\/a> is based off of JATS\n(Journal Article Tag Suite), \u201can international standard XML tag set for journal\narticles<\/a>\u201d that started being implemented\nby the SciELO Brazil collection<\/a> in 2014.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JATS is developed\nby NISO so of course it was discussed in many contexts, from its origins as the\nNLM DTD<\/a>\nto its current state and the approach they are taking on the move to version\n2.0, that will not be backwards compatible, but that should address ambiguities\nand accessibility concerns from version 1.x and fix \u201ctechnical\ndebt that had been preserved because of backward compatibility before moving to\nstandard<\/a>\u201d. The JATS4R<\/a> (JATS for Reuse) working group was also introduced\nduring the conference as \u201cdevoted to optimising the reusability of scholarly\ncontent by developing best-practice recommendations for tagging content in JATS\nXML\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SciELO\nparticipates in both the JATS committee and in the Peer Review\nMaterials<\/a> JATS4R subgroup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CRediT<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Given that NISO\nis planning to establish a c<\/a>ommittee to continue outreach efforts and promote\ncontinued development of the taxonomy,<\/a>\nNISO Plus was a great venue to discuss about CRediT current and future\nimplementations and challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many publishers are currently encouraging the use of CRediT with a variety of approaches as described by Gabe Harp, MIT Press. Publishers like PLOS and eLife are mandating contribution details and requiring CRediT as the format, while others like MIT Press implement a \u201cvariable approach\u201d making contributions statements optional and recommending the use of CRediT when authors list their contributions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ORCID is planning\nto implement support for CRediT contributor roles to enable users to add this\ninformation manually and for organizations to add this data via the API. As an\ninfrastructure provider and NISO member, ORCID participates in the committee\nand supports NISO leading this community discussion. Crossref is also planning\nto add support for CRediT in their schema<\/a> soon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SciELO will\nofficially start recommending the use of CRediT on the new Criteria, policies\nand procedures for the admission and permanence<\/a> of scientific journals in\nthe SciELO Brazil Collection, even though some SciELO journals have been using\nit for a while now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the\ndiscussion and breakout groups, the general consensus in regards to the\nrequirement of contributor roles (using CRediT or not) was the difficulty found\nin convincing authors and editors to adopt new practices, as well as for\nservices providers to implement and support these. An apparently simple\nsolution for the transparency in authorship criteria issue becomes a lot more\ncomplicated when considering different contexts, stakeholders, disciplines, and\nsystems. These shared challenges, support and confirm the need for a\ncommunity-wide approach for standardization that enables:<\/p>\n\n\n\n