2014 Charleston Library Conference

ROAD, the Directory of Open Access scholarly Resources, was launched by the ISSN International Centre in December 2013 with the support of the Communication and Information Sector of UNESCO. This new directory aims to give an overview of the production of OA resources worldwide covering all those resources that can be identified by an ISSN such as, journals, conference proceedings, monographic series and academic repositories.  The primary goals of ROAD can be described as:

• The provision of statistical information of OA resources for example subject coverage, geographical coverage, where OA is being published and by whom.
• The service also aims to help users whether they are students and researchers, public bodies in charge of the funding and evaluation of the research or journalists, librarians and information scientists to determine the coverage of OA resources by indexing and abstracting services and to know, when appropriate, the ranking of these resources by journal indicators. Enabling people to select OA resources of good quality.

ROAD is a free and multidisciplinary database which is based on ISSN bibliographic records and produced in conjunction with a number of partners (Scopus, Linguistics Abstracts, EconLit, DOAJ, Medline, SNIP, SJR...) who share their coverage lists with the ISSN International Centre. Their data is subsequently used to enrich the records in ROAD.  Currently available as a beta version (http://road.issn.org), ROAD will switch to a full service at the end of 2014.

The presentation will explain the origins of the project (recurring questions about the quality of OA resources and about the role of the ISSN as an identifier, UNESCO’s need for statistics about OA in the world), the target audience and the use cases, the main features of the service and also the role of the ISSN as a matching key for gathering information taken from various sources. It will also explain the role of ROAD as a "laboratory" for further ISSN projects, in particular for exposing ISSN records as linked data.

The ISSN International Centre is an intergovernmental organization responsible for maintaining and publishing the ISSN International Register, the reference bibliographic database for the identification of serials and continuing resources. It is also the coordinator of the 88 National Centres charged to identify serials worldwide.

The Communication and Information Sector (CI) of UNESCO was established in its present form in 1990. Its programmes are rooted in UNESCO’s Constitution, which requires the Organization to promote the “free flow of ideas by word and image.”