ROAD : the Directory of Open Access Scholarly resources | Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS)

"The ISSN Network identifies and assigns ISSN (each day worldwide) not only to scientific sources but also to newspapers, magazines, websites, annual reports and many other types of publications without any scientific content. The publishers who apply for an ISSN are requested to follow a standard procedure available on the website of the ISSN International Centre.

This latter, with the support of the Communication and Information Sector of UNESCO, launched (on 16th December 2013) the beta version of the Project Directory of Open Access scholarly Resources (ROAD). In July 2013, the ISSN International Centre has started to identify Open Access (OA) scholarly resources among the 130,000 online resources to which ISSN numbers have been assigned (an ISSN to one resource and only one) by the ISSN Network since the end of the 90’s. This retrospective identification has been continued and completed in 2014. Since 2014 ROAD has been extended in terms of the coverage and additional features.

The purpose of ROAD is to: (1) provide a single access point to different types of global online scholarly resources; (2) provide information about the use of the OA resources identified by a standard bibliographic identifier ISSN in the scholarly community; (3) give an overview of global OA scholarly production; and (4) demonstrate new ways of using the ISSN for compiling bibliographic information from various sources.

ROAD provides a free access (under CC BY-NC 4.0 license) to a subset of the ISSN Register (1,9+ millions of bibliographic records). This subset comprises  bibliographic records - created by the 89 ISSN National Centers and the ISSN International Centre following the cataloguing rules of the ISSN Manual – that describe scholarly resources (journals, conference proceedings and academic repositories, monographic series, scholarly blogs) in OA."