1 April 2020
The International Standard Serial Number International Centre (ISSN IC) has 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 uses 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. 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.
The ISSN International Centre is an intergovernmental organisation 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.
ORCID provides an identifier for individuals to use with their name as they engage in research and innovation activities, and open tools that enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and affiliations.