The ISSN Register was created by UNESCO and France in the 1970s to index and identify analogue and digital serial publications. The ISSN database was available only to Member States and subscribers until 2013, when the ROAD database of open access scientific resources was made available on the web. This movement to free up ISSN data has accelerated under the impetus of a new management and thanks to the support of member countries, leading to the opening of the ISSN Portal in 2018. Today, the ISSN Portal offers a suite of services to libraries, publishers and the information industry that aims to trace as accurately as possible the trajectory of serial publications from their birth to their long-term preservation.

This presentation is intended to provide an overview of the progress made since the opening of ROAD in 2013 and an outline of the 2024 strategy.

On 23 November 2020, the Library of Congress’s U.S. ISSN Center launched ISSN Uplink, a new  application and tracking system for International Standard Serial Numbers. Publishers and other users such as  Program for Cooperative Cataloging’s CONSER members will be able to apply online for ISSN, create accounts that include team members, track the status of their applications, communicate with ISSN staff members, and be able to see a history of all their applications, communications, and ISSN assigned. The applications submission history and record of communications in Uplink will allow ISSN staff to provide better service to users during the ISSN assignment process and for future inquiries. For further information, please review the ISSN Uplink Fast FAQs.

Regina Romano Reynolds, Director of the  U.S. ISSN Center, Library of Congress, and Karen E. A. Ross authored an article published in Serials Librarian about ISSN and grey literature.

This article discusses and provides examples of the types of grey literature in scope for ISSN and describes the bibliographic metadata about these resources created to support each ISSN assignment. Benefits to the originators of grey literature that result from ISSN assignments are highlighted, especially the valuable exposure that the resources gain from the bibliographic records that are created to document ISSN assignments and are included in multiple international databases. Benefits that accrue to the ISSN Network from the inclusion of grey literature will also be covered.

The Supervisory Board of Europeana Foundation has just approved the appointment of Gaëlle Béquet as member of the newly created Europeana Foundation Advisory Board to which she will bring her expertise in the field of digital strategies and her experience and knowledge of the cultural sector.

During the sessions of the Permanent UNIMARC Committee 2020, most of the discussions were devoted to the adaptation of the format to the LRM model through the finalisation of the description grids of works and expressions in the UNIMARC/A format.

(Article in French)

The results of this thesis confirm that semantic interoperability may be achieved under specific conditions. All the conditions, prerequisites and good practices identified during the study of the models, the development of the mappings and their assessment using the approach of the Gold Datasets, involve cataloging policy decisions. Thus, the final thesis statement advocates for better cooperation between stakeholders and the adoption of a common mindset and practices to resolve heterogeneities of the past and to prevent new ones from happening. The thesis can be downloaded here.

In 2020, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) welcomed 14 new endorsing publishers as the most recent adopters of its Transfer Code of Practice.

The Transfer Code of Practice responds to the expressed needs of the scholarly journal community for consistent guidelines to help publishers ensure that journal content remains easily accessible by librarians and readers when there is a transfer between parties, and to ensure that the transfer process occurs with minimum disruption. The Code contains best practice guidelines for both the Transferring Publisher and the Receiving Publisher.  Publishers are asked to endorse the Code and to abide by its principles wherever it is commercially reasonable to do so. Publishers who endorse the Code can register for free with the ISSN Portal ; when they acquire a title, they may record the transfer through this portal. Information about transfers is shared with the library and publishing communities via the Transfer Alerting Service<https://journaltransfer.issn.org/>.

The Retraction Watch team takes a look at the most important publishing mistakes this year.

This book addresses multiple aspects of how public and academic libraries can deal with the increase in self-published titles.

The latest IFLA Asia and Oceania Regional Quarterly Newsletter is out. You will know what is trending in the Asia and Oceania region. But also,  discussions have taken place about the current situations affecting libraries, and about unprecedented changes that are reshaping the library communities.

Please open the PDF newsletter to access the links.

The Wikicite Discussion Series was organised by the IFLA Wikidata Working Group and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. These discussions, led by the IFLA Wikidata Working Group,  address several themes such as open citations, language revitalisation, knowledge equity, access to scholarly publications, linking and visualising bibliographic data, the global wiki community, and much more!

The Passport For Open Science is a guide designed to accompany PhD students at every step of their research career, whatever their disciplinary field. It provides a set of tools and good practices that can be directly implemented.

As a result of an increasing number of reports that show fake scientific news is on the rise, the scholarly publishing trade body STM is calling on the research community to be ever more vigilant.

This report explains the origins of the open access movement, gives a timeline for its development, but most importantly, Simba Information quantifies open access’ position as a fast growing subsegment of scholarly journal publishing.

In its report—Open Access Book Publishing 2020-2024—Simba reports on an open access book market that declined for the first time since tracking was initiated in 2013. It concludes that title output declined 18.7% in 2019 with 2,801 open access books published against 3,445 in 2018, according to titles listed by publication year in the Directory of Open Access Books.

Jisc, the research and education not-for-profit, is launching a new multi-content repository for storing research data and articles that will make it easier for university staff to manage the administration around open access publishing.

The new repository offers simple, cost-effective ways to manage, store and share digital research outputs, and will allow institutions to meet all Plan S mandatory requirements and other funder and publisher mandates for open scholarship.

In response to a recent blog post on the OASPA website authored by several representatives, COAR would like to underscore the critical role of Open Access repositories in accelerating innovation in scholarly communications and the adoption of Open Access and Open Science.

The BCM RG (Bibliographic Conceptual Models Review Group) will hold its second annual business meeting on Tuesday, December 22 2020 from 3 to 5 pm CET. The action plan 2020-2021 and the review of RDA/IFLA LRM maps will be on the agenda. The complete maps are published under an open license in the RDA Vocabularies project and are available for download from the RDA Registry

Observers are welcome, and should contact melanie.c.roche@free.fr for more details.