The German National Library (DNB) organizes an information day regarding the topic Open Access (OA) for its staff. The OA days take place on March 2nd, 2017 in Leipzig and on March 9th, 2017 in Frankfurt am Main. The in-house training with OA experts -from the Universitätsbibliothek Regensburg, Kooperativer Bibliotheksverbund Berlin-Brandenburg, Copernicus Publications and Springer Nature- will provide (from different prospects) an overview and definition of OA and describe the benefits for science and research. New challenges and possibilities for scientific libraries, publishers and for the DNB in the near future will be highlighted. Kristina Eckl and Christian Schütz (both from ISSN Germany) will hold a presentation about ROAD: the Directory of Open Access scholarly Resources produced by the ISSN Network.

The ISSN Register is at the heart of the Keepers Registry, the database managed by EDINA – University of Edinburgh and which acts as a global monitor on archiving arrangements for electronic journals made by a dozen memory organizations.

The site thekeepers.org, which reports 34,357 e-journals as being archived, was recently upgraded and new features were added. Users can now submit lists of ISSN / titles so as to check the archival status of different publications in batch mode. Users searching for an ISSN associated with an e-publication get a result that shows basic information about that title, even if it is not reported as archived by any of the Keepers. Furthermore, a machine to machine interface (API) has been introduced through which external applications can query the database.

A training session will be held at the National Library of Kazakhstan from 3 to 5 April 2017 for colleagues from ISSN national centers in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Russia. Representatives of the Book chambers of Belarus and Ukraine will also participate in this training. At the same time, discussions will be held with the representatives of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia on the establishment of an ISSN regional center. A visit to the International Book Fair “On the Silk Road” is also scheduled for April 6th.