Noteworthy

SUSHI Standard and Schemas Updated to Version 1.7

NISO has published a revision to the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) Protocol (ANSI/NISO Z39.93-2014). The SUSHI standard defines an automated request and response model for the harvesting of electronic resource usage data utilizing a Web services framework that can replace the user-mediated collection of usage data reports. It was designed as a generalized protocol extensible to a variety of usage reports. An extension designed specifically to work with COUNTER reports is also provided.

This new version of the SUSHI standard extends the filter support to allow multiple optional filters and/or report attributes to be included in the SUSHI Request. The SUSHI standard was created with the notion of filters; however, the only filter originally provided for was that of the date range for the report. With use, a number of cases have surfaced where additional filters and other report attributes would be beneficial. The revised standard allows, for example, filtering by a particular platform for harvesting when a given SUSHI server provides usage for multiple platforms, or specifying that a report exclude items with zero usage to keep the report size smaller.

Both the core SUSHI schema and the COUNTER-SUSHI schema have been updated to version 1.7 of SUSHI to match the revised standard. The COUNTER schema and the COUNTER data element values have been updated to support COUNTER Release 4.1. Additionally, the SUSHI website has new sample reports in COUNTER Release 4 formats, selected updated SUSHI Harvesters tools to allow the user to select “4” as the COUNTER Release, and Server Registry updates to display known COUNTER 4 support.

SUSHI website: http://www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi

ISO and IEC Publish Cloud Computing Standards

The ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology has developed and published two standards for cloud computing that are intended to be foundational standards for further work by Subcommittee 38 on Cloud Computing and Distributed Platforms.

Information technology – Cloud computing – Overview and vocabulary (ISO/IEC 17788:2014) provides an overview of cloud computing along with a set of terms and definitions. It is a terminology foundation for cloud computing standards and is applicable to all types of organizations (e.g., commercial enterprises, government agencies, not-for-profit organizations).

Information technology – Cloud computing – Reference architecture (ISO/IEC 17789:2014) specifies the cloud computing reference architecture (CCRA), which includes the cloud computing roles, cloud computing activities, and the cloud computing functional components and their relationships.

Both standards are available for free download from the ISO Publicly Available Standards portal: http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/

HTML5 Oficially Published as W3C Recommendation

The World Wide Web Consortium has officially published the HTML5 standard—HTML5: A Vocabulary and Associated APIs for HTML and XHTML, the fifth major revision of the format used to build webpages and applications—as a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Recommendation. “HTML5 brings to the Web video and audio tracks without needing plugins; programmatic access to a resolution-dependent bitmap canvas, which is useful for rendering graphs, game graphics, or other visual images on the fly; native support for scalable vector graphics (SVG) and math (MathML); annotations important for East Asian typography (Ruby); features to enable accessibility of rich applications; and much more.”

HTML5 has been in development for several years and the W3C had announced the completion of the HTML Definition in December 2012, meaning the standard was then “feature complete.” Testing and implementations of HTML5 have been ongoing since that announcement, and the standard was approved as a final W3C Recommendation on October 28, 2014.

Gartner has listed HTML5 as one of the top 10 technologies that need to be mastered “to unlock the full potential of mobility” and “an essential technology for organizations delivering applications across multiple platforms.”

HTML5 specification: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/
HTML5 press release: https://www.w3.org/2014/10/html5-rec.html.en
Gartner Identifies Top 10 Mobile Technologies and Capabilities for 2015 and 2016: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2669915

New Release of HowOpenIsIt? Guide

PLOS, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) have published a new edition of the HowOpenIsIt? guide that standardizes Open Access terminology and shows five levels from open to closed access based on reader rights, reuse rights, copyrights, author posting rights, automatic posting, and machine readability.

An analysis of 100 journals using the original 2012 addition of the guide showed that some clarifications were needed to address subtle nuances of some of the journals’ policies. Updates in the new guide include:

• An adjustment to the Reuse Rights category to address journals that allow reuse of some, but not all, articles

• Substantial revisions to the Copyrights category to focus less on which party owns the copyright and more on what authors are allowed to do with their rights

• The addition of a time dimension within the Author Posting Rights category to accommodate not just what version an author can post and where, but also when

• The inclusion of language in the Automatic Posting category that encompasses non-biomedical repositories, as well as an adjustment to address journals that automatically post some, but not all, articles

• A modification of the Machine Readability category to better reflect what is possible and what is practical in today’s publishing environment

The guide is targeted to authors, research funders, government agencies, and institutions who need to determine a scholarly journals’ degree of openness.

HowOpenIsIt? guide: http://www.plos.org/open-access/howopenisit/
Press release about the new edition: http://www.plos.org/new-release-of-howopenisit-guide-addresses-nuances-of-open-access-policies/

International ISBN Agency Launches the Global Register of Publishers

The Global Register of Publishers (GRP), a sister website to the main International ISBN Agency website, collates information provided by many of the 151 national ISBN agencies around the world about the publishers that have received ISBNs or ISBN prefixes. The International ISBN Agency is making all the publisher and prefix data as supplied by the national ISBN Agencies available online for free for the first time. Simple searches and retrieval of basic publisher name and prefix information is publicly available. More advanced searches and more detailed publisher contact information is available to users who choose to register, which is completely free.

The data in the Global Register is supplied directly by national ISBN agencies and it will be compiled and revised at least annually.

Global Registry of Publishers: https://grp.isbn-international.org/International 

ISBN Agency: https://www.isbn-international.org/

EDItEUR Releases Thema Version 1.1

EDItEUR and its Thema International Steering Committee have released version 1.1 of Thema, the subject classification scheme launched in 2013. The new version includes around 120 new subject categories—including significant new categories for genre fiction, science and technology, and a wide range of refinements in children’s non-fiction—90 new qualifiers, and roughly 200 other minor editorial changes.

These additions increase the power and expressivity of Thema classifications. Some of the changes are specifically aimed at improving the fidelity of mappings (for example from BISAC to Thema), and some other improvements stem from work on translating or applying Thema in non-English language contexts. No categories from version 1.0 have been significantly modified or deleted, so the new version is fully compatible with version 1.0 and existing metadata remains valid and does not need revision.

Thema: http://www.editeur.org/151/Thema/

EPUB 3 Now an ISO Standard

ISO/IEC TS 30135:2014, Information technology – Digital publishing – EPUB3
The seven-part EPUB3 standard, developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), has been fast-tracked through the International Organization of Standardization (ISO) as a seven- part ISO Technical Specification (ISO/IEC TS 30135:2014). The seven parts are:

• Part 1: EPUB3 Overview
• Part 2: Publications
• Part 3: Content Documents
• Part 4: Open Container Format
• Part 5: Media Overlay
• Part 6: EPUB Canonical Fragment Identifier
• Part 7: EPUB3 Fixed-Layout Documents

The ISO/IEC Technical Specification corresponds to version 3 of EPUB. The IDPF has published a version 3.1 update to the standard, which
is expected to be submitted to ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 so they can also update the ISO/IEC version.

ISO/IEC TS 30135 webpages: http://www.iso.org/iso/home/search.htm?
qt=30135 &sort=rel&type=simple&published=on

IDPF EPUB 3.1 standard: http://idpf.org/epub/301