Press release: Springer Nature and the ISSN International Centre working together on Centralization of ISSN Assignment

Springer Nature and the ISSN International Centre have been initiating a centralized process for the assignment of International Standard Serial Numbers (ISSN) to serial publications of Springer Nature. The new process for requesting ISSN standardizes and automates the way unique identifiers are requested, before their publication, for periodicals and books series published under the various imprints of Springer Nature. Springer Nature thus has only one point of contact for all new ISSN assignments.

“As an international publisher, Springer Nature used to handle numerous ISSN application workflows with different national ISSN Centres, depending on the place of publication. The requesting processes were often time-consuming and diverged from one National Centre to another”, says Henning Schönenberger, Director of Product Data and Metadata at Springer Nature. In order to standardize the assignment process, the ISSN International Centre and Springer Nature, with the support of the German ISSN Centre, initiated a new and unique workflow of ISSN assignments.

The new process involves the automated ISSN assignment to pre-publications through transfer of metadata from Springer Nature to the ISSN International Centre. “This process is experimented for the first time, and it gives international publishers the possibility to apply for ISSN at one single ISSN Centre, regardless of the location of the actual publishing office”, says Gaëlle Béquet, Director of the ISSN International Centre.

Springer Nature will get ISSNs more quickly, and the ISSN International Centre will immediately share the new data with ISSN National Centres via the ISSN Register, the database which provides authoritative information about serial publications worldwide.