The ISSN for Online Publications

As well as print publications, the ISSN can be assigned to continuing resources published online. Online publications assigned an ISSN are catalogued both in the Finnish national bibliography and the international ISSN Portal database. Because the serial records in the ISSN Portal are hyperlinked to the publications themselves, we recommend that the URL of your publication's first display is kept as permanent as possible.

The same ISSN is used for different formats (PDF, HTML) of the same online publication. If there is a paper version of that publication, it will be assigned a separate ISSN.

ISSN guidelines

The Finnish National ISSN Centre assigns ISSNs to online journals and series in a traditional form (i.e. separate issues/volumes with a common title) as well as to integrating resources that are updated on a continuous basis, e.g. article databases (fulltext databases) or news services (including self-written/edited material).

However, the following resources are not assigned ISSNs at this time:
- Private weblogs or chatsites
- Portals (listing links only)
- Reference databases or catalogues
- Media services, including merely commercial advertisements and brochures

Please, notice that an ISSN will not be assigned to an online publication until it has been published. If the access to your online publication is restricted, we ask you to send us the first issue/version of the publication in PDF format.

The application of an ISSN must include the URL of the online publication. In order to ensure access to the publication also in the future, the ISSN Centre should be notified immediately of a change of URL. You can do this by submitting the electronic form: Change of URL.