The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and UKSG announce that the Transfer Code of Practice will now be supported and maintained by NISO. The Code provides voluntary guidelines for publishers to follow when transferring journal titles between parties to ensure that the journal content remains easily accessible by librarians and readers. NISO has republished Transfer version 3.0 as a NISO Recommended Practice (NISO RP-24-2015) and will move all supporting documentation to the NISO website. A NISO Standing Committee has been established to manage the ongoing support of the Transfer Code of Practice.
“The Transfer project was initiated by UKSG in 2006 and the first version of the Code was released in 2007 in response to issues identified by the scholarly communications community when journal titles change platform providers or owners,” explains Elizabeth Winter, Electronic Resources Coordinator, Georgia Institute of Technology Libraries, and Co-chair of the NISO Transfer Standing Committee. “Such transfers can negatively impact libraries, intermediaries (such as serials subscription agents, link resolver administrators, and vendors of large-scale discovery systems), and readers. Often the journal would seem to disappear and links from existing information systems to the content would break, even though the title was still being published. Publishers and platform providers have a vested interest in ensuing that their content is easily accessible. The Transfer Code provides them with the specifics of how they can make sure that all of their stakeholders can continue to make the content available with the least amount of disruption.”
“A very important achievement to date for the UKSG Transfer Working Group was the creation of the Enhanced Transfer Alerting Service (ETAS),” states Alison Mitchell, Editorial Director, Nature Publishing Group, and Co-chair of the NISO Transfer Standing Committee. “This public, searchable database helps publishers communicate journal transfers and makes it easy for librarians and readers to be notified of journal transfers and to search previous journal transfer alerts. The ETAS is currently offered through collaboration among UKSG, JUSP, Jisc, and Cranfield University with JUSP and Mimas providing the hosting environment. The current hosting arrangements for the ETAS service will remain in place for the foreseeable future.”
“I am delighted, both as UKSG Chair and as Jisc’s service manager for JUSP, that Transfer has been so successful” said Ross MacIntyre, Senior Manager for Bibliographic, Research and Analytic Services, Mimas. “It has been a truly useful initiative to all parties. UKSG continues to invest in research and to incubate projects like Transfer that facilitate better connection between different parties in the knowledge community.”
“NISO is very pleased to take on responsibility for the Transfer Code of Practice,” asserts Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director. “We are very well placed to disseminate information about the Code, encourage publisher endorsement and implementation, and promote the best practices in the Code. Additionally, the Code fits nicely in our portfolio alongside related recommended practices such as PIE-J: The Presentation & Identification of E-Journals (NISO RP-16-2013), Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials (NISO RP-15-2013), Journal Article Versions (NISO RP-8-2008), and the forthcoming Protocol for Exchanging Serial Content (PESC).”
The Transfer Code of Practice is available on the NISO website from the Transfer Standing Committee’s webpage: www.niso.org/workrooms/transfer/. The ETAS alerting service continues to be available at: http://etas.jusp.mimas.ac.uk/.
