The Faxon Company announced that it successfully transmitted changes of subscriber addresses to the Royal Society of Chemistry in Cambridge, England, in a standard ANSI Xl2 communications session. X12 is the parent body for EDI standards used in North America and much of the rest of the world. This marks the first time anywhere in the serials publishing community that standard Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) has been used. Transmitting such documents with standard EDI will eliminate postal delays, greatly reduce clerical involvement in the process, ensure system to system data transfer, and permit the publishers and vendors to serve libraries more cost-effectively. The Royal Society of Chemistry is one of six publishers who have joined Faxon in exchanging four sets of documents in ANSI X12. The other publishers in the Faxon pilot project are: Kluwer, Pergamon, the National Research Council of Canada, John Wiley, and Plenum. The other documents to be exchanged are claims, claims responses, and cancellations. Additional documents are under development for mapping and transmission in ANSI X12, and Faxon is planning to offer this state-of-the-art service to other publishers.
This accomplishment follows a preliminary statement of direction on ANSI X12 by Paul Evan Peters, the Chairman of NISO, at a meeting of the Serials Industry Systems Advisory Committee (SISAC) , last June. At the meeting, Peters indicated it is likely that NISO will migrate all current and draft library materials acquisitions EDI standards to ANSI X12. This will mean the recasting of the NISO standards for monographic and serials orders, claims and cancellations, as well as dispatch data.
[Contact: The Faxon Company, 15 Southwest Park, Westwood, MA 02090; (617) 329-3350; Fax (617) 329-9875.]
