National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR) came into existence   on 30 September 2002 with the merger of National Institute of Science Communication (NISCOM) and Indian National Scientific Documentation Centre (INSDOC).  Now NISCAIR is an institute capable of serving the society using modern IT infrastructure in a more effective manner and taking up new ventures in the field of science communication, dissemination and S&T information management systems and services. To increase visibility of NISCAIR journals, all the journals are registered with Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR), Google Analytics and all of the prominent search engines. NISCAIR is the National Centre of the ISSN International Centre for assigning ISSN numbers for serials published in India. NISCAIR exchanges publications with over 150 institutions in 44 countries in the world.

NISCAIR brings out two abstracting journals namely Indian Science Abstracts (ISA) and Medicinal and Aromatic Plants Abstracts (MAPA). ISA is a fortnightly abstracting journal reporting current Indian scientific work published in India and abroad. MAPA is a bimonthly abstracting journal covering world literature on agronomy, botany, pharmacognosy, and biological activities of medicinal and aromatic plants by scanning around 600 journals.