PRESS RELEASE
DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) and Érudit have entered into a partnership for a project aimed at encouraging and helping peer-reviewed open access (OA) journals disseminated on the erudit.org platform to be indexed in DOAJ.
DOAJ has set an international standard for peer-reviewed open access (OA) journals. Today, the index includes 14,450 journals from over 131 countries, publishing in 75 languages, demonstrating a regional and linguistic diversity of research. As a signatory of the Helsinki Initiative, DOAJ is working hard to ensure the indexation of more non-English-language journals as a way to emphasise the importance of research in all languages.
“From its launch in 2003, DOAJ has always had the ambition of being truly interdisciplinary and global in terms of geography, language, and scope. With all the DOAJ data being harvestable for free, including approximately 5 million pieces of article metadata, we give even the smaller journals global visibility. The data is picked up by organisations, leading search engines and discovery services all over the world, and we facilitate that by making it available in multiple ways,” says Lars Bjørnshauge, DOAJ Managing Director and Founder.
French, an official language in 29 countries around the world, was selected by DOAJ the ideal linguistic candidate to launch a collaborative project to attract more non-English-language journals. As a Canadian and non-commercial platform, Érudit brings together 220+ French-language and bilingual journals, with 97% of the content available in open access. The journals disseminated on the Érudit platform are small or medium-sized editorial structures, published by university presses, scholarly societies or other research organizations. The Érudit platform attracts 3 million visitors from 85 countries every year.
“This partnership with the DOAJ is a good way to recognize the quality of open access journals disseminated on Érudit and to increase their visibility, discoverability, and impact. We’re glad to contribute to the development of OA and to support a non-commercial system of scholarly communication by this partnership,” said Tanja Niemann, Érudit Executive Director.
DOAJ and Érudit will work together to facilitate the application process for French-language journals by communicating DOAJ criteria, translating instructions, and organising workshops. An important by-product of the project will be more DOAJ training and support materials in French, which will be useful in attracting more French-language journals from other parts of the world. The Pilot project will focus on fifty journals and run from March 2020 to December 2021.
Lars Bjørnshauge adds: “We are delighted to enter this partnership. By working directly with groups like Érudit on projects like this one, we see a 95% success rate among the applications that are eventually submitted, compared to the usual 50% from unsolicited applications. It’s a great thing for DOAJ to work with Érudit and to be in direct contact with the journal editors and publishers on the Érudit platform.”
For further information, contact:
Dominic Mitchell – DOAJ Operations Manager – dom@doaj.org
Gwendal Henry – Érudit Communication Officer – gwendal.henry@erudit.org
2 Comments