One of DOAJ’s current focusses is Discovery and that means better integration with other services. DOAJ has a strategic partnership with ISSN International Centre. All journal pages in DOAJ now contain a link out to the journal record in the ISSN Portal.

DOAJ and ISSN have been working together for several years. ISSN grants us access to the ISSN Portal and DOAJ uses the information to verify that the applying journal has registered and fully confirmed its ISSN(s). DOAJ also partners with ISSN on some projects and we talk regularly to exchange information.

Something that we have been trying to do for a while is to establish a bidirectional link between the two databases and this is now a reality. ISSN already includes a link to the DOAJ record where it can find one. We have now added a link to the journal landing pages in DOAJ so that the ISSN links out to the corresponding entry at ISSN. We default to the electronic ISSN but on the rare occasion that only a Print ISSN is available, we use that instead.

A journal landing page displaying the new link out to the ISSN Portal

Integration with other databases is vital for DOAJ to maximise the discovery opportunities that we offer all publishers with journals in DOAJ. With clever linking and integration, the DOAJ platform and the data in it becomes even more discoverable. It’s also a way of DOAJ securing its place in the discovery chain. Furthermore, we hope that the links will drive more traffic to the ISSN Portal, a valuable resource.

We already integrated with Dimensions metrics badges on each article page and we are looking forward to integrating with more services over time.

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