Below is a fact sheet which gives context to the pricing for 2021. It includes an update on what we have achieved recently and what we are hoping to do.
We believe that, if enough organisations can support DOAJ at costs which are comparable to a single journal subscription, we can achieve broad financial support that ensures alignment to the interests of those supporting DOAJ. We always provide an option for libraries to donate an amount of their choosing.
Every contribution is appreciated.
We are changing the way that we refer to organisations that financially support DOAJ.
In the past, we have referred to you as “members” but DOAJ is not strictly a membership organisation. From now on, we will refer to you as DOAJ Supporters.
The DOAJ Supporter contributions for 2021
There are two options:
- Annual Basic Supporter contribution:
- £750/€825/$975 for large institutions[1]
- £375/€413/$488 for small institutions
- Annual Sustaining Supporter contribution[2]
- £3000/€3300/$3900 for large institutions
- £1500/€1650/$1950 for small institutions
A 30% discount is available, on both options, for supporters signing up via their consortium. There is an additional 15% discount available for 3-year (three) commitments with payment upfront.
Please refer to the pricing table (PDF) for a full breakdown of all the options. The information is also available on our website.
We are operating at a higher capacity, with greater editorial efficiency and maintaining the same high standard that the community expects of us
As the efforts to transition to scholarly publishing where open access is the default continue to bear fruit, this means that DOAJ will have a larger and larger work-load over the coming years. We are putting increased attention on becoming more efficient and educating our publisher partners on ways in which they can make the process of integrating DOAJ into their work-flows more efficient. Some of the increase inevitably means investments in our capacity.
- The average number of applications received per month in 2020 was 713, a 43% increase since January 2018
- There has been a 50% increase in journals indexed in the Directory since September 2017.
- The mean processing time for new applications is down to just two months.
- There has been a 100% increase in article metadata records sent to DOAJ since September 2017.
Greater editorial efficiency has been achieved by:
- The introduction of a Triage function, removing poor quality applications (up to 50% of all applications) before they reach our Editorial Team.
- The implementation of workflows for multi-journal publishers, increasing efficiency for large numbers of journals.
We are making it easier to submit an application
Our new website will launch in November, with improved user experience, specifically addressing accessibility, making it available to all users, regardless of ability, technology or location.
We have rewritten our criteria in plain English. We separated the Basic criteria from the Seal criteria and are more transparent about our requirements for special types of journals.
A simplified and more intuitive application form will allow applicants to save their progress and review answers before submission.
We are investing time and attention to ensure that DOAJ becomes more inclusive and more diverse
DOAJ contains a more diverse set of peer-reviewed, open access journals than any other database. We achieve this by:
- assisting minority groups of journals, eg non-English language journals in the Arts & Humanities, to be listed.
- creating strategic partnerships with organisations representing these groups, where DOAJ provides training, advice and materials, generating new applications and an acceptance rate of 95%.
- a dedicated focus on internationalisation by translating our documentation and through offering the website in local languages.
- extending our successful ambassador program to new territories: Indonesia, Japan, Korea, and North America.
DOAJ is a signatory of the Helsinki Initiative which encourages multilingualism in research and scholarly communication.
Governance
We have stable governance through our Advisory Board and Council, allowing for greater input from the stakeholder groups that support us. (DOAJ Supporters are eligible to nominate candidates for these.)
DOAJ and discovery
We continue to increase the recency and accuracy of all the metadata in DOAJ, through a combination of automatic and manual checks, and updates by us and the publishers. It is increasingly important for open access journals to be indexed in DOAJ as it increases their discoverability and visibility around the world.
In 2021/22 DOAJ will work with all the major discovery services to find out how we can maximise DOAJ-indexed journals’ presence in their systems.
We have a variety of ways, from APIs to widgets, in which DOAJ metadata can be integrated into different services, or through which metadata can be sent to us. Many of those are new since 2016. They are heavily used and require technical support and maintenance.
We have also established closer working relationships with key open access/open science infrastructures, such as Redalyc, Scielo, PKP, ISSN ROAD, Unesco, Research4Life, and have a greater reach throughout more territories than ever before.
Finally
DOAJ is an organization which is rooted by its governance and funding structures to libraries and library organizations. The benefit of this is that DOAJ is naturally inclined to take the initiative in pressing for the interests of libraries when publishers, or groups of publishers, come up with “innovations”, such as hybrid, which only benefit themselves, or when they fail to see the importance of paying attention to inclusion and the elimination of barriers, such as access, to the scholarly record.
[1] This is a 39% increase on the Basic Supporter Contribution for 2020.
[2] The Sustaining Supporter Contribution is based on a 19% reduction on the contributions originally recommended in 2018-19 by SCOSS
