We’re almost there! Testing is underway and the final pieces are fitting into place.
REMEMBER: all journals that were accepted into DOAJ before March 2014 MUST reapply to remain indexed in the Directory.
Are you ready to reapply? We’ll be opening the reapplication system soon so it’s important that, if you are responsible for a journal or a group of journals in DOAJ, you have all the information that you will need readily available:
- Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sending out important communications about the reapplication process. To avoid our emails ending up in your Spam or Trash folders, please add our domain ‘doaj.org’ to your safelist. We may send emails from two or three different addresses so adding doaj.org is the most efficient way for you to ensure that you get your invitation to reapply.
- Keep an eye on our Twitter account @doajplus and our Facebook page. We send a lot of information out over these two channels. Don’t worry though: if you don’t use Facebook or Twitter, all our updates will appear here too.
- Make sure you know your username and password to log into DOAJ. You’ll need this to reapply. If you have forgotten your password, you can automatically reset it. If you don’t know your username, you will need to Contact Us so we can help you. If you try to reset your password and your email address is not recognised by our system, it is likely that someone else’s email address is associated with the journal(s)’ account. Contact us and we will locate the account you are looking for and add your email address.
- If you have more than one journal in DOAJ and you will be responsible for reapplying for all of them, log into your Publisher account at DOAJ and check that all the journals appear in the Your Journals tab. If they don’t then it is likely that they are split over two or more accounts. To make the reapplication process as smooth as possible, we would like to get those accounts merged soon so Contact us and we will help you. (Remember to give us your account number!)
- Read this documentation:
- If you have 10 or less journals in DOAJ: a guide on processing your reapplications and a question-by-question guide on how to complete a reapplication.
- If you have 11 or more journals in DOAJ: a guide on processing your multiple reapplications using a CSV file and a question-by-question guide on how to complete your CSV file.
Let me (Dom) know if you have any questions!
- Start to gather the information needed now. Even though you can’t actually submit any reapplications yet you can start to gather all the necessary information, using the documentation above as a guide. When the reapplication system opens, you’ll be able to log into your account and start reapplying right away!
We estimate that approximately 9700 out of the 10090 journals in DOAJ currently will need to reapply. That’s 99%. There’s a lot of work to be done. If you have questions, don’t hesitate to ask us for help. You can leave a comment here, use our Contact us page (link above), or get in touch via Twitter or Facebook. We’re here to help you!
CRYSTAL CLEAR CRITERIA PLEASE!
“… little information is provided about how the various criteria will be weighted, and it appears that the decisions will be substantially subjective.
(Anderson 2014)
“new [DOAJ] management will presumably need to remove some of the journals in its database. This would likely spark further guerrilla warfare, or at least angry exchanges and bad feeling. Moreover, it would still appear to leave OA publishers in an undesirable binary world of good and bad. Either they are in the DOAJ, or they are out of it. And since the DOAJ is a Western-based initiative, suspicions will surely remain that the process is discriminatory.” (Poynder 2013)
I worked on a List of Criteria for journals to get into DOAJ based on the Application Form.(Comment 2014-05-22) However, DOAJ in an email: “… we are in a difficult position re a list of basic criteria: if we published one, it would be open to abuse”.
Thanks to DOAJ for adding the section „What is the procedure for a journal being accepted into DOAJ?“ Thanks also for easing the wording in some places that sparked suspicion as expressed above. What is the process?
A)
To get into DOAJ the first hurdle is to pass the requirements in “What are the basic standards that a journal must meet for the application to be considered?”. “A journal must meet the following basic standards for an application to be considered. Meeting these standards does not guarantee a successful application.“ (http://doaj.org/faq#standards) Only after passing this test the Application Form will be looked at by DOAJ in more detail.
B)
Next is: “What is the procedure for a journal being accepted into DOAJ?” (http://doaj.org/faq#procedure) It says at the bottom: “We will also look for examples of Best Practice.“ No link is given, but „Best Practice“ seems to refer to „Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing“. (http://doaj.org/bestpractice) 16 points are given called „Principles of Transparency“. There are also the “Good practice guidelines for Open Access publishers”. (http://doaj.org/publishers)
Unfortunately, questions remain and remarks are necessary.
1.)
At the bottom of the „Principles of Transparency“ is the text „In the event that a member organization is found to have violated these best practices, … membership … may be … terminated.“
QUESTION: Who is a member of DOAJ? Who’s membership is terminated? Or, who is denied access? The publisher (with all its journals) or the single journal that applied?
2.)
“15. Archiving: A journal’s plan for electronic backup and preservation of access to the journal content”. According to an email from DOAJ this has to be understood like this: “We encourage all publishers to state their plan but if they are already executing that plan then they get the [DOAJ] Seal.”
REMARK: This means archiving is not mandatory. It is sufficient to have a plan that may lead in e.g. 5 years to some sort of archiving. For me not the correct interpretation of no 15!
3.)
a) „Quality: The journal must exercise quality control on submitted papers through an editor, [AND] editorial board AND a peer-review system.“ (http://doaj.org/faq#standards)
b) “The journal must have either an editor OR an editorial board“ (http://doaj.org/application/new)
QUESTION: What is required AND or OR? Note: The OR is exclusive.
4.)
Consider Comment 2014-11-26 (link below).
QUESTION: What can prevent a journal from getting into DOAJ with respect to Impact Factors?
5.)
„Applicants are simply encouraged to complete the form clearly and honestly. If you do not know the answer to a question, you can request help by contacting us.“ (http://doaj.org/application/new) DOAJ has not the time anymore to answer questions. It is also not efficient to answer so many questions.
REMARK: “Qustions are not Criteria!” One simple example should explain this: „10) Contact’s email address“. We know from Beall: Questionable is: „The publishers’ officers use email addresses that end in .gmail.com, yahoo.com some other free email supplier“. I can only guess that such a stupid criterion is not applied at DOAJ, but I DO NOT KNOW!
6.)
DOAJ refused to look at the application and asked a publisher to show “transparency and openness”.
QUESTION: What kind of transparency? „Principles of Transparency“ or “Transparent editorial boards”? (http://doaj.org/publishers) A physical address? A phone number? The business plan online? (Beall) The tax declaration online? (Beall) DOAJ: If you want to help, more details please! What is missing?
7.)
A publisher was asked to show OASPA membership first before the application can be looked at!
QUESTION: DOAJ, can you decide on your own?
CRYSTAL CLEAR CRITERIA PLEASE! NO DISCRIMINATION PLEASE!
REFERENCES
ANDERSON, Rick, 2014: Housecleaning at the Directory of Open Access Journals. In: The Scholarly Kitchen. 14.08.2014 http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/08/14/housecleaning-at-the-directory-of-open-access-journals/
COMMENT from 2014-05-22: https://doajournals.wordpress.com/2014/05/22/doaj-publishes-lists-of-journals-removed-and-added/comment-page-1/#comment-2
COMMENT from 2014-11-26: http://doajournals.wordpress.com/2014/11/26/update-on-our-reapplication-process/comment-page-1/#comment-154
POYNDER, Richard, 2013: The OA Interviews: Ashry Aly of Ashdin Publishing. 2013-01-17. Available from: http://poynder.blogspot.de/2013/01/the-oa-interviews-ashry-aly-of-ashdin.html