DOAJ constantly reviews existing records in DOAJ to ensure that they meet DOAJ criteria, particularly those with the Seal.

Recently 1432 journals in DOAJ had the Seal. Today that number is 1339. Journals that have been awarded the Seal adhere to outstanding best practice and meet to our 7 carefully chosen criteria. These criteria are indicators of high commitment to open access best practices.

In the last few weeks, we performed an in-depth review of the journals with the Seal to check they still comply with these criteria. After the review, we found out that 45 of the journals no longer met one or more of the criteria. We contacted all the journals in this situation and we are happy to communicate that we have already restored some of the Seals.

In general, the question that most journals failed on was criterium 3: “Provide article level metadata to DOAJ (Question 29). ‘No’ or failure to provide metadata within 3 months do not qualify for the Seal.” We realise that the constant supply of article metadata to DOAJ can be tricky but there are tools to help you, and soon we will be adding support for Crossref XML.

Remember: if your journal has the Seal you MUST keep article metadata up to date in DOAJ!