The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and UKSG have announced 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. 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.
The Transfer Code of Practice is available on the NISO website from the Transfer Standing Committee's webpage: www.niso.org/workrooms/transfer/. The Enhanced Transfer Alerting Service (ETAS) continues to be available at: http://etas.jusp.mimas.ac.uk/.
