Hello everyone, 

I’m very happy to share this announcement of an exciting new project from the ISSN International Centre.  I will be giving a presentation about ROAD at the LC Booth at ALA Midwinter on Saturday at 2:30 and again on Sunday at 12:30.

****************

The ISSN International Centre is pleased to announce the launch of the beta version of ROAD, the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources:

http://road.issn.org

ROAD provides a free access to those ISSN bibliographic records which describe scholarly resources in Open Access: journals, conference proceedings and academic repositories. These records, created by the ISSN Network (88 National Centres worldwide + the International Centre), are enriched by information about the coverage of the scholarly resources by indexing and abstracting databases, registries and journals indicators.

Main features:

•             Faceted search,

•             Map search,

•             Search per country, subject, indexing services, journal indicators… and of course per ISSN,

•             Presentation of the indexing and abstracting databases, registries and journals indicators which data are used for enriching bibliographic records,

•             Records freely downloadable as  a MARC XML dump (they will be available as RDF triples in 2014).

ROAD serves four major purposes  :

•             to provide a single access point to different types of online scholarly resources published worldwide and freely available,

•             to provide information about the use of the Open Access resources identified by an ISSN in the scholarly community,

•             as such, and once the coverage of ROAD is developed, to give an overview of the Open Access scholarly production worldwide (for statistics purposes for instance),

•             to demonstrate new ways of using the ISSN for compiling information from various sources.

ROAD will be developed all along 2014:

•             completion of the coverage (retrospective identification of Open Access scholarly resources within the ISSN Register),

•             addition of new types of resources (e.g., : monographic series),

•             ROAD records in RDF triples, using the PRESSoo model as a formalism,

•             Extension of the list of indexing/abstracting databases and journal indicators used for enriching ISSN records

•             …

ROAD has been developed with the support of the Communication and Information Sector of UNESCO.

Any comments are more than welcome, and can be sent to road@issn.org

**************

Regina Romano Reynolds

Director, U.S. ISSN Center

Head, ISSN Section

Library of Congress

Washington, DC

(202) 707-6379 (voice)

(202) 707-6333 (fax)

rrey@loc.gov