NISO Plus Baltimore 2025

Efforts by disability rights advocates have significantly advanced the development of accessibility metadata both in publisher and library-based standards. These concerted efforts have brought the stars into closer alignment, allowing us to more fully imagine how information about accessibility features may flow from creators into library discovery services. This alignment is crucial for ensuring that individuals with disabilities can access the information they need from libraries without unnecessary barriers.
 
This panel invites thought leaders in the area of accessibility metadata to imagine the potential for beneficiary communities, the risks of inaction, and what steps we can take to make the future we want. By bringing together experts from the field, we aim to explore the transformative potential of well-implemented accessibility metadata. Without continued progress and commitments, we risk perpetuating the exclusion of disabled individuals from vital information resources – affecting education, employment, and overall quality of life. To mitigate these risks, the panel will outline actionable steps that stakeholders can take to ensure a more inclusive future. This includes advocating for the adoption of standardized accessibility metadata, fostering collaboration between publishers and libraries, and promoting awareness of the importance of accessibility in emerging practices.

Collaborative Notes 

The rise of openly available and organizationally licensed generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools have signalled a paradigm shift in higher education and scholarly publishing. Over the past two years, the consistent point of needing to disclose the use of GenAI, but largely leaving guidance on how to do so in a consistent manner to the discretion of the individual.

This session addresses the current state of recommendation and policy around generative artificial intelligence disclosure in learning and research contexts and introduces the Artificial Intelligence Disclosure (AID) Framework. The AID Framework is a tool that provides a transparent, consistent, and targeted approach to attribute the use of artificial intelligence in teaching and research work. In addition to the introduction of the AID Framework itself, participants will have the opportunity to review sample AID statements, discuss where such disclosure is best integrated in learning and research tasks, and brainstorm potential missing or future criteria for the AID Framework.

Collaborative Notes

Join us for to hear updates from Internet2 and InCommon pertaining to the Research & Education Federated Identity Community.

We will present progress and recommendations from several working groups active during 2024, including the SAML Subject Identifier Deployment Guidance Working Group and Federation Proxies Working Group. Each of these initiatives was convened to facilitate the refinement and adoption of various standards related to data privacy, user experience and trust. Additionally, we will encourage an interactive discussion on driving standards adoption within the R&E Federated Identity community.

Collaborative Notes

Institutions, publishers, and scholars are grappling with the complex challenges of ensuring security while fostering access to knowledge. The drive to make research more easily available brings with it new cybersecurity risks, from safeguarding sensitive information in publisher databases to protecting the integrity of scholarly content. These challenges underscore the need for a coordinated approach that balances ease of access with robust digital security practices.

This session will examine the intersection of cybersecurity and access within academic publishing, exploring how industry stakeholders can collaboratively address these issues. With an increasing reliance on digital platforms to distribute and access research, ensuring security at all levels—while preserving the openness that drives scholarly innovation—has never been more critical.

Key discussion points will include:
• The evolving cybersecurity risks faced by academic publishers and institutions as they implement access models.
• How publishers and libraries can safeguard research content and data against breaches while enabling broader access.
• The potential role of cross-industry standards or recommended practices to address cybersecurity concerns without hindering the access goals.
• Strategies to foster collaboration across academic institutions, publishers, and technology providers to mitigate security risks.
• The emerging technologies that can help balance cybersecurity with the need for accessible knowledge.

Collaborative Notes

To advance open science, there is increasing need for scientific data to be made publicly available in a way that is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) including through the use of standard, interoperable metadata and persistent identifiers (PIDs) across the data ecosystem. The evolution of data repository features is key to supporting researchers' evolving needs to share and reuse datasets. Through the development and implementation of common standards for metadata and PIDs in the repository ecosystem, data can more easily be discovered across repositories and search indexes and the impact of open data can also be measured more accurately. This session will present examples of interoperable repository standards that have been implemented at two generalist repositories: Figshare and Open Science Framework. The speakers will highlight specific use cases and features that support them including PIDs for authors, funding, and research organizations, standardized DataCite metadata, and CEDAR discipline-specific metadata templates to enable data reuse. Through collaboration across research infrastructure providers to establish common metadata, PIDs, and best practices, repositories are able to support a more open research data ecosystem that supports data discovery across repositories and facilitates the reuse of data. Audience feedback on achieving these goals will be encouraged during the Q&A.


Collaborative Notes

Research communication in the digital age retains many of the disadvantages of the print era. It is slow and incomplete, with much of the data and other components missing or locked in the supplemental files of journal articles. Ideally research communication would be both rapid and complete, with all aspects of the work included, and shared publicly in machine-readable and AI-actionable formats.
 
Research stacks – which we mean to encompass multiple concepts from automated workflows to notebooks and records of versions – are gaining traction as a way to collect all aspects of a scientific research project such as: development, planning, methods, data collection and execution, analysis, and reporting of results. One advantage is facilitation of seamless collaboration and sharing of critical aspects of the research. Another is that contributions to the research such as data sets or statistical analysis can be credited to the researchers most responsible for those products prior to final publication, all of which promotes research integrity and reproducibility. This session will explore how to support adoption of research stacks and appropriately integrate consideration of credit and accountability throughout the development of the research.

Collaborative Notes