The ISSN Has Lasting Appeal

Information Industry News

ISSN Data and the associated suite of services have become an essential element in the identification of continuing resources worldwide: the ISSN Portal to freely and easily identify more than 2.5 million serials; ROAD to access Open Access scholarly resources curated by the ISSN Network; Keepers Registry to check which digital resources are archived by our 14 contributing agencies’; and Transfer Alerting Service to track journal transfer information. Since 1975, the ISSN has been the unique and persistent identifier for journals and other continuing publications. On a daily basis, it serves librarians, editors, publishers, content providers, database managers, scholars, students. 

Bodil Dalgaard-Møller, Database Consultant at DBC D1G1TAL, the Danish Library Centre with the Danish Union Catalogue (DanBib) and library. dk, emphasizes that “ISSN is important as the official reference for identifying and distinguishing continuing resources”. 

For 10 years, the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA), a UK non-profit organization, has been using the ISSN Portal. Caroline Baldry-Last, CLA Data Team Manager comments “CLA has had a positive relationship with ISSN Portal for over 10 years. We use their services on a daily basis as a trusted source to identify bibliographic metadata in order for us to accurately distribute our revenue to copyright holders.”

In 2021, more than 3 million ISSN visits were made to the ISSN Portal to check and find reliable data on archived, ceased and current publications. Denise Peres, Librarian coordinator at SciELO notes that their aim is to benefit from “a reliable source, with a single standardized record format for generating data and indicators.”

The latest version of ISO 3297 standard published in 2020 takes into account the requirements of the library and the publishing communities. The standard has been improved by introducing the following items: 

— the concept of “cluster ISSN” to group serials based on various characteristics, e.g. print and digital media formats or preceding and succeeding titles, 

— the expansion of the list of resource types eligible for ISSN assignment, e.g. blogs, conference proceedings, 

— the specification of ISSN interoperability with other identification systems, e.g. DOI, EAN, URN. 

Readers are invited to contact the ISSN Centre to learn more about their offers for professionals. Email them at sales (at) issn (dot) org.