The National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) has announced the release of their Best Practices for Publishing Journal Articles. The document has been in development for more than a year by a Working Group under the leadership of Linda Beebe, Senior Director, PsycINFO, and including representatives from primary and secondary publishing as well as from the library community. It provides guidelines for bibliographic policies that apply not only to article-by-article digital publishing, but also to the more traditional article publishing processes.
The need for a Best Practices document grew out of an NFAIS Roundtable discussion on this topic that was sponsored by the American Psychological Association/PsycINFO in late 2007. A group of interested information professionals from the publishing and library communities met to share their experiences in handling digital article-by-article publishing and they identified a set of common concerns that they believe needed to be addressed - such as the need to know when a specific journal issue is closed; what document is to be considered the article/issue of record; how to easily identify publishing gaps and duplicate articles; how to ensure that errata are not overlooked; how to avoid the use of diverse pagination across media (print, online) for the same article; how to identify the length of an article in the absence of traditional pagination, etc.
The first draft of their work was approved by the NFAIS Assembly in August 2008, but the Working Group revised the document in response to the many thoughtful comments that were supplied during the voting process. As a result the guidelines were expanded to apply to all journal article publishing processes and the revised document was approved on February 13, 2009.
NFAIS will now circulate this set of Best Practices to other industry organisations for discussion and possible further refinement.
