Being a part of a global network has its benefits. Over 90 ISSN National Centres receive support from the ISSN International Centre to put into practice the ISO 3297 standard. The ISSN Network coordinates the collection of bibliographic data for serials and continuing resources which is in turn published in a centralized registry. Member countries have recognized the value of hosting their own ISSN National Centre at a research centre, national library, book chamber or publisher association.

Benefits

• Offering publishers a recognized global label (ISO 3297) and service in their native language
• Support for establishing data workflows and a network of experts to consult
• A way to promote your country’s cultural and academic publications on a global platform

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Dr Gaëlle Béquet, Director of ISSN International Centre, will participate in a panel session titled Strategic Frontiers in Digital Preservation that will take place on 3 November. In this session, the perspectives of libraries, publishers, and service providers will be explored on key strategic digital preservation issues. Participants will learn about recent initiatives and hear expert reflections on the fundamental requirements to ensure that scholarly material is adequately preserved in efficient and cost-effective ways for future scholars.

The full agenda of the conference is online.

In a year of exceptional growth of the ISSN Network, the ISSN International Centre is delighted to announce the opening of the 93rd ISSN National Centre in Lima, Peru, on August 24th, 2021.

The Peruvian ISSN Centre is hosted by the National Library of Peru and is the newest registration agency for ISO 3297, the standard for the identification of serials and continuing resources. Dr. Ezio Neyra Magagna, Director of the National Library of Peru, said, “The opening of the ISSN National  Center in Peru is a very relevant event for our country and our National Library in the context of the 200th anniversary of its creation in 1821. Many thanks to the ISSN International Center for its cooperation and guidance during the process of implementation in Peru.”.

Dr. Gaelle Bequet, Director of the ISSN International Centre, commented, “2021 is a very successful year for the ISSN Network with three consecutive openings of national centers: ISSN Ukraine in March 2021, ISSN Austria in April 2021 and ISSN Peru in August 2021. Our teams of information professionals in Kiev, Lima, Paris and Vienna have been instrumental to achieve this expansion. The recent commitment of the National Library of Peru to promote ISSN is a pledge of success for this persistent identifier in Latin America.”

Replay the opening ceremony of the ISSN National Centre in Peru (August 24th) via Facebook Live: https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=5945722972165494&ref=watch_permalink

Watch this brief video originally prepared for IFLA’s World Library and Information Congress in August 2021, describing the activities of the ISSN International Centre. The video subtitles are available in 6 languages, which you can display by clicking on the CC symbol in the lower right corner of the viewer.

The number of open access scholarly journals has increased six-fold according to statistics published in the ISSN International Center’s 2020 annual report regarding the development of the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources (ROAD) service. Publishers who manage a portfolio of open access journals wish to optimize the impact of these resources in indexing databases and improve their bibliometric indexes. Librarians and researchers want to reference titles that best meet commonly accepted editorial quality criteria. But what about the emergence of questionable journals? Their editors are more eager to cash in on author processing charges (APCs) than to provide a quality service to authors.

Dr Gaëlle Béquet, Director of ISSN International Centre, chaired this session organized by IFLA Serials and Other Continuing Resources Section. The session included Mathias Astell, Hindawi; Ana María Cetto, Latindex; Kate Snow, African Journal Online (AJOL); Leena Shah, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). They presented the quality criteria they have developed and implemented in their respective services for the benefit of librarians and researchers worldwide.

Watch this session and view the presentations from the IFLA WLIC 2021 website (registration required).

Gaëlle Béquet’s introduction can be viewed on Slideshare.

Ten years after the publication of its Consolidated Edition, ISBD is at a crossroad. The Revision of the ISBD is taking place in a complex environment driven by diverse bibliographic and technological developments and pressing users’ needs.

There is on one hand the urgent need to extend its coverage horizontally (to a larger array of resources) and vertically (to more granular descriptions). There is on the other hand the strategic mandate to align the ISBD with the IFLA Library Reference Model (LRM), to keep up with the developments in the bibliographic universe and achieve complementarity between IFLA standards. In addition there is the necessity to engage – with other cultural institutions – in the web of data and linked data and semantic web technologies.
In this session, experts of ISBD and bibliographic standards are presenting their views that are driving the transition of the ISBD. Elena Escolano Rodríguez, Head of the Central Library at the Spanish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, presented an update of ISBD as the response to the communities of users to solve their needs of information; Mikael Wetterström, Specialist in Automated Processing of Bibliographic Data at ISSN International Centre, presented the ISBD revision work done so far by the ISBD for Manifestation Task Force. Gordon Dunsire, RDA Technical Team Liaison Officer, presented the position and role of ISBD in the current bibliographic universe, including its relationship to other IFLA bibliographic standards, RDA (Resource Eescription and Access), BIBFRAME, and linked open data.

The ISSN International Centre, with academic publisher Springer Nature, has just completed constructing a new, centralized process for the assignment of ISSN to periodicals and books series published by this publisher.

Read the press release.