NISO Seeks Public Comment on Draft Recommended Practice PIE-J: Presentation & Identification of E-Journals
The National Library of Medicine, the world's largest medical library and a component of the National Institutes of Health, has a deep interest in the publishing models used by scientific journals, from the viewpoints of practical and efficient use of titles that are indexed for MEDLINE, and the clear and accurate preservation of the scientific literature for use by future generations. This notice presents an opportunity for others with a similar interest to participate in the development of a Recommended Practice that will provide guidance on the presentation and identification of electronic journals, an undertaking of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO).
NISO has released the draft Recommended Practice "PIE-J: Presentation & Identification of E-Journals" (NISO RP-16-201x) for public review and comment through July 5, 2012. (The PIE-J draft Recommended Practice and an online commenting form are available from the NISO PIE-J workroom at: http://www.niso.org/workrooms/piej/.)
This Recommended Practice was developed to provide guidance on the presentation of e-journals-particularly in the areas of title presentation, accurate use of ISSN, and citation practices-to publishers and platform providers, as well as to solve some long-standing concerns of serials librarians. In addition to the recommendations, the document includes extensive examples of good practices using screenshots from various publishers' online journals platforms; a discussion of helpful resources for obtaining title history and ISSN information; an overview of the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) and key points for using it correctly; an explanation of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI®), the registration agency CrossRef, and tips on using DOIs for journal title management; and a review of related standards and recommended practices.
Citations form the basis for much scholarly research. Connecting researchers with appropriate content is the goal of OpenURL linking and other reference linking systems. Unless journal websites accurately and uniformly list all the titles under which content was published, user access to desired content is considerably diminished. For example, many e-journal publishers and aggregators now place digitized content originally published under an earlier title on the website for the current title, using the current ISSN, thus seriously impeding the researcher's ability to find or identify the content being sought. The PIE-J project was initiated to address these issues. The PIE-J Recommended Practice provides a clear and succinct list of guidelines that publishers can easily implement to facilitate long-term access to their e-journal content. This constructive advice will aid publishers with the presentation of born-digital content as well as supporting the continued digitization of content from journals originally published only in print.
For more information:
Technical Editor / Consultant
National Information Standards Organization