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The Italian ISSN Centre participates in ROAD, the world directory of the scientific/academic open access serials, implemented by the ISSN Network and supported by UNESCO Communication and Information sector. In the directory are listed periodicals, series, set of conference proceedings, academic repositories, and scientific blog.

The ROAD database - coordinated by the International Centre and increased thanks to the bibliographic records of the serials of each participating ISSN Centre - was inaugurated in December 2013, and two years after its start it had more than twelve thousand titles.

The directory plays a key role in all survey and reconnaissance activities - including statistics -  related to the academy and research global world. It already exhibits in homepage a series of aggregated findings (constantly updated totals by geographic, typological and disciplinary macroareas) and allows all the traditional bibliographic searches, even very complex, within different subsets (eg., within the production of a single country, or in a specific editorial kind).

The ROAD records can be downloaded and freely reused (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Public License). ROAD, like all dynamic database, constantly updates the bibliographic data for the serials when they present substantial changes: for example, are updated URLs of resources, or the names of responsible corporate authors. It is then also possible, of course, that a recorded title is removed from ROAD if the publication does not follow the more open access policy.

The Italian Centre has joined the ROAD project and reports the Italian serials that meet the requirements set by the International Centre:

1. to be a clear scientific publication, based on the contents, the target audience at which it is directed, the declared editorial policy, the liability of the authorial Organization, etc.
2. open access admission to the objectively verifiable contents,
3. minimum presence of five articles for issue (in the case where the serial is a periodical / journal).

The detection activity is constant, and is usually carried out on the publications for which is presented the ISSN assignment request; The Centre, however, also provides for reporting whenever possible ROAD publications already identified by ISSN in previous years at the beginning of the project but that still meet today the requirements. The Centre therefore cooperates with the International Centre to increase the wealth and retrospectivity of ROAD, and helps in a more lasting way to define the overview of the Italian scientific publishing open access, providing a diachronic and historical dimension in addition to the main purpose of the project consisting in the contemporary information recording.

ROAD is available at: http://road.issn.org

If you want to signal an Italian serial ROAD sent a message to us using this form: just indicate in ROAD, in the text and the title of the serial and its URL. The ISSN Centre will check for the requirements and will forward your report to the ISSN Network.

For more information please contact Dr. Flavia Cancedda