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.

COPE has released a discussion document about predatory publishing (https://publicationethics.org/predatory-publishing-discussion-document) which contains recommendations to help researchers pinpoint fake scientific journals. COPE advises researchers to search the ISSN of the publication in the ISSN Portal and verify if the ISSN is genuine and has not been assigned to another serial publication.

At PIDapalooza, the Open Festival of Persistent Identifiers, the ISSN IC Director will give a presentation about the portfolio of services provided by the ISSN portal that is expanding to support the identification of continuing resources and share information about their preservation in the digital scholarly environment. Plans to turn the ISSN portal into a hub of identifiers for digital resources and organizations are emerging. Bring your chords and your PIDs and tune in for an innovative music piece.

See the schedule.

The German National Library (Deutsche National Bibliotek, DNB) has a new website, and as does the German ISSN Centre hosted by the DNB. Contents, functionality, user guidance and the general website design have been completely revised and technically enhanced. As an expert you will find information at the entry point DNB Professional.

The U.S. ISSN Center assigned a recordbreaking 6,341 International Standard Serial Numbers (ISSN) in 2019, an increase of 10.5 percent over fiscal 2018. Of these, 2,621 ISSN, or 41 percent, were assigned to online resources. ISSN statistics over many years show that print resources continue to be published at a steady rate. The high number of ISSN assigned to publications requested by CONSER libraries in 2019 represented the successful elimination of an arrearage of more than 1,500 titles that had accumulated, partly as a result of libraries requesting ISSN for older print titles being digitized or moved to off-site storage. In 2020, the U.S. ISSN Center plans a project for more than 5,000 titles in HathiTrust and a project to assign ISSN to science blogs. Work continues on ISSN Uplink, an ISSN web form application, workflow, and communication system.