The annual plenary meeting of ISO Technical Committee 46 Information-Documentation will be held at the National Library of Portugal in Lisbon (Portugal) from 14 to 18 May 2018 at the kind invitation of Instituto Português da Qualidade (IPQ). The working group about the revision of ISO 3297 — ISSN will hold two meetings in Lisbon. The Director of the ISSN International Centre, who chairs TC46, will have a meeting with colleagues from ISSN Portugal.

The ISSN International Centre is invited by the French Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education (ABES) to participate in the annual meeting with SUDOC centres specialized in serial identification and cataloguing. This SUDOC PS annual meeting, organized each year by ABES in Montpellier, will take place on 25 May 2018 during the annual 2-day conference (ABES Days), whose programme is online.

The Head of Data, Network and Standards Department will represent the ISSN International Centre and give a demo of the ISSN portal.

By letter dated 13 March 2018, Ms Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, acknowledged the accession of the Republic of Panama to the ISSN Network in response to the letter sent by Ms Isabel de Saint Malo de Alvarado, Vice-President and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Panama. The Ernesto J. Castillero R. National Library has been officially designated to house the future ISSN National Centre of the Republic of Panama.

The ISSN International Centre is organising a one-day conference about Open Science in Paris on April 26th, 2018.

Jean-Claude Guédon, Chair of the Expert Group on the future of scholarly publishing at the European Commission and a pioneer in the open access movement, will be the keynote speaker. Among the invited speakers, Mikael Laakso (Hanken School of Economics in Finland) will deliver his study about the evolution of OA journal publishing viewed through ROAD, the ISSN Directory of Scholarly Open Access Resources. Leo Waaijers (Netherlands) will talk about QOAM, Quality Open Access Market, a tool for quality assessment of editorial practices. Ana Maria Cetto (UNAM, Mexico) will focus on the move from open access to open science in the Latin American ecosystem.

This event is on invitation only.

IFLA President Glòria Pérez-Salmerón has invited IFLA Officers to attend the official presentation of IFLA Global Vision Report that will take place on March 19th, 2018. ISSN International Centre Director Gaëlle Béquet has been invited since she is currently Secretary to IFLA Serials and Other Continuing Resources Section.

Insights Journal has published an article about the new ISSN Portal entitled Revisiting the identification of serials: ISSN goes linked.

UKSG 41st Annual Conference and Exhibition will take place in Glasgow, 9-11 April 2018. A presentation of the new ISSN Portal will be held at booth 33, in the exhibition hall of the Scottish Event Campus.

Clément Oury, Head of Data, Network and Standards department at ISSN International Centre, will also participate in the next ICEDIS meeting to be held after the UKSG annual conference.

The Conference Programme is now online.

DOAJ and the ISSN International Centre have just renewed their Memorandum of Understanding whose purpose is to document the metadata exchange and linking between the DOAJ and the ISSN portal for open access scholarly journals. The benefit of this agreement is to give an insight about trusted peer-reviewed open access journals in the ISSN Portal, and to improve the quality of the metadata for both services.

The ISSN International Centre expresses its thanks to the 1491 colleagues and partners who have submitted a response to the Opinion Survey about the ISSN Standard. The survey was circulated in 7 languages and has attracted attention in 78 countries. The ISO Working Group on the revision of the ISSN standard will now discuss the survey findings. We will keep you posted!

Since 5th January 2018, the ISSN International Centre has been offering a new ISSN portal interface and a new ISSN Extranet for publishers.

The ISSN Portal interface (https://portal.issn.org) combines free data and subscription-based access to enhanced ISSN data. New features have been added. A cartographic search is now available from the landing page, enabling to search by place of publication. Subscribing users can submit a list of ISSNs in order to check the ISSN status and get the corresponding records. Faceted refinements are possible as well as a search by subjects. The new portal also provides linked and enriched information to its customers.

The ISSN Extranet provides publishers with enhanced services meant to facilitate ISSN requests and track the assignment process at every stage. Moreover, publishers can claim ownership for publications.

ISSN assignment is now a chargeable service. An ISSN request shall cost between 25€ and 50€ as per the country where the publisher is located. Service packages are also available on request. For further information, please contact communication[at]issn.org.