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:
- Is the question needed to determine a journal’s inclusion in DOAJ?
- Does the question text ask exactly what we mean to ask?
- Does the question’s functionality allow for the correct answers to be collected?
- Is the question redundant after the functional upgrade?
- 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:
- 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 Some of the questions labelled for removal are outdated; for some of them, we check the information anyway so don’t need to ask for it on the form.
- 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.
It’s Great…!
Unification of author names and persistent identifiers of journal articles would be an essential component for the Source Journals covered in DOAJ.
Regards
Jiban K. Pal
Thank you! It’s very good to give a hard look to the application form fields and the data model, because DOAJ has ambitious goals and the application form must not raise unnecessary barriers.
I have some experience performing rather advanced DOAJ searches to surface journals people may want to use and importing DOAJ data into Wikidata. From this background, I have some comments on fields 8, 32, 33.
8) I agree that this doesn’t need to be asked and updated manually, but it’s important for authors and other users to know whether a journal uses free/libre and open source software or not. If you an author, this is often the easiest way to make sure that the content will keep being accessible in certain ways, if you care about it. If you are a reviewer and you are looking for a journal where to volunteer, you may also like to use a software you know and like (or to avoid one you hate). So, please keep either a binary FLOSS/proprietary, or an option from a closed list (OJS, Janeway, ARPHA, you name it), fetched automatically.
32) This field is currently hard to use, but the information would be valuable if reliable. There’s some discussion at . Please engage to find out where we can keep this sort of information for everyone to share.
33) This is a bit like 8). The data currently contained is often of little use, but the authors may be interested in knowing whether the journal produces JATS or other machine-readable output. Knowing that a journal handles more than doc and PDF is often a proxy for knowing whether they have a decent full-text handling system (cf. format-free journals https://asntech.github.io/format-free-journals/ ) or they live in the middle ages like most of the giant publishers.
Hi Nemobis, thank you for your valuable feedback! What was the link you meant to provide for Q 32? ‘There’s some discussion at .’
Oh sorry, eaten by pseudo-HTML markers: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:WikiProject_Periodicals#Tables_with_information_on_periodical_copyright_and_free_issue_availability