NISO/ALPSP committee releases best practices publication

The National Information Standards Organisation (NISO), in partnership with the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), has published the Recommended Practice Journal Article Versions (JAV): Recommendations of the NISO/ALPSP JAV Technical Working Group (NISO-RP-8-2008).

The publication is designed to provide a simple, practical way of describing the versions of scholarly journal articles that typically appear online before, during, and after formal journal publication.

‘Static, single copies of research papers that are essentially facsimiles of a single, unambiguously identified printed document are a thing of the past, stated Bernard Rous, deputy director of publications at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and co-chair of the JAV Working Group. ‘Changes in the way we create, produce, and store articles lead to multiple versions that are often all discovered together through web searches. Our working group addressed the consequent problem: how to identify the versions retrieved and clarify the relationships among them.’

NISO plans to aggressively promote use of the JAV recommendations in the information dissemination community over the coming months.

The document is available from the NISO website at www.niso.org/publications/rp.