In January 2018, the ISSN International Centre will release its new portal and customer extranet. It has been completely re-designed and will offer a new interface to request ISSN assignments, and some new customer services.

The ISSN International Centre has been working for one year with the French IT company Progilone to set up a RDF triplestore based on the specific ISSN data model designed by the ISSN International Centre. ISSN applicants will also use the new extranet to register their publications’ data and track the status of their requests. Other features shall include online report of titles for which a given publisher assumes editorial responsibility, and online request for modification regarding the metadata describing serial publications under the responsibility of any publisher.

A first version of the portal and customer extranet will be presented as a preview for French users on December 12th, 2017 in Paris. The ISSN International Centre will make a demo of the new portal and will present new services, more specifically those available for subscribers.

Participation is free upon reservation.

[Article en français]

Do you use  ISSN? The ISSN standard is being revised and the ISSN International Centre is seeking views from all sectors as to the future of the standard.

There is a short survey available which should only take 10 minutes or so to complete. It can be found at :

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/Z3D5XX5

Surveys in French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Arabic are also available.

Thank you for your time.

The annual meeting of Directors of ISSN Centres was hosted this year by the National Library of the Kingdom of Morocco in Rabat (November 7-10, 2017). Twenty-seven countries were represented with participants coming from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America. IFLA WLIC 2017 featured high on the agenda with presentations about the new Library Reference Model (LRM) and the revision of ISBD. Another hot topic was the release in January 2018 of the new ISSN web portal based on linked data technologies. The portal will enable the development of new services developed within the framework of the 2015-2018 strategy of the ISSN International Centre.

Philippe Cantié, Director of the French ISSN Centre, explains the process of ISSN assignments to Hypothèses scholarly blogs. These blogs are searchable by ISSN or by title on the catalog of the National Library of France, as well as on the ISSN Register (subscription-based) and ROAD, the ISSN Directory of Scholarly Open Acess Resources.

The identification of the scholarly blogs through ISSN assignments is meant to facilitate their search and discovery and to highlight the authors’ publications.

Working Together to Ensure the Future of the Digital Scholarly Record is a statement that outlines the actions required to tackle the challenges of preserving and ensuring the long term accessibility of digital scholarship. Initially released in August 2016, the statement sets out a series of recommended activities that publishers, research libraries and national libraries can undertake to support archiving and preservation initiatives. The ISSN International Centre is involved in this action. The statement has already been endorsed by 8 organisations. Other organisations are invited to endorse the statement and lend their support to this call to action.

The International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI) is organising its General Assembly & Workshops meeting on 26th October 2017 at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., USA. The full program is online, as well as the preliminary program for both workshops ITOC (Information Trends and Opportunities Committee) and TACC (Technical Activities Coordinating Committee). Registration is still open.

Regina Romano Reynolds, Director of the U.S. ISSN Center at the Library of Congress, standing in for Gaëlle Béquet, Director of the ISSN International Centre in Paris, will present an overview of the ISSN Network’s strategy to provide enhanced access to ISSN data.

Peter Burnhill, founding Director of EDINA, University of Edinburgh, and Gaëlle Béquet, Director of the ISSN International Centre, gave this joint presentation at a satellite meeting to IFLA 2017 World Library and Information Congress, in Session 80 – Serials and Other Continuing Resources.

They reviewed the different ways in which content issued via the Web becomes Open Access, setting out the range of threats to the continuity and integrity of our published heritage: how ‘Open today’ could tomorrow become ‘closed’ or just ‘ceased to be’. Notably, the role of national and research libraries was highlighted, since the published heritage is a subset of ‘documentary heritage’ that can be monitored via the ISSN and the Keepers Registry.

The first meeting of national consortia from Latin America, the Caribbean and Spain took place in Mexico in early September 2017. It was organized by the Ministries of Science and Technology from Mexico, Chile and Brazil and attended by representatives from ten countries responsible for negotiating with publishers for national access to scientific/research publications. IBICT (Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia) and CONICYT (Comisión nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica) –the hosting institutions of the Brazilian and Chilean ISSN Centres– participated in the meeting. A statement was issued, which expresses the concerns of the participating organizations over the costs of APCs (article publishing charges) and outlines their perspective on international discussions around flipping subscriptions to APC open access. Most notably, the consortia were in agreement that APCs will not help to reduce costs, but rather contribute to the already inflationary situation with the current international scholarly publishing system.

The declaration is online in Spanish and English.

ROAD, the ISSN Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources, reached a milestone surpassing 22,000 resources. This was made possible thanks to the cooperation of the ISSN network.

Launched in December 2013 by the ISSN International Centre and supported by the Communication and Information Sector of UNESCO, ROAD provides a free access to a subset of the ISSN Register. This subset gathers bibliographic records describing and pointing to worldwide, multidisciplinary scholarly resources in open access that have been identified by the ISSN Network. ROAD gathers not only journals, but also conference proceedings, monographic series, academic repositories and blogs. ROAD innovative concept is that ISSN bibliographic records are enhanced with external information aggregated from data sources like indexing and abstracting services, metrics and registries.

Clément Oury, Head of Data, Network & Standards department at ISSN International Centre, participated in the first Bibframe workshop held on 26 and 27 of September 2017 at the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He presented a lightning talk about the use of Bibframe for serials and other continuing resources and the choices made by the ISSN International Centre to implement Bibframe for continuing resources in the future ISSN portal.

The workshop was arranged by the Nordic Network Group on bibliographic and infrastructure topics (NNG) and the Organizer Group in close cooperation with the DNB. The goal of this workshop was to take stock on the current situation of Biframe and its use in European institutions.

The presentations and documents are available online.