Feature s‘An irreplaceable


Gaëlle Béquet, director of ISSN International Centre, outlines the work of the Keepers Registry – followed by interviews with four of its partner agencies


Keepers Registry (keepers.issn.org) is the service that aims to inform the community of librarians and publishers about the actions taken by archiving agencies across the globe to preserve titles of digitised and born-digital serial publications bearing an eISSN in order to promote long-term access to documentary resources, and thus consolidate scientific references for the world of research. Since 2008, the ISSN International


Centre (ISSN-IC) has been working with EDINA (University of Edinburgh) and Jisc to develop the Keepers Registry. In July 2019, when EDINA withdrew from the service due to a lack of funding, ISSN-IC’s governing board voted to approve that it could take over Keepers Registry as a natural extension of the ISSN Portal’s services. This strategic decision turns the ISSN


Portal (portal.issn.org) into an irreplaceable source of information about periodicals at all stages of their existence, from their creation and their identification by the ISSN Network, to their preservation by the partner archiving agencies. As of December last year, the ISSN Portal started hosting Keepers Registry with Archaeology Data Service (UK), British Library (UK), Cariniana Network (Brazil), CLOCKSS Archive (USA), Global LOCKSS Network (USA), HathiTrust (USA), Library of Congress (USA), National Digital Preservation Program (China), National Library of the Netherlands, PKP Preservation Network (Canada), Portico (USA), Scholars Portal (Canada), and the Swiss National Library contributing holdings data for digital serials. Despite challenging working conditions due to the pandemic, the ISSN-IC and


20 Research Information October/November 2020


ource of information’


Gaëlle Béquet


“Keepers Registry operates under the freemium model of the ISSN portal”


the ISSN Network have made remarkable progress with the Keepers Registry: by developing additional features to provide statistics about archived titles across agencies, by updating the ISSN Portal’s linked data formats to include data holdings for records describing archived digital titles, and by creating new records and assigning eISSN to resources for which so far only the printed version had been identified. The Keepers Registry features


prominently in the 2024 Strategy of ISSN-IC. We want to expand the range of archiving agencies and improve the geographical coverage of the service, as well as diversify the digital titles under custody. Geographical representativeness is an important issue: currently, only two archiving services are not based in North America or Europe. This tropism must be


mitigated by actively seeking partners on other continents and the ISSN-IC counts on the support of Unesco to broaden its outreach. The Keepers Registry operates under


the freemium model of the ISSN Portal, that combines free and fee-based services. In the coming months, ISSN- IC and its partner archiving agencies will consider and implement additional offerings, such as a referral service for publishers to identify suitable archiving agencies, an ISSN and title list submission that will allow users to check which titles are archived and those that are not. Another path to explore is how Keepers Registry can interoperate with Transfer (journaltransfer.issn.org), which monitors transfers of titles between publishers under the Transfer code of practice maintained by NISO. ISSN-IC and partner archiving agencies


are deeply committed to enhancing this essential infrastructure for researchers, publishers and librarians in the coming months. The implementation of the governance of Keepers Registry that will involve its sponsors and its users is the first phase of our development strategy.


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