DOAJ is very pleased to announce that its Reapplications project, which started in January 2015, is officially complete. Although the last reapplication was processed by the DOAJ Editorial Team at the end of October, some tidying-up remained to be done: a few discontinued journals; a few which had changed title; and a few for which we had no reapplication. In total, the DOAJ Editorial Team processed 6359 submitted reapplications, of which 2058 were rejected. A further 2860 journals were removed from the database for failing to submit a reapplication at all. In total over 40% of the journals were culled from the database.
All the journals which are now listed in the database have been reviewed under DOAJ’s stricter criteria. 99% of the journal records are as current as mid-2015. A small fraction are slightly older, from 2014.
Now that the Reapplications project is complete, DOAJ will work with its technical partners, Cottage Labs, to develop a system whereby publishers can submit updates to their journal records, automating a time-consuming process which distracts the editorial team from reviewing new applications. We will write more here when we have something to share.
