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.

***To learn more about Transfer and the transition to NISO, join us for an open teleconference call today (Monday, February 9) at 3:00 - 4:00 PM Eastern time. The call is free and anyone is welcome to participate.  To join, simply dial 877-375-2160 and enter the code: 413 756 9413#. Can’t make the call? A recorded version will be posted to the NISO website (http://www.niso.org/news/events/2015/telecon/) within 48 hours.***

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. 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). 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 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/.

Read the full press release at: http://www.niso.org/news/pr/view?item_key=a0d43901fbfd7674d20a70dfee8c78f9014b9a86

Cynthia Hodgson

Technical Editor / Consultant

National Information Standards Organization

chodgson@niso.org

301-654-2512