Questionable Practices in Scholarly Publishing: the Stance of the ISSN Network

Abstract

The ISSN network actively supports Open Access scholarly journals and repositories by disseminating free information about these resources on its web platform ROAD. ROAD provides the bibliographic and geographical metadata supplied by the ISSN network. The latter is enriched with metadata about the coverage of the resources by indexing, abstracting and citation databases, registries and journal impact factors.

The advent of Open Access publishing has been tainted by questionable practices favouring profit-generating activities over the advancement of sciences. The ISSN network has been faced since 2012 with ISSN requests lacking correct and verifiable information preventing the unambiguous identification of the publication. Some guidelines have been devised to handle these flawed requests. The ISSN network advocates some educational action towards authors, editors and publishers to improve the quality of publications.