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ISSN IC and ORCID Join Efforts: Enhanced Information Services Provided To The Scholarly Community

ISSN IC and ORCID Join Efforts

April 2020

From the ISSN International Centre

The International Standard Serial Number International Centre (ISSN IC) announced that its partnership with ORCID has resulted in improved accessibility and easier discovery of authoritative information about academic journals and where scholarly articles are published.

The ISSN International Centre and the ISSN Network have been around for more than 40 years identifying serials and continuing publications, both print and digital. In January 2018, ISSN IC released a subset of openly available, machine readable ISSN data on the ISSN Portal via content negotiation and API.

ORCID utilizes the machine readable ISSN Portal, building upon its existing functionality, to look up journal names at the authoritative source and display that data within ORCID records. Notably this new functionality better connects researchers with their peer review activity, allowing scientific publishers to acknowledge the huge amount of effort put in by researchers.

Within the ORCID user interface and metadata, peer reviews are grouped together using persistent identifiers, usually ISSNs, which are displayed alongside journal titles with a link to the portal landing page for that journal. This means that:

  • ORCID members use ISSN when managing journal names, and

  • individuals browsing the ORCID registry can discover and access more information about journals found within each record by visiting the ISSN Portal directly.

The ORCID registry currently has a total of 1,528,407 peer reviews linked to 28,407 different ISSNs. This number will grow in the near future since peer-reviewing is crucial to establishing credibility and trust in scientific output. Many countries around the globe have invested heavily in research and development in the last four years with spending rising for example from 2.3 % of GDP in 2014 to 2.40 % in 2018 in the OECD area while the number of researchers in the same area has grown from 8,2 per 1000 employed in 2014 to 8,5 in 2017.

As stated in the 2018 International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) Publishers Report, “the number of articles published each year and the number of journals have both grown steadily for over two centuries, by about 3% and 3.5% per year respectively. However, growth has accelerated to 4% per year for articles and over 5% for journals in recent years.” Scientific research is clearly an important sector of the global economy which needs a robust knowledge management infrastructure to thrive, and the use of PIDs, such as ISSNs and ORCIDs, to manage information about and connections between researchers and publications is a critical component.

Gaëlle Béquet, Director, ISSN International Centre, explains, “interoperability between global standard identifiers like ISSN and ORCID is founded on trust and synergy. It allows both services to cross-check data, advance the information ecosystem and eventually provide quality services to the scholarly community. By referencing the ISSN Portal in its researcher interface, ORCID boosts the visibility of ISSN data on the web.”

ORCID’s Director of Product, Tom Demeranville adds “it is fantastic to see ISSN provide openly available and machine readable data about publications. They’ve become part of the wider open scholarly infrastructure and provide easy to use and interoperable data for all. ORCID re-using this data is great news for publishers who can now deal with their journal information in a central location and see it reused across the web. It’s also great news for researchers and the institutions they work with who benefit from authoritative and easy to access data about the publications they access and publish in.”

About the ISSN International Centre - The ISSN International Centre is an intergovernmental organization founded in 1975 by UNESCO and France. It is based in Paris and manages the identification and the description of serial publications and ongoing resources, print and online, in all disciplines and at the international level. In 2019, the ISSN Network comprises 90 member countries hosting an ISSN National Centre. The ISSN International Centre provides global information services, i.e. the ISSN Portal (portal.issn.org), the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources (road.issn.org), the Enhanced Transfer Alerting Service (journaltransfer.issn.org) and the Keepers Registry (keepers.issn.org). Learn more at www.issn.org.

About ORCID - ORCID’s vision is a world where all who participate in research and innovation, from imagining to building and managing, are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions across disciplines, and borders, and time. ORCID provides an identifier for individuals to use with their name as they engage in research and innovation activities. ORCID provides open tools that enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and affiliations. ORCID provides this service to help people find information and to simplify reporting and analysis. Learn more at https://orcid.org.