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Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei edited this page Nov 22, 2023 · 5 revisions

The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a numeric commercial book identifier that is intended to be unique.

Building on work from Grimme et al. 2019, the COPIM WP5 Scoping Report notes that ISBNs

"are certainly not PIDs and multiple ISBNs can exist for the same work, print, digital, vendor editions etc., but as noted above, publishers continue to rely on them instead of the DOI. Grimme et al. comment “that ISBNs were designed as retail identifiers” and this creates an issue for OA as there is no incentive for a retailer to distribute the OA version because there is no sales commission on the OA version. This is despite evidence to suggest that there is no impact on sales, and in some cases sales more increase." Scoping Report, 2021

Publishers purchase or receive ISBNs from an affiliate of the International ISBN Agency, such as:

A List of National Agencies is provided via Wikipedia.

The Thoth Wiki has been developed in the context of the COPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) project. Individual contributions to the wiki have been made by Tim Elfenbein, Rupert Gatti, Ross Higman, Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, Tobias Steiner and Hannah Hillen under the general editorship of Van Gerven Oei. All data are available under a CC-BY 4.0 license.

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