Frequently Asked Questions

- Free users are non-registered users accessing the Portal on the Internet. They have access to “essential” identification information, referred to as “Released ISSN data” for Confirmed records.[see section 2.2. What does "Released ISSN data" mean? and section 2.5. What types of ISSN records are accessible in the ISSN Portal?]

- Corporate users are users in institutions having subscribed to the ISSN Register. They register either by login/password or by IP. They can access all information from all types of ISSN records. However, the amount of data they will be entitled to download depends on the subscription package chosen by their institution.

- Network users are users in National Centres and at the International Centre. Network users access the same kind of data and services as corporate users, and they also access administrative data.

- Both Corporate users and Network users are Subscribing users.

- Publishers are users requesting ISSN assignment, and other services for publishers, from the ISSN International Centre. Even though they need to register to the ISSN Extranet, they are not considered Subscribing users in the Portal: they do not have access to full ISSN information, except for records of resources under their responsibility [see sections 8.4 ISSN Assignment and 8.5. ISSN Claiming and transfer of ownership].

“Released ISSN data” is a core set of bibliographic data elements that constitute a basic form of description for a serial publication in the ISSN Register. This core set of data is made available to users free of charge via the Free Access Portal. This “Released ISSN Data” is limited to:

- ISSN

- ISSN-L

- Other ISSN (Suppressed, cancelled or incorrect ISSN)

- Title proper (title as it appears on the preferred source of information for the resource)

- Key-title (standardized and unique form of title derived from the title proper, created by the ISSN Network)

- Country

- Medium

- URL of the digital resource

- Date of last update of the record

- ISSN National Centre responsible for the record.

Released ISSN data is under licence CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike).

“Complete ISSN data” is a complete set of bibliographic data elements that constitute a full description for a serial publication in the ISSN Register, plus additional data extracted from authority databases. Depending on the resources, it may include for example:

- Other variant titles,

- Subject,

- Current and earliest Publishers,

- Corporate editor name,

- ISNI,

- Dates of publication,

- Frequency,

- Type of resource,

- Language,

- Coverage by abstracting and indexing databases,

- Related publications,

- Links to external resources.

Complete ISSN data on open access scholarly publications included in ROAD (Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources) are accessible for free via the Free Access Portal.

An ISSN record represents the authority record for a continuing resource title [See also section 4. ISSN record]. An ISSN record has different statuses depending how and when they were created, and for which resource:

• Confirmed records correspond to resources whose publication has been checked by the ISSN Network.

• Provisional records correspond to provisional ISSN that may be assigned to pre-publications; they are liable to become Confirmed records.

• Legacy records were created at the infancy of the ISSN Register; their bibliographic data is incomplete and not up-to-date.

• Cancelled records correspond to cancelled ISSN, e.g. if an ISSN was mistakenly assigned twice, it is then cancelled and a new ISSN is re-assigned.

• Suppressed records correspond to ISSN that were deleted, generally because the resource described is not a continuing resource or has never been published.

• Unreported records correspond to identifiers not yet assigned and that are not (yet) reported to the ISSN International Centre.