Baltimore, MD – September 5, 2018 – The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announces the release of a draft revision to the Transfer Code of Practice, a NISO Recommended Practice, for public comment.  Transfer contains guidelines to help publishers ensure that journal content that is transferred between parties remains easily accessible to librarians and readers and that the transfer process occurs with minimum disruption to all stakeholders.  These recommendations include steps for better organization, communication, data transfer, and access to content, and enable a common understanding of the overall process between transferring and receiving publishers and subscribing libraries.

The NISO Transfer Standing Committee consists of publishers, librarians, and other experts who are responsible for the content of the Code of Practice and who coordinate educational programs, presentations, and other support efforts to ensure that Transfer is well-understood by its target audiences. Publishers are asked to endorse the Code and to abide by its principles wherever it is commercially reasonable to do so. An important element of Transfer is the Transfer Alerting Service (TAS), which notifies the community about journal moves and includes a searchable database archive to help with local record-keeping.

“This new revision of the Code of Practice seeks to address feedback received since the release of version 3.0 in 2014 by UKSG, Transfer’s original sponsor,” notes James Phillpotts of Oxford University Press and co-chair of the Transfer Standing Committee.  “The intent is to ensure that the Code continues to address current considerations in the scholarly journals community, and sets out publisher responsibilities as clearly as possible.  In particular, updates have been made to clarify and address categories of paid customer beyond subscribers, open access considerations, perpetual access responsibilities, licensing information, and further revisions to handling journal URLs and redirects.”

“NISO is a proud sponsor of the Transfer Standing Committee,” comments Nettie Lagace, NISO Associate Director for Programs. “We are pleased that we can provide a forum for varied stakeholders to discuss journal transfer issues and help with the process for publication of recommendations that we hope will be useful to everyone. During this public comment period, the Standing Committee members look forward to receiving input from community members that they can address before NISO publishes the final updated Transfer Code of Practice later this year.”

The NISO Transfer Code of Practice is available for public comment from September 5 to October 19, 2018. To download the draft document or submit comments, visit the NISO project page at https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/transfer. All input is welcome.

NISO, based in Baltimore, Maryland, fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and learning. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire lifecycle of information standards. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO website.