Online Serial Publications

Conditions for the assignment of an ISSN

An online serial may be assigned an ISSN if its publisher is based in the territory of the Czech Republic.The Czech ISSN National Centre has been given full authority to assign or not assign an ISSN by the International ISSN Centre.

ISSNs are assigned to serials/publications that are:

• Published periodically under the same title, with no predetermined end date for publication
• Issued in parts, either with numerical or chronological markings, or in the form of an editorially-updated web page containing the full-text of articles.
• New articles must be added with a definite, predetermined periodicity and each article must be marked with the date it was published on the web
• Accessible in an archive of full-text articles (start of publication to present)
• When submitting an ISSN request, the pages must be fully functional (i.e., full of content)
• The name/title of the publisher and contact information for the editorial office must be stated on the pages

If the publication is concurrently issued in two and more different formats, each format will be assigned its own ISSN

Some online serials cannot be assigned an ISSN, including:

• Personal, advertising and publicity web pages
• Pages that primarily describe products or goods and services; catalogs; gambling and music portals and similar portals; web logs; "diaries"; online bulletins for communities, towns and schools and other sources containing information aimed at a narrow audience of visitors
• For now, these sources are not a priority for the ISSN network
• Sources that only contain abstracts (annotations) of articles without access to their full-text or that largely refer to other pages
• Sources that are suspected of fulfilling the definition of § 191, 355 and 356 of the Criminal Code (act No. 40/2009 Coll.)

Other items of note

There is no fee for an ISSN assignment.

The bibliographic description of the documents and resources that have been assigned an ISSN are stored in the Czech national ISSN database, which is a part of the international ISSN Register.

The publisher/editor is therefore obliged to adhere to the following rules established by the ISSN system:

• An ISSN is inseperably linked to the name of the online serial. This name must therefore be explicitly displayed on the entry page of the resource. If the title is changed  at any point during the serial's publishing history, it requires a new ISSN
• The ISSN should be placed near the title; contingently in the section with publisher information
• All changes to a publication (change of name, change of URL, change of publisher, termination of publishing, etc.) require that the publisher register the change with the Czech ISSN National Centre
• We recommended the ISSN be displayed in source code