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 

Collaborative Notes

Join us for an in-depth look at how evolving browser technologies may affect authentication to electronic resources, from user experiences on the open web to the reliability of common access methods.

This session will feature insights and recommendations for technical librarians, IT and identity professionals, and product experts from publishing and service providers. Additionally, attendees will receive the latest updates from the SeamlessAccess initiative, which aims to streamline online access for users of scholarly tools, information resources, and research infrastructure.

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

As US Federal Agencies launch updated Public Access Plans to meet the 2022 OSTP Nelson Memo, 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.
This panel will present three perspectives on achieving an interoperable research data landscape. First, the NIH Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) recognizes the need for data to be discoverable across repositories and not be siloed. GREI is supporting progress towards this through repository adoption of common metadata, PIDs, and best practices. Second, as a public data repository and repository infrastructure provider, Figshare is evolving to meet OSTP desirable repository characteristics, implement GREI common metadata, and support emerging PIDs and FAIR data standards. Third, the USDA leverages Figshare’s standards-compliant repository infrastructure to provide Ag Data Commons (ADC), a data repository and catalog for USDA-funded research data. ADC supports FAIR data services through high-quality metadata reviewed by curators, broad discoverability including records of data in discipline-specific repositories, and striving for FAIR data for AI/ML. 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