Month: Mar 2020

Heads up! Our API is changing.

The DOAJ is changing its application form. This means that there will be downstream implications across all of our metadata output channels, including the API.

A new version of the API will be released in Q3 2020. This new version will not be fully backwards compatible.

Those of you submitting applications via the API, or who are using the API for journals search and retrieval, will need to adjust your integrations.

Not all functions will be affected: for those of you who are uploading article metadata to us, nothing will change; there is nothing for you to do.

If you have any questions, please post them here.

Further announcements will happen here and on our Twitter feed.

Our application form is changing

The current application form is now 6 years’ old. It is very long. It needs an upgrade in terms of functionality and its content needs a review. A new form will go live in Q2 2020.

The editorial team and our UX designer have carefully reviewed each question using the following criteria:

  1. Is the question needed to determine a journal’s inclusion in DOAJ?
  2. Does the question text ask exactly what we mean to ask?
  3. Does the question’s functionality allow for the correct answers to be collected?
  4. Is the question redundant after the functional upgrade?
  5. Can the question text be reduced, simplified, made clearer in the context of the new UI?

The editorial team then considered if other questions needed to be added to the form. We will be adding three new questions, (none of which are part of the Basic Criteria for inclusion):

  • the country of the society/institution;
  • whether the journal allows for ORCID integration; and
  • whether the journals’ references adhere to the I4OC standards.

At this point, I’d like to underline two Very Important Things:

  1. Our form is changing, not our criteria. Some of the questions labelled for removal are outdated; for some of them, we check the information anyway so don’t need to ask for it on the form.
  2. Any additional changes that may be required for Plan S certification have no bearing on this work.

Once the new form goes live, journals will be encouraged to update their information with us as soon as possible.

From the form as it is today, the questions that are suggested for removal are:

Question number Question text
8 Platform, Host or Aggregator
9* Name of contact for this journal
10* Contact’s email address
11* Confirm contact’s email address
19 Amount (submission charges)
20 Currency (submission charges)
21 How many research and review articles did the journal publish in the last calendar year?
22 Enter the URL where this information can be found
27 Does the journal allow software/spiders to automatically crawl the journal content (also known as text mining)?
29 Does the journal provide, or intend to provide, article-level metadata to DOAJ?
30 Does the journal provide article download statistics?
31 Enter the URL where this information can be found
32 What was the first calendar year in which a complete volume of the journal provided online Open Access content to the Full Text of all articles? (Full Text may be provided as PDFs. Does not apply for new journals.)
33 Please indicate which formats of the full text are available
54** Will the journal allow the author(s) to retain publishing rights without restrictions?
55 Enter the URL where this information can be found
56* Your name (Applicant)
57* Your email address (Applicant)
58* Confirm your email address (Applicant)

*All applicants will need to sign in or register before they can submit an application, therefore these 6 questions become redundant.

**This question is being merged with the one before it and re-worded to: ‘Does the author(s) or their institution retain both full, unrestricted copyright and publishing rights?’

Once the new form goes live, the specific answers for those questions being removed will no longer be available to download.

We welcome the community’s feedback on these changes and look forward to discussing them with you.

The Keepers Registry is now available on the ISSN portal

This is a guest post by Gaëlle Bequet, Director of the ISSN International Centre. ISSN is a partner of DOAJ.

KeepersLogotype_BD

As of December 2019, the ISSN International Centre is the sole operator of the Keepers Registry. This service aggregates preservation metadata and ISSN descriptive metadata to report the archival status of digital journals. The Keepers Registry is now fully integrated with the ISSN Portal. The latter provides a complete and accurate overview of a serial title’s journey from initial publication to transfer of responsibility and to long-term preservation by archiving agencies. The ISSN Portal is indeed the authoritative database for serial title identification and tracking.

Both libraries and publishers want easy and persistent access to scholarly materials across the Internet. The shift from print to digital format for all types of continuing resources, particularly journals, and the need to archive not just digital serials but also ongoing ‘integrating resources’ is a challenge. Archiving agencies are addressing this challenge and supporting the Keepers Registry as a tool to monitor the archival status of digital content.

Craig Van Dyck, Executive Director of CLOCKSS, USA, posits that “The Keepers Registry performs several critical functions: exposing information about which scholarly journals are preserved, and which volumes, and by which preservation archives; providing a normalized platform for users to find the information, and for archives to integrate with; and a social structure for archives to come together to collaborate. Digital preservation is an evolving field, and collaboration is key to moving forward. The ISSN International Centre makes a lot of sense as a home for the Keepers Registry.”

The Keepers Registry collects preservation metadata, supplied on a regular basis by 13 archiving agencies globally. National libraries, non-profit organisations, academic consortia cooperate with the ISSN International Centre to disseminate up-to-date information about archived serial titles and titles at risk.

Jeffrey van der Hoeven, Head of the Digital Preservation department at the Nationale Bibliotheek van Nederland (KB), Netherlands, explains that “From the perspective of long-term preservation, the Keepers Registry fulfills an important role for KB in determining the integrity of its collection”.

Grant Hurley, Digital Preservation Librarian at Scholars Portal, Canada, states that “The Keepers Registry is a crucial component of our collective preservation ecosystem. Keepers Registry gives its stakeholders the ability to evaluate what materials are being preserved and by whom, and therefore, what materials may still be at risk. As a preservation service provider, Scholars Portal benefits from exposing its holdings data in a consistent and reliable way, which ensures its preservation practices are transparent and supports the trust of its user communities.”

Our partner archiving agencies are: Archaeology Data Service, British Library, Cariniana Network, CLOCKSS Archive, Global LOCKSS Network, HathiTrust, Library of Congress, National Digital Reservation Program China, National Library of the Netherlands, PKP Preservation Network, Portico, Scholars Portal, Swiss National Library.

Keepers Registry is available for free through the ISSN Portal.

For information about specific professional services or to join the Keepers Registry as an archiving agency, please contact the ISSN International Centre (Email: sales@issn.org)