Hong Kong Open Access Publisher New Horizon Press Gains a Vote in Global Standards Body

An independent open access publisher based in Hong Kong has taken a seat at the table where some of the most consequential technical decisions in scholarly publishing are made. New Horizon Press Limited, a young academic publisher incorporated in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China, has joined the National Information Standards Organization, better known across the publishing and library world as NISO, as a Voting Member. The announcement, dated October 12, 2026, places the small publisher alongside some of the largest names in scholarly communication, from Elsevier and Springer Nature to the Library of Congress and the U.S. National Library of Medicine, all of which appear on NISO’s published directory of Voting Member organizations.

For readers who have never encountered NISO, the organization is easy to overlook and impossible to avoid. It is a non-profit membership association, accredited by the American National Standards Institute, that identifies, develops, maintains and publishes technical standards and recommended practices for managing information. Founded in 1939, incorporated as a not-for-profit education association in 1983, and known by its current name since 1984, the Baltimore, Maryland-based body describes its vision as a world where everyone benefits from the unfettered exchange of information. In practical terms, NISO is where publishers, libraries and technology providers negotiate the shared technical agreements that allow scholarly information to move cleanly between systems that would otherwise be incompatible.

The scope of that work covers the entire lifecycle of information, organized into three areas: Information Creation and Curation, Information Discovery and Interchange, and Information Policy and Analysis. Anyone who has downloaded a journal article, checked a contributor list, or watched a journal move from one publisher to another has benefited from NISO’s output, often without knowing it. The Journal Article Tag Suite, or JATS, the XML vocabulary that underlies article markup and archiving across the industry, is a NISO standard. The CRediT taxonomy, which assigns standardized contributor roles to the researchers behind a paper, is a NISO output. The Transfer Code of Practice, which governs how journals move between publishers while protecting continuity for authors and readers, is likewise a NISO product.

Membership at the Voting tier is the most engaged level of participation the organization offers. According to NISO’s published description of Voting Member benefits, these are the organizations that hold an actual vote in the standards process. For New Horizon Press, that translates into a bundle of specific rights: the ability to name a Voting Representative and an Alternate who comment and vote on every proposed or revised standard and recommended practice; the ability to join any number of NISO standards committees and working groups, a privilege non-members can access only by nominating a single person to a single group; the right to propose new standards work items to the NISO community; and a vote in NISO Board elections and other governance matters.

The benefits extend beyond formal balloting. Voting Members may send all of their staff to NISO’s monthly educational webinars free of charge, receive discounted registration for other events including the annual NISO Plus conference, and are listed on NISO’s membership page and in every standard published while their membership remains in good standing. New Horizon Press has said it plans to take part in NISO webinars and education programs and to submit comments during public review and balloting of standards, signaling an intention to use the full range of participation channels rather than simply holding the designation.

The publisher framed the move as a deliberate alignment strategy. “As a young open access publisher based in Hong Kong, we want our journal workflows to match international best practice,” the company said in its announcement. “Membership gives us a direct part in the discussions and votes that shape standards for metadata, JATS, journal transfers, discovery and accessibility.” The statement is notable for how specifically it maps membership onto operational concerns. Metadata quality, article markup, transfer protocols, discoverability and accessibility are precisely the technical seams where small publishers most often diverge from industry norms, and where divergence carries real costs in indexing, preservation and reader trust.

For the authors and readers of New Horizon Press’s journals, the company argues, the practical payoff is continuity with the wider ecosystem. The membership means the publisher’s journals will keep their metadata, article markup and discoverability practices in step with the standards the broader industry uses. In an era when funders, institutions and indexing services increasingly audit the technical hygiene of journals, that alignment is not cosmetic. Structured metadata determines whether articles are harvested correctly by discovery services; consistent JATS markup determines whether content can be preserved and migrated across platforms; adherence to transfer norms determines whether a journal can change hands without disrupting its editorial record.

New Horizon Press arrives at NISO with an existing record of engagement in the scholarly publishing infrastructure. The company is already an organisational member of ALPSP, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, and describes its mission as creating an equitable, friendly and open scientific publishing environment while giving researchers high-quality publishing services and academic resources. Its portfolio spans environmental science, agriculture, energy, carbon science, biomass, sustainable materials and artificial intelligence. The publisher’s own journals include Artificial Intelligence & Environment and Lignin Research, and it partners with Springer Nature on the journals Biochar and Carbon Research. All of its journals are fully open access and peer reviewed, with authors retaining copyright, a model that places a premium on discoverability since open access depends heavily on content being findable and machine-readable.

The contrast in scale between New Horizon Press and many of its fellow Voting Members underscores why the announcement has drawn attention. NISO’s Voting Members include the leaders of more than 100 organizations spanning publishing, libraries, information technology and media, among them Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, IEEE, Crossref, ORCID and Clarivate. More than 500 experts and practitioners sit on NISO’s working groups and committees, where the technical details of standards are hammered out. A small publisher joining this community gains access to the same deliberative machinery as the industry giants, and in principle carries the same formal weight of one vote per member organization in the standards process.

NISO’s international role adds another dimension to the significance of participation. The organization is designated by ANSI as the U.S. Technical Advisory Group to ISO Technical Committee 46, which handles information and documentation, and serves as Secretariat of that committee’s Subcommittee 9 on identification and description. Standards work that begins in NISO committees can therefore ripple outward into international ISO frameworks that govern how information is identified and described worldwide. For a Hong Kong-based publisher with global authorship ambitions, a voice in that pipeline is a form of influence disproportionate to company size. Whether New Horizon Press converts its new voting rights into tangible technical contributions will depend on the staff it places on committees and the comments it files during balloting, but the membership itself marks a clear statement of intent: that even a young open access press wants its workflows, and by extension its authors’ work, built to the same specifications as the rest of the scholarly world.

Subject of Research: Membership of an open access publisher in the National Information Standards Organization and its implications for scholarly publishing standards

Article Title: New Horizon Press Limited joins NISO as a Voting Member

Article References: New Horizon Press Limited joins NISO as a Voting Member. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: NISO, New Horizon Press, open access publishing, scholarly standards, JATS, metadata, CRediT, journal transfer, Hong Kong, ANSI, academic publishing, interoperability