NISO Plus 2020: Outputs and next steps

1. Introduction

The inaugural NISO Plus conference took place in Baltimore, MD on February 23–25, 2020. Following the merger of NFAIS and NISO in 2019, our goal was to combine the thought leadership tradition of the former NFAIS conference with the hands-on practicality of NISO. The conference brought together around 250 professionals from across the information community — librarians, publishers, service providers, and more — to focus on our shared challenges and opportunities through a combination of presentations and in-depth discussions, culminating in concrete next steps for NISO and our community.

“Important to have conversations with all groups in information field and avoid silos. We need to establish good communication and work together to cultivate the best information systems.” –  Librarian The NISO community consists of stakeholders from all parts of the information landscape, who cooperate to create consensus industry standards and recommended practices, which support better interoperability and communications in scores of different types of technical interactions. The NISO working group process itself is seen as a fruitful learning experience that enables participants to better understand each others’ requirements and motivations, leading to practical outcomes that meet the needs of all stakeholders. NISO standards and recommended practices result in increased efficiencies across diverse supply chains and improved communications and trust between stakeholder groups, and provide platforms for individual players’ innovations.

The NISO team hoped the presentations and discussions at NISO Plus would be lively, and generate reactions and contributions from all attendees. We believe this was the case! We also hoped that the conversations and information shared by NISO Plus participants would continue beyond the end of the conference. In particular, we wanted to ensure that the pain points and gaps that were identified could be evaluated for potential future NISO work, enabling us to build on the momentum from NISO Plus and work with our community to find meaningful solutions. This strategy would place the NISO Plus conference squarely into the NISO process lifecycle, as well as connect NFAIS’s former thought leadership activities and NISO’s standards development.

This report summarizes the outputs from NISO Plus 2020 and provides a clear set of actions for NISO as well as recommendations for other organizations and the wider information community.

2. Capturing ideas

To ensure that we captured the ideas generated during the conference, links to collaborative note documents were shared for each session, with participants, speakers, and NISO staff contributing to these resources (along with some people following along via Twitter offsite!). These notes are linked in Appendix A. Since the conference, we have worked with the members of our three Topic Committees — Information Curation and Creation (ICC), Information Discovery and Interchange (IDI), and Information Policy and Analysis (IPA) — as well as the overarching Architecture Committee, to review, organize, and prioritize the many suggestions we received. This included identifying ideas that would fit under our existing standards work or could be taken on by other organizations in the information community; well-defined ideas that could be taken forward by NISO, with the approval of our voting members; and ideas that need to be fleshed out in more detail before they can be acted on.

Very early in the planning process for NISO Plus, we identified several strategies for ensuring a combination of value production for the conference community broadly and for NISO more narrowly. Our core principle was to prioritize conversation over content delivery, and we embodied this principle by reflecting it in the schedule. Each time slot was divided into a roughly 45-minute “delivery” section, followed by another 30–45 minutes for a conversation about the topic and content, rather than the usual 5–10 minute question-and-answer session at the end. This approach worked incredibly well to push the conversation about each topic into a more substantive discussion including, where possible, the identification of concrete challenges, opportunities, and possible next steps.

To put this plan into action, when working on the NISO Plus program we first reached out to a variety of stakeholders in our community in order to determine the critical topics and themes that were top-of-mind. These were broad, conceptual topics that would drive the overall feel of the conference and, as we started to define them, they helped shape the tracks for the conference. These tracks broadly divided into topics that revolved around future and near-future developments in the information industry; concerns that were immediate and pressing about what our community is working on now; and work that NISO is already directly driving, such as current and in-progress standards, best practices development, and other committee work.

As we assigned each topic to one of these tracks, we also identified experts who could speak to the topic, including participating in the conversation sessions. We aimed for two to three speakers per session, balanced across our stakeholder community, in order to reflect multiple perspectives on each topic. This process also allowed us to pay special attention to equity and representation more generally, working to be as inclusive as possible in our panels.

“I like the GoogleDocs format. It can be difficult to get all of the notes down. I like to take notes so I can mull over topics later and share them with my team. I loved this, and it even enabled me to be more engaged in thinking on the spot since I wasn’t so focused on note taking.” –  Publisher We recruited volunteers from the NISO Board and Topic Committees to moderate sessions and charged them with ensuring that the conversations flowed and moved toward synthesis and analysis. A NISO staff member was on hand at each session to help with note-taking, which allowed a level of attention to the topics that made it easier to identify and track outcomes and next steps.

3. Organizing ideas

On average, each session generated about three ideas for future actions (although some sessions had more ideas and some had none). NISO staff added these to a master spreadsheet, together with the session name, and matched like ideas together in adjacent rows.

3.1. Architecture Committee review

NISO’s Architecture Committee is responsible for providing strategic direction for our organization’s activities. This includes oversight and leadership of standards development in areas that are new to NISO, as well as coordination with and guidance to the three NISO Topic Committees. Architecture Committee members were therefore the first to review the spreadsheet, over the course of several meetings. They noted additional relationships and matchings between ideas, and also observed that some ideas were more fleshed out than others, with more background information and/or good existing understanding about the issue at hand, while others were much briefer and vaguer. They therefore split the list into two categories, “Concrete” and “Needs Exploration”, and tagged the relevant Topic Committee(s) for each idea.

In the near term, Topic Committees will focus on the concrete ideas and, over time, the Architecture Committee plans to investigate and expand on the suggestions that need more exploration. The latter may also be a source of ideas for future NISO thought leadership events.

High-level themes that emerged across multiple ideas include:

The need for quality metadata

Identifiers; controlled vocabularies

Linking and interoperability between systems

Metrics and other indicators of value

Opportunities for education and sharing understanding between stakeholders, including the development of best practices in discrete areas of work

In many respects these themes are not terribly surprising, given our community’s work, and they signal the need to remain mindful of industry requirements for these areas no matter the discrete area of application. They could provide jumping-off points for possible in-depth study of overall requirements and directions in particular scoped areas. They highlight the universal imperatives to ensure general findability, identification, and connections between systems and their users; the need to support local workflows while efficiently sharing information used for many different purposes; the need to agree on appropriate measurements for various contexts; and ultimately, realization that the different perspectives, experiences, use cases and requirements brought by different participants result in richer and more productive outputs.

3.2. Topic Committee review

Each Topic Committee has reviewed and discussed the “concrete” ideas assigned to them by the Architecture Committee, as follows:

Information Curation and Creation Committee:

Metadata and controlled vocabulary standards for digital humanities work

Metadata requirements for data set curation

Publisher responsibilities for data

Fine-tuning of publishing platform input to improve web crawling

Crosswalks for book metadata schemas

Strategies for involving creators in digital preservation preparation

Best practices for assigning identifiers

Information Discovery and Interchange:

Examination of recent user discovery processes to highlight technical opportunities for cross-search, improved linking to related materials, and identification of additional discovery pathways (such as citation trail, recommender systems, virtual browse)

Best practices for training data preparation for artificial intelligence

Determination of new metrics to include resource types beyond journal article (such as streaming media)

Information Policy and Analysis:

Identifiers for publisher journal/book packages for use in link resolvers and electronic resource management systems

Further statistics to track use of demand-driven acquired materials

Creation of a Plan S requirements checklist and recommendations for Plan S compliance

Organizing metadata around article processing charges; and analysis of incentives for adoption of standards

Notes from these discussions can be found in Appendix B.

4. Making ideas a reality

All the Topic Committee discussions mentioned the need to organize small ‘review’ groups, ideally made up of topic experts, to describe further contexts and stakeholder perspectives for each problem statement for the areas listed above. Such groups could include (but are not limited to) NISO Plus speakers and participants, and would meet virtually once or twice. Besides shedding additional light on the relative need for the work, these reviews might identify other organizations or individuals interested in participating.

For example, many of the issues raised related to metadata. The Architecture Committee recognized that metadata almost always has a specific purpose, and metadata requirements differ depending on the application or intended process. Metadata applied for descriptive purposes naturally has a role in discovery processes, so these are usually related, but the Architecture Committee noted that it is also important to be looking forward as systems change and new features are developed. A review group of experts, meeting for a few discussions, could expand on the specific metadata-related problems raised at NISO Plus, place them into a specific context, and recommend appropriate next steps to a NISO Topic Committee. This could include development of a NISO project proposal.

Based on their initial discussions, the Architecture and Topic Committees felt that some items could be managed in two phases by different NISO groups. For example, the NISO Plus session on electronic resource management (ERM) included a lively audience discussion of package IDs, identifiers for publisher-specified packages of electronic content. How these would be defined and implemented would be of interest to both those involved in the management of library resources and those involved in discovery and access (often not the same people, either in a publisher company or a library!). The Information Discovery & Information Topic Committee and the Information Policy & Analysis Topic Committee therefore proposed that one group should determine the rules for identification and a second should address application and implementation.

5. Areas for further exploration

Several ideas were not defined well enough in the session notes for the Architecture Committee to determine specific actions; these could be explored in the future by the Architecture Committee, or NISO may organize one or more thought leader meetings to examine them more closely:

Big data: badging for data, standardized methods of review/categorization

Opportunities for cooperation, collaboration in repository management (Example: Coordination around redaction/modifications/retraction)

How to manage content in diverse output formats; metadata in non-traditional formats

Best practices for indexing large collections in discovery services

Challenges for open content in electronic resource management

Focus moving from discovery to resource management, for example, KBART data is relied on by systems other than link resolvers

There were also many ideas and points raised at the conference that fell into areas already covered by existing NISO Working Groups and Standing Committees, and these have been shared with them for exploration and potential action. They include:

An easy way for authors to deposit materials from submission systems to repositories — included in the NISO Manuscript Exchange Common Approach (MECA) Recommended Practice, expected to be published in June 2020.

Several ideas related to NISO KBART (Knowledge Bases and Related Tools) — likely due to community pain points regarding subscription tracking, discovery, and linking:

Transmit KBART data in XML format

More automatic interactions (such as APIs) between publisher KBART data and library electronic resource management (ERM) systems

Better management of coverage gaps and article or chapter-level collections, as KBART currently defines coverage at journal or book level

Similarly, some discussions raised points that are part of work being addressed by other organizations working in our community, including COUNTER, SeamlessAccess, and Metadata 2020. We are communicating these outputs directly to these organizations for their consideration and action:

SeamlessAccess. These presentations prompted many observations about challenges in SAML implementation, and configuration for publishers and libraries, including descriptions of issues around costs, system complexities and technical barriers to interoperability, the need to police “bad actors”, and other general hurdles.

COUNTER. The general need to accurately measure online usage of all materials was mentioned in many sessions, with measuring usage of open access material seen as a growing problem, since the community both produces and consumes this material in many forms, which are typically not captured in existing systems and processes.

Metadata 2020. This initiative has been advocating for “richer, connected, and reusable, open metadata for all research outputs” for several years, and this came up as a priority in many sessions. While Metadata 2020 in its current form is ending this year, we will share the ideas from NISO Plus with the team for consideration as they begin discussing future plans for the initiative.

This leaves us with many ideas from the Topic Committee discussions that we need to prioritize. As a community-led organization, anyone is welcome to submit ideas for new NISO standards and recommended practices, typically using the NISO “Work Item Template” (included here as Appendix C). These ideas are then considered in much the same way as described above for the outputs from NISO Plus — they are reviewed by the Topic Committees, who may approve project proposals to be reviewed by NISO’s Voting Members for ultimate approval on whether they should advance as actionable projects. NISO is a very small organization with a large volunteer community consisting of dozens of people who participate in one or more of our standards working groups and committees. Our role is to support those volunteers by facilitating these groups and helping them define and publish their recommendations.

“Standards help establish trust! It’s all about the community! Humans should be ON the loop!” –  Service/Infrastructure Provider But, as with any organization, our resources are finite. With so many ideas to consider from NISO Plus, we’d like to invite everyone in the information community to help us prioritize which of them to move forward with. As mentioned above, we have already identified which ideas were best articulated at the conference. We will soon solicit community feedback to help distinguish between those that are quick wins (but not necessarily important), and those that are more complex, but will be more valuable to the information community. The feedback gathered will aid in the prioritization needed and the means for organizing this input and feedback will be announced soon.

Comments are always welcome via [e-mail].