Month: April 2019

Swiss consortium pledges 216,000 Eur to DOAJ and SHERPA/RoMEO

We are delighted to announce that the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries, comprising sixteen libraries and the Swiss National Science Foundation, is the third national consortium to commit to the SCOSS initiative.

swissuniversities, the Rectors’ Conference of Swiss Higher Education Institutions, contributes approximately 50% of the total costs in the framework of the Swiss National Strategy for Open Access.

Thank you very much for your support!

We’ve added 2 new columns to the journal CSV.

In a series of enhancements to article metadata, we have released the third today.*

If you are familiar with DOAJ metadata then you probably already know that you can download a CSV file which contains the journal-level metadata for all the journals in DOAJ. It is updated every 30 minutes and is probably one of the most popular metadata services we have. It is certainly the best way to get an overview of all the journals in DOAJ.

Today, we’ve released a new version of that file which adds two new columns to it: the number of article records added to a journal in DOAJ and the date that the last article was added. (Columns BF and BG respectively)

The columns were added for two reasons:

  1. To give greater transparency to the information which we display on our homepage whcountere we state that 77% of the journals in DOAJ have article content loaded to them. This is slightly misleading because a journal which uploaded only 5 articles to us in 2013 is counted in that 77%. It is more interesting to know how recent the articles are from a particular title and how much content they have uploaded to us. While this information has always been available by selecting a journal ISSN and using the ‘articles’ filter in Search, we’ve never been able to show all the information in one place.I think that this development will be welcomed by all our users, especially publishers, librarians and those doing research on open access publishing developments.
  2. To allow us to review those journals which have been awarded the DOAJ Seal and remove that Seal from those which are not supplying article metadata to us. Supplying article metadata is one of the 7 Seal criteria and we haven’t yet been able to check, in an efficient manner, which journals are sticking to their promise. [In the application form, we ask if journals “intend” to supply metadata to us.] It’s going to take deeper analysis to get the final figure but I can see very quickly that 25 journals are going to lose their Seal.

I’d love to know what you think about this development so, as usual, do leave a comment or a question, or email me directly: dom@doaj.org.

P.S. The other development which I will post about soon is the removal of duplicated articles from the DOAJ database. More on that when I have it.

*The first and second developments are described in this blog post from February.

Why do we ask applicants to wait 6 months before they apply again?

When we reject an application, the rejection email contains details about why the application was not successful and usually tells applicants that they must wait 6 months before submitting another application for the same journal to us. Why do we do this?

One reason is that it is an attempt to discourage repeat applications, made in haste, and we get many, many of those. Repeat and duplicate applications clog up the system and take our dedicated volunteers and team away from those applications which need some time spent on them. (In 10 months alone, DOAJ received 221 duplicate applications!)

The other reason is that many of the recommendations that we make in our rejection emails, recommendations made to help journals meet our criteria, take time to implement. Adding words to a website isn’t enough. Changes need to be implemented properly, communicated to stakeholders, tested, and managed. Some changes will require other parties to implement changes too. This all takes time. After the 6 months has passed, we welcome a new application but we ask that the journal website demonstrates very clearly that our recommendations have been put into practice and our editorial team will be very careful to check that all our recommendations have been implemented.

Full DOAJ data dump now available

“We’re going to a hackathon and would love to work with DOAJ’s data! Do you have a dump of all DOAJ data?”

“Er, no. Sorry. I mean, we could get it for you but it will take a while. You could probably get it yourself if you know how to extract the JSON… When do you need it for?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Oh.”

We’ve had this conversation a few times. Or had requests from eager individuals and organisations who want to use the rich offerings of the DOAJ metadata. They’ve told us of the wonderful things they could do with the data (slicing, reporting, analysing, apps, databases, software…) and we’ve never been able to help them in good time. But now, we can….

Introducing, full data dumps of ALL the metadata in DOAJ, both journals and articles: https://doaj.org/public-data-dump

So what? Well, let me suggest to you why these are a good thing:

  • For the journal metadata, the CSV is really the only easy-to-use format. The journal data dump provides another way to do this.
  • The data dumps are updated weekly, so can keep you up-to-date on a reasonably short delay. (There is no change feed, just a full dump.)
  • When you want all of the DOAJ data for any reason, you can just take it!
  • Deep paging on the search API is no longer permitted – search is for search, not harvesting. The data dump allows you to harvest.
  • Whenever you want a subset of the DOAJ data, you can just download the data dump, then filter it locally for your needs. For example, if you are a publisher and you want to see all of your metadata in DOAJ, that is all in this data dump, and you can then filter by ISSN
  • You can use it to enhance any local data in your own system or database: you may have basic article metadata in your system, and you want to extend it with DOAJ metadata.
  • If you want to aggregate publications data from multiple sources, this is one way of quickly getting that information from DOAJ (versus using OAI-PMH).
  • These data dumps are more metadata rich than OAI-PMH
  • You may want to use the data for analysis or data mining or other forms of research, or hackathons.
  • The data dumps are also useful as a test dataset.

So there you have it. Despite a rather awkward name, data dumps are A Good Thing.

We’d love to know what you think, so do please leave a comment here or send us feedback: feedback@doaj.org