Digital accessibility represents a crucial journey towards inclusivity. In a world where approximately one in five people live with some form of disability, it is crucial for companies to ensure that their digital content is accessible to all. This commitment is reinforced by various legislative measures around the globe which require businesses to respond to the needs of those with disabilities. Prioritizing digital accessibility not only enhances a company’s reputation for corporate social responsibility, but also helps to prevent legal challenges that may arise from non-compliance. It ensures that all users can have an equal experience when interacting with digital content. It involves careful consideration of various factors, such as creating the right workflow, managing alternative text for images, and optimizing metadata and colour contrasts. As businesses embark on this path, they encounter various challenges that require thoughtful solutions and strategies. We will address how organizations might develop these strategies and implement the necessary tools to create a robust framework for digital accessibility and highlight NISO initiatives related to these areas. By doing so, companies not only comply with legal standards, but also contribute positively to an inclusive digital landscape.

The proliferation of paper mills and unethical practices within the scientific community poses a significant threat to research integrity. The extent of this problem across the entire industry is recognized and yet is ambiguous, making it imperative for publishers to implement scalable solutions. Metadata, XML tagging, and industry standards offer a structured approach to scrutinizing journal articles on a large scale, empowering publishers to proactively identify potential integrity issues. This article, based upon a presentation at the 2024 NISO Plus Global conference, delves into the reasons behind the challenges and proposes ideas to make integrity checks more effective for publishing operations. It also promotes the importance of finding and remediating potential abuses early in the process to prevent further problems. Using available standards in concert with information from organizations such as ORCID, Ringgold, the Research Organization Registry (ROR), Crossref, and NISO, this article highlights powerful ways by which publishers can find and address crucial red flags before publication or peer review.

Ethics and integrity cases in submitted manuscripts is becoming an increasingly common problem, whilst retractions continue to grow at a rapid rate. These cases are caused by both intentional misconduct and fraud, as well as a host of unintentional poor research practices. Whilst most good journals undertake a range of checks to spot these issues ahead of peer review and publication, which checks have been conducted and passed are unclear to the reader, and most preprint servers conduct far more limited checks. As preprints become increasingly recognised as valued outputs of research, they will likely become a growing target for problematic submissions. This article explores the need to develop standards around the labelling of checks conducted and passed across all types of publication outlets, to better inform the reader how much to trust an article or preprint. It describes a couple of recent developments to create such labelling and more rigorously verified preprints, and explores the need for a more nuanced expectation around checks and peer review on different types of research outputs. Finally, it proposes that NISO (or a similar neutral entity) work to bring together relevant providers and members of the community to develop and agree a standard framework and metadata for these checks and verification.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) is reshaping the landscape of content discovery, access, and usage within the academic publishing ecosystem. This paper examines the complex relationships between content providers and GAI, focusing on the multifaceted roles that publishers play as consumers, developers, feeders, and influencers of GAI technologies. It explores the ethical considerations, policy developments, and principles guiding the use of GAI in academic publishing. The paper also analyzes the impact of GAI-assisted search on content discoverability, linkability, accessibility, and trackability. By auditing current GAI tools and discussing the dilemma of blocking GAI bots, the paper highlights the challenges and opportunities that GAI presents. Finally, it calls for collaborative efforts among stakeholders to promote ethical AI practices and introduces future directions, including the upcoming NISO Open Discovery Initiative survey on GAI.

The FAIR principles provide guidance on improving the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability of digital resources. Since the publication of the principles, several workflows have been proposed to support the process of making data FAIR (FAIRification). However, to respect the uniqueness of different communities, both the principles and the available workflows have been deliberately designed to remain agnostic in terms of standards, tools, and implementation choices. Consequently, FAIRification needs to be properly planned, and implementation details must be discussed with stakeholders and aligned with FAIRification objectives. To support this need, this paper describes GO-Plan, a method for identifying and refining FAIRification objectives. Leveraging on best practices from requirements and ontology engineering, the method aims at incrementally elaborating the most obvious aspects of the domain (e.g. the initial set of elements to be collected) into complex and comprehensive objectives. The definition of clear objectives enables stakeholders to communicate effectively and make informed implementation decisions, such as defining achievement criteria for distinct principles and identifying relevant metadata to be collected. GO-Plan has been validated in multiple discussion sessions with experts on FAIR, in an application to a real use case and in two hands-on tutorials with end-users.

This paper offers an overview of some of the highlights of the 2024 NISO Plus Baltimore Conference that was held February 13–February 14, 2024. While this was the fifth such conference, it was the first to be held in-person since 2020 as the following three were held in a completely virtual format due to the global impact of COVID-19. These conferences have emerged from the merger of NISO and the National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services (NFAIS) in June 2019, replacing the NFAIS Annual Conferences and offering a new, more interactive format. The ultimate goal of the NISO Plus conferences is to have a discussion, identify information industry problems and, with the collective wisdom of the speakers and audience who are representative of the information industry stakeholders, generate potential solutions that NISO or others can develop. As with prior years, there was no general topical theme (although the impact of Artificial Intelligence was a common thread throughout), but there were topics of interest for everyone working in the information ecosystem—from the practical subjects of persistent identifiers, standards, metadata, data sharing, Open Science, and Open Access to the potential future impact of Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has revolutionized knowledge management, offering unprecedented capabilities for creating, proofing, summarizing, and evaluating documentation. This paper explores how AI, particularly large language models (LLMs), and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, can streamline the development of knowledge articles while addressing ethical concerns such as data ownership and bias. We examine practical applications, including real-time collaboration, multilingual support, personalized information retrieval, and automated knowledge forecasting. Additionally, we explore AI’s role in bridging legacy systems, reducing biases, and enhancing decision-making. Ultimately, AI extends beyond generating content, shaping a more efficient, inclusive, and innovative approach to knowledge management. This article is based upon a presentation given at the 2024 NISO Plus Conference that was held in Baltimore, MD, USA, February 13–14, 2024.

Many colleges in China have adopted the policy of recruiting students by academic subject categories in order to optimize the talent training mode. To solve the problems in major selection after enrollment, this paper has designed an intelligent algorithm model for recommending college majors. Compared with existing methods for assigning college majors, the model uses deep neural networks and clustering algorithms to simulate complex calculations in the human brain. It uses historical learning data from senior students or graduates to predict the future grades of freshmen, judge their adaptability to various college majors, reduce human interference in the college major selection process, recommend the most suitable college major to students.

This paper is based upon a lightening talk that was given on February 14, 2023 at the 2023 NISO Plus conference. The presentation described the research for the creation of a white paper on the use of blockchain technology along the scientific research workflow that will be released in early 2024 by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). What the three-year study found is that the technology is indeed being used in almost all the steps in the scientific research workflow - from hypothesis development through to publication - by commercial organizations as well as by non-profits and across all market sectors, even governments. For example, the U.S Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) uses blockchain technology in a pilot program, the Grant-recipient Digital Dossier (GDD), to manage their grant program more efficiently. As of July 2021, GDD had reduced the time required to complete grant assessment tasks from four-plus-hours to a fifteen-minute process. This paper briefly summarizes the findings, discusses the pros/cons of the technology, and provides a glimpse of how the technology is impacting the future of scientific research.

his paper is based upon a lightning talk given at the NISO Plus conference on February 14, 2023 and it describes interlibrary Loan syste4m, Fulfillment, developed by the Equinox Open Library Initiative. A thriving resource-sharing consortium allows libraries to offer broader and deeper opportunities for individual learning and greater community equity. It unlocks access to additional copies beyond what an owning library has available, along with a broad range of content owned within the network, which provides a diverse collection for library users. Providing access to such a rich network of resources is the goal of Fulfillment, an open-source resource sharing system which breaks down barriers to sharing collections.