Highlights from the 2024 NISO Plus Global/Online Conference

By Mary Beth Barilla (Director of Business Development and Communications, NISO)

Attendees from Around the World Gathered Online to Tackle Open Research, Metadata, AI, and More in this Interactive Event

The NISO Plus conference, now in its fifth year, was established to bring professionals from across the information community — representatives from libraries, publishers, service and technology providers, government agencies, and more — together to explore shared problems and brainstorm ways to address them. The first conference was held in person in February 2020, but in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, we shifted to a virtual meeting format for 2021–2023. Approaching 2024, the NISO team knew that many in our community were eager to return to onsite meetings, but we were also reluctant to give up the inclusivity that virtual meetings offer. As a result, we held two NISO Plus meetings this year: NISO Plus Baltimore, an event held in person last February, and NISO Plus Global/Online, hosted virtually on September 17–18.

In keeping with NISO’s mission to develop standards that reflect the diversity of the global information community, including perspectives from outside the US is an important goal of NISO Plus Global/Online. The virtual conference format makes this goal more achievable, allowing attendees to participate without taking on the considerable time and expense often required for international travel. Representing 19 countries, roughly 20% of all attendees and 35% of speakers at the conference were from outside the U.S. To accommodate participants logging in from multiple time zones, we organized the meeting into two time slots, and recordings were made available to all attendees.

A second goal of the meeting, one shared by all NISO Plus events, is to generate ideas with the potential to become NISO initiatives or projects. (Our most recently published Recommended Practice, for the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern, originated in a conversation that took place at a NISO Plus conference.) Of course, we don’t require speakers or attendees to attend with a fully formed idea or proposal for a standard! Rather, we host conversations in which participants work together to identify common challenges or pain points and brainstorm potential solutions. To support these conversations, each session at NISO Plus Global/Online included an interactive portion in which participants were encouraged not only to pose questions to presenters but also to engage in a broader discussion of opportunities for collaboration.

Session proposals for the meeting, reviewed and selected by the NISO Plus Planning Committee and the NISO team (including Assistant Program Manager Keondra Bailey and Director of Strategic Initiatives Jason Griffey), reflected the big issues and challenges on the minds of members of the information community. Three of these issues rose very quickly to the fore: open research (including open access), metadata, and AI in scholarly communications. The first, open research, remains an important topic as institutions and organizations work to make science more transparent, build trust in scholarly research, and ensure that research is accessible.

The opening keynote speaker, Rachel Bruce, Head of Open Research at UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), set the tone for a meeting program focused on this topic. UKRI is the largest funder of research in the UK and Rachel’s talk, entitled Open research, incentivising change, and underpinning infrastructure: A UK perspective , presented the organization’s vision of a more transparent, collaborative, and trusted research culture. She outlined some of the efforts undertaken by UKRI and other organizations to develop better infrastructure to support open research and research integrity. She also highlighted the need for changes in how research is assessed and considered how to better incentivize researchers to adopt open research practices. One change recommended was the use of narrative CVs, which can “make the invisible visible” and encourage a more equitable assessment of a researcher’s skills and qualifications.

Several panel presentations also addressed issues related to open research, from PIDs and open data to open access (OA). Two sessions focused specifically on OA. Evolving Library Practice toward the Sustainability of Open Access featured a panel of librarians with extensive experience supporting OA in their respective institutions — Miranda Bennett (California Digital Library), Matthew Goddard (Iowa State University), Joshua Shelly (University of Potsdam), and Maureen Walsh (The Ohio State University). Together they explored the challenges involved in implementing and managing multiple, complex transformative agreement models and the need for more standardized workflows to address these challenges. In a lively discussion entitled The Virtuous Cycle, a panel representing publishers, libraries, and research institutions — Wendy Hesford (The Ohio State University), Lily Bergh (University of Toronto Press), Peter Potter (Paradigm Publishing Services/De Gruyter), David Prosser (Research Libraries UK), and Karin Wulf (Brown University) — shared perspectives on the sustainability of OA, particularly OA monographs, in the humanities and social sciences.

Metadata, so critical to the flow of information in scholarly communications, is a perennial topic of interest at NISO meetings, and NISO Plus Global/Online was no exception. Heather Campbell (Iowa State University), Harriet Wintermute (University of Nebraska at Lincoln), and Harrison Inefuku (Iowa State University) presented highlights from the recently published DEIA Metadata Handbook (https://doi.org/10.31274/ isudp.2024.153), a reference for metadata creators developed by librarians and published by the Iowa State University Digital Press. This informative session offered many practical tips and advice on revising existing metadata to be more inclusive as well as creating new metadata that is informed by DEI principles. Other metadata-focused sessions in the program addressed persistent identifiers (PIDs). Although PIDs play an essential role in supporting open research, several presentations weighed in on some of the challenges to adopting them in countries outside of the Global North. For example, Joy Owango, Executive Director of the Training Centre in Communication (TCC-Africa), described the difficulty of making research conducted in Africa more visible. Investing in research infrastructure can be prohibitively expensive for some institutions, and existing identifier systems are inadequate for the purpose of protecting and preserving Indigenous knowledge and cultural heritage. In response, the African PID Alliance has developed their own unique, multilinear approach to these challenges and are working to develop a Digital Object Container Identifier (DOCiDTM) that better supports research data and outputs across the entire life cycle of research conducted in Africa.

Finally, what would a conference in scholarly communications be in 2024 without sessions focused on AI? Our community continues to explore the potential of emerging AI technologies while grappling with their ethical implications. Jay Holloway (OCLC), Ken Varnum (University of Michigan), and Julie Zhu (IEEE) discussed the impact of AI on library discovery services. In “Exploring Emerging Technologies in Archiving and Preservation,” Aaron Pahl (University of Alabama at Birmingham) shared how he uses generative AI in his work as well as how he navigates some of the ethical questions and pitfalls that can arise from using this technology for research. And the conference social event, a team-based activity, was a contest to see who could develop the best illustration capturing the spirit of NISO Plus using text-to-image AI technology. Emceed by Melroy Almeida of the Australian Access Federation, the activity was a fun way for people to meet other attendees while practicing their prompt engineering skills, and it generated some creative (and humorous) results.

The end of the conference returned to the topic of open research with an inspiring closing keynote, “How journals can survive and thrive in an age of innovation and disruption,” from Dr. Ginny Barbour, Editor in Chief of the Medical Journal of Australia and Adjunct Professor at Queensland University of Technology. Suggesting that, in addition to their traditional purposes of dissemination and discussion, journals should make advocacy part of their mission, Ginny offered six observations to keep in mind when considering how journals can remain relevant in a rapidly changing environment. She also gave several compelling examples of how journals have acted as a force for social good, including the MAJ’s work to support Indigenous health researchers in Australia. The talk was a great reminder that journals still have the power and influence to effect real social change, and that leaning into that role could contribute to their longevity.

It’s impossible to do justice to the entire conference in one article. Rebecca Lawrence (F1000), Blaine Butler (Center for Open Science), and Kathryn Funk (National Center for Biotechnology Information) presented an idea for trust markers for research that would help readers, including those among the general public, better assess the quality of published research and avoid misinformation. The Data Conversion Laboratory’s David Turner took a creative approach to highlighting the importance of metadata and XML tags in supporting research integrity, examining the topic through the lens of the Spielberg film Catch Me If You Can (2002). And of course there were several sessions covering NISO standards, including an introduction to the information standards process as well as updates from Working Group members on current standards projects like Open Access Business Processes and Accessibility Remediation Metadata. NISO is grateful to the speakers and volunteers who gave freely of their time and expertise in producing the meeting content, as well as to all the attendees, who contributed to the many discussions and helped to generate new ideas. We are looking forward to sharing outputs from the discussions with NISO’s Topic Committees, who will review them with an eye for possible future projects.

If you weren’t able to join us in September, recordings of the keynotes from Rachel Bruce and Ginny Barbour are now open and available in our online video library (https://niso.cadmoremedia. com/). In the meantime, another opportunity to experience NISO Plus is coming soon! Consider joining us for the next series of conversations, to be hosted in person February 10–12 at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront. Registration is open — check out our website at https://niso.plus/ to learn more!