ROAD, the Directory of Open Access scholarly Resources, is a service offered by the ISSN International Centre with the support of the Communication and Information Sector of UNESCO. Launched as a beta version on 16th December 2013,
ROAD provides a free access to a subset of the ISSN Register (1,7 millions of bibliographic records, available on subscription, http://www.issn.org/en/understanding-the-issn/the-issn-international-register/). This subset comprises bibliographic records which describe scholarly resources in Open Access which have been assigned an ISSN by the ISSN Network : journals, conference proceedings and academic repositories. ROAD records are also downloadable as a MARC XML dump and will be available as RDF triples in 2014.
The bibliographic records are enriched, when appropriate, by metadata about the coverage of the resources by indexing, abstracting, citation databases, registries and journal indicators.
ROAD serves four major purposes :
- It provides a single access point to different types of online scholarly resources published worldwide and freely available.
- It also provides information about the quality and prominence of OA resources, or at least the criteria they meet, by indicating by what services or journal indicators they are covered
- as such, and once the coverage of ROAD is developed, to give an overview of the Open Access scholarly production worldwide (for statistics purposes for instance)
- ROAD demonstrate new ways of using the ISSN for compiling information from various sources.
Follow the link to search the ROAD Resources
