Due to the pandemic of COVID-19 in France and the measures imposed by the French authorities to limit contagion, ISSN International Center staff work from home.

In the current circumstances, we kindly advise you, whenever possible, to pay your ISSN credits and your subscriptions to the ISSN International Center services by credit card in order to facilitate the management of your requests.

The two resolutions submitted to vote by ISO TC46/SC9 regarding ISO standard 3297 were officially approved by 20 national standard bodies on March 17th, 2020. A final draft of ISSN standard will be balloted by ISO in the coming weeks.

Due to the COVID-19 global outbreak and health and social measures imposed by several national authorities, the ISSN Governing Board and the ISSN Member Countries voted to cancel all in-person meetings and the International Conference that were to take place in Paris in April 2020.

Instead of the General Assembly in-person meeting, the ISSN International Centre will organize distant meetings.

The ISSN International Centre operates remotely and responds to all your requests concerning the use of its services (ISSN Portal, Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources, Keepers Registry, Enhanced Transfer Alerting Service, ISSN assignments to serials and continuing resources). Do not hesitate to contact us by email or via Facebook and Twitter.

Due to the COVID-19 global outbreak and health and social measures imposed by many national authorities, ISSN National Centres and their hosting institutions may encounter technical and operational issues. This particular situation may have an impact on the timely management of publishers’ ISSN requests and ISSN assignments. Unfortunately, the ISSN International Centre cannot currently replace impacted ISSN National Centres and manage all ISSN requests and assignments. If ISSN National Centres and their hosting institutions are temporary closed due to this crisis, the ISSN International Centre invites publishers to be patient and renew their requests regularly. We thank you for your understanding.

Due to the covid-19 outbreak, and measures imposed by national authorities, ISSN National Centres may encounter technical and operational issues. This may have an impact on the management of ISSN requests, assignments and portal updates. Some centres have staff working from home, but we are doing our best to keep everything running. Thank you for your understanding!

The Keepers Registry is now available on the ISSN portal.

As of December 2019, the ISSN International Centre is the sole operator of the Keepers Registry. This service aggregates preservation metadata to ISSN descriptive metadata to report about the archival status of digital journals. The Keepers Registry is now fully integrated with the ISSN Portal. The latter provides a complete and accurate overview of a serial title’s journey from initial publication to transfer of responsibility and to long-term preservation by archiving agencies. The ISSN Portal can thus be seen as an authoritative database for serial title identification and tracking.

Jennifer Bazeley, E-Resources Metadata Management Librarian, Yale University Library, will present NISO Transfer Code of Practice (https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/transfer) and the related Transfer Alerting Service managed by the ISSN International Centre since 2018. The Electronic Resources & Libraries Annual Conference will take place in Austin, TX, USA on March 8-11, 2020.

This Learned Publishing article, by Eti Herman, John Akeroyd, Gaelle Bequet, David Nicholas, and Anthony Watkinson, presents an up-to-date portrayal of the greatly changed landscape of scholarly journal publishing and identifies the emerging trends characterizing it. The article posits that journal transition can be seen as falling into three categories: enhanced models of the traditional scholarly journal, innovative models of the traditional scholarly journal and possible alternatives to the traditional journal. This review shows that each of the models identified makes contributions to enriching the reporting and showcasing of scholarly output. This study on the evolution of serial publications, and more particularly on the transformations of scientific journals, was commissioned by the ISSN International Centre as part of a reflection on the new multi-year development strategy of ISSN International Centre for the years 2020 to 2024.

The National Librarian, Dr. Lenrie Olatokunbo Aina, spoke at the sensitization workshop on legal deposit compliance and ISBN & ISSN, held on 9th–10th December, 2019 hosted by the Kano State Library Board, at the Murtala Muhammed Library Complex, Kano. The well-attended event was open to publishers and members of the public, and included a tweet-storm of Dr. Aina’s speech. Dr. Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, the Governor of Kano State, was a special guest. This is one example of events in which the ISSN Centre of Nigeria participates to encourage compliance by publishers, authors, printers, academicians and government printers to international standards.