Myth-busting: article content will appear in DOAJ once a journal is accepted for indexing

This is a myth.

Unlike some other indexing services, if a journal is accepted into DOAJ, we won’t automatically go and collect published content. Publishers have to send the content to us, either via our API or as XML.

Getting a journal accepted into DOAJ is a great feeling and it ensures that the metadata about your journal, its practices and publishing qualities will be integrated into many other discovery services. However, there is one extra step which should be done to really improve your journal’s impact: article metadata should be uploaded to us.

DOAJ has never gone out and collected metadata from journal websites and we have always relied on publishers providing it to us. The reason for this is simple: we simply don’t have the resources to build the many integrations that would be needed to pull published content from the thousands of journals in DOAJ.

JSON or XML, manual or automated?

There are several ways in which metadata can be provided to us, some of them more automated than others:

1. Our API allows publishers to connect to DOAJ and send us JSON. This is highly automated.
2. Publishers on the OJS platform–of which there are many with journals in DOAJ–are able to use a DOAJ XML plugin that the good people at PKP have created. This is semi-automated.
3. There is an option to upload XML to us via your DOAJ account. You don’t need to upload one article at a time. You can upload as many as you like in one file, as long as the file is less than 250Mb. And you can send us DOAJ XML or Crossref XML.
4. You can use our article metadata input form and input the article metadata by hand.

If your journal is part of a larger publishing platform which provides discovery services to you, ask them what options they can offer for getting your article metadata into DOAJ.

Any questions, or if you need help with sending us your metadata, leave a comment here.