NISO Publishes Recommended Practice on Presentation and Identification of
E-Journals

Recommendations Ensure Long-Term Online Accessibility to Scholarly Journals
Even After Title and Publisher Changes

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announces the
publication of a new Recommended Practice: PIE-J: Presentation &
Identification of E-Journals (NISO RP-16-2013). 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, collections, and
electronic resources 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 (DOIR), 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. Unless journal
websites accurately and uniformly list all the titles under which content
was published, user access to desired content is considerably diminished,"
explains Cindy Hepfer, Continuing E-Resource Management and Cataloging
Librarian at the State University of New York at Buffalo and Co-chair of the
NISO PIE-J Working Group. "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 publishers and providers of e-journals take great pride in the diverse
designs of their websites," states Bob Boissy, Manager, Account Development
& Strategic Alliances at Springer and Co-chair of the NISO PIE-J Working
Group. "Yet how these websites present, identify, and link together the
publications that they display can make the end users' task of discovering
articles and accessing them easy, frustrating, or completely fruitless.
Application of the PIE-J recommended practice guidelines will result in
improved discovery and access that will benefit researchers, authors,
librarians, online providers, and publishers."

"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," declares Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive
Director. "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."

The PIE-J draft Recommended Practice and a brochure summarizing the
recommendations are available from the NISO PIE-J workroom website at:
www.niso.org/workrooms/piej/.

Cynthia Hodgson
Technical Editor / Consultant
National Information Standards Organization
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301-654-2512