COVID-19

Possible delay, due to COVID-19, to publishers’ ISSN requests via national ISSN centres

An important note from this month’s ISSN newsletter. I would urge publishers to sign up to the newsletter if you haven’t already done so.

DOAJ is taking the information below into account when reviewing applications. In particular, we know that applications from Argentina, Colombia, United Kingdom, Luxemburg, Nigeria, Philippines, Senegal, Slovakia might be affected. Applications from this country which contain ISSNs which are not confirmed or registered will be placed on hold instead of being rejected.

Note to publishers requesting ISSN assignments from the ISSN Network
Due to the COVID-19 global outbreak and health and social measures imposed by several national authorities, ISSN National Centres and their hosting institutions may encounter technical and operational issues. This particular situation may have an impact on the timely management of publishers’ ISSN requests and ISSN assignments. Unfortunately, the ISSN International Centre cannot currently replace impacted ISSN National Centres and manage all ISSN requests and assignments. If ISSN National Centres and their hosting institutions are temporarily closed due to this crisis, the ISSN International Centre invites publishers to be patient and renew their requests regularly. We thank you for your understanding.

COVID-19: turnaround times may be affected

As with most organisations, COVID-19 is having an effect on DOAJ. Although we are an organisation without physical offices (virtual, already remote-working and Cloud-based), our team members and volunteers are all affected in real ways.

This means that we may take longer than usual to process applications. Many applications are processed in under 3 months but this may increase over the coming weeks. We ask you to be patient.

If you are a publisher waiting to hear from us about an application, the standard rules still apply:

  • do not email for a status update if you submitted your application less than 3 months ago.
  • before you contact us, check that emails from us aren’t in your spam folder. (Remember that our volunteers will email from their own email addresses and not DOAJ ones.)
  • always contact us using the Contact Us form and include the journal title and ISSN(s).

On behalf of everyone at DOAJ and all our volunteers, I’d like to thank you for your understanding but, more importantly, take great care of yourselves in these times of uncertainty.

Dom Mitchell
DOAJ Operations Manager