Gaëlle Béquet, ISSN IC Director, will attend the online conference PIDapalooza -The Open Festival of Persistent Identifiers on 27 January 2021. The program is available.

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.

DOAJ, the CLOCKSS Archive, Internet Archive, Keepers Registry/ISSN International Centre and Public Knowledge Project (PKP) have agreed to partner to provide an alternative pathway for the preservation of small-scale, APC-free, Open Access journals. The recent study, authored by M. Laakso, L. Matthias, and N. Jahn, has revived academia’s concern over the disappearance of the scholarly record disseminated in Open Access (OA) journals. DOAJ will act as a single interface with CLOCKSS, PKP and Internet Archive and facilitate a connection to these services for interested journals.

Reports regarding the effective preservation of the journals’ content will be aggregated by the ISSN International Centre (ISSN IC) and published in the Keepers Registry. Gaëlle Béquet, ISSN IC Director, commented: “As the operator of the Keepers Registry service, the ISSN International Centre receives inquiries from journal publishers looking for archiving solutions. This project is a new step in the development of our service to meet this need in a transparent and diverse way involving all our partners.”

The Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) has been licensed by ISNI International Agency since 1 October 2020 as an International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) registration agency for Belgian public identities active in a creative sector, such as the publishing world.
ISNI International Agency is responsible for the creation and dissemination of identifiers, as well as the administration of the database. It promotes and leads the adoption of ISNI identification worldwide.

To improve the work process of the National Library of Latvia (NLL), a decision was made to develop a new IT system – Portal for Publishers (Portal). The goal was to create an online space where publishers could request and receive international standard numbers (ISBN , ISSN , ISMN) and barcodes generated from them, as well as UDC indexes. Publishers can also submit legal deposit copies of online publications and reports on publishing activities for statistical purposes.

Arabic Reference Citation Index (ARCI), one of the Egyptian Knowledge Bank projects, introduced an Arabic interface for the Web of Science, providing access to bibliographic information and citations to scholarly articles from Arabic journals. The primary aim of ARCI is to evaluate the quality and research output of Arabic researchers, universities and research organizations. The ISSN Egyptian agency played a key part in promoting the ISSN to be the essential check point in committee discussions, and got agreement that metadata will be re-evaluated based on Egyptian journal records in the ISSN Portal in case of data discrepancies.  For more information on selection criteria, see the brochure, and click here for more information on how to submit a journal.

The ISSN IC, as sponsor and partner of CISPC 2020, will participate in the conference “Challenges in the Scholarly Publishing Cycle 2020” on Nov. 30th, 2020 at 11:20. Gaëlle Béquet, ISSN-IC Director, and Dominic Mitchell, DOAJ Operations Manager, will give a joint presentation. The program is available.