NISO Plus Baltimore 2025

Join us for a two-part exploration of the state of Artificial Intelligence in the world of scholarship and research. In the first half of the session, we will have a moderated discussion with a group of technical experts from publishers, vendors, and others actively working on products that use AI in the marketplace now. We will explore the strengths of each approach to using AI and the possibilities and limitations moving forward, and give the audience a chance to participate in conversation to learn more about these emerging tools. 

In the second half, we will use the ARL/CNI Artificial Intelligence Scenarios (https://www.arl.org/resources/the-arl-cni-2035-scenarios-ai-influenced-futures-in-the-research-environment/) to examine the potential of these tools. We will work to find areas where libraries, publishers, vendors, and researchers have a need for collaboratively developed best practices and standards around the development, use, and evaluation of AI tools. Join us to advance the conversation around responsible use of AI in scholarly communications! 

JATS-Con is a conference for anyone who uses, or is interested in learning about, the Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS), an XML format for marking up and exchanging journal content. JATS is an ANSI/NISO standard and is formally designated as ANSI/NISO Z39.96.

The conference has been hosted by the National Library of Medicine since 2010 and will now be a full-day pre-conference at NISOPlus 2025 in Baltimore on February 10, 2025. A Call for Proposals will be forthcoming very soon for those interested!

Conference presentations are peer-reviewed and result in a final paper that is archived. Papers from previous conferences are available in the Proceedings (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK65129/).

As the prevalence of open access grows in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) book publishing, digital usage metrics become increasingly important for measuring impact. Publishers, scholars, and university administrators all have their own specific interest in being able to accurately assess impact. The challenges, however, in HSS book publishing are significantly different than those in scientific journal publishing. Whereas it is standard for an article to have one DOI that points to a single version of record (VOR), digital books typically live on multiple platforms (e.g. JSTOR, Project MUSE, OAPEN, IRs, etc.) with their own unique digital object identifier (DOI) and no real equivalent to a “VOR.” It’s also not uncommon for a platform provider to “chunk” books into their constituent chapters and assign chapter-specific DOIs. Again, each platform might assign its own DOIs, which means that a single book might have ten or more DOIs associated with it (not to mention 3 or 4 ISBNs, which publishers continue to assign to books for the trade). Further complicating the situation is the fact that there is no agreed-upon terminology for defining usage. Terms such as “downloads,” “views,” and “reads” can vary from one platform to the next. And while COUNTER has helped to rein in some of the terminological variation, there is still no consensus, especially among publishers, that achieving COUNTER compliance is the solution to all of the problems that OA books pose.

The goal of this event is to bring together representatives from across the OA book publishing sector (including publishers, aggregators, librarians, and platform providers) to engage in a robust, collective conversation, bringing all perspectives of the community. Through conversation and breakout activities, a map of the initial contours of a shared set of standards for OA eBook usage may emerge, preparing for a charted a path toward achieving such a set of standards.