Press release
24 June 2021, Chicago – The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is delighted to be entering into a new agreement with the NorthEast Research Libraries Consortium (NERL) and the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) in the United States. The arrangement will allow for greater support to DOAJ from the more than 300 members of the two consortia.
As a free and independent database, DOAJ indexes over 16,500 peer-reviewed open access journals from around the world. Under the new partnership both consortia will be able to offer support for DOAJ to their members at a substantial discount.
NERL and CRL include among their membership the majority of US universities that are designated in the Carnegie Classifications as doctoral universities with high or very high research activity. Providing a smooth path for these institutions to provide support for DOAJ will help create a sustainable crowd-funding system, channeling funds directly to the activities of DOAJ.
NERL-affiliated institutions produce an estimated 10-12% of the most important and impactful scholarly research in the world. CRL’s community of more than 200 institutions in Canada and the United States with affiliates across the globe work together to advance solutions to sustain an open knowledge ecosystem. Today’s announcement enables the NERL and CRL consortia to stand alongside the many other consortia in the USA supporting sustainable open access publishing models through DOAJ.
“Open access is key to an equitable and sustainable future of the global research world and the advancement of knowledge. We are delighted to be partnering with NERL and CRL, this announcement comes at a critical moment in the USA, as collective support builds for open access and DOAJ,” said Lars Bjørnshauge, DOAJ Founder and Managing Director.
“DOAJ dovetails very well with NERL’s core values of Transparency, Sustainability, Equity, Reproducibility, and Flexibility. NERL is pleased to be partnering with both CRL and DOAJ to promote this endeavor,” commented Christine Stamison, Director of NERL.
“DOAJ’s infrastructure of enabling open knowledge sharing is consistent with CRL’s values of supporting the global community of researchers, librarians, archivists, publishers, and others to promote a resource environment where access to information is widely available for the benefit of all” stated James Simon, CRL’s Director of Collections and Partnerships.
An increased demand for vetted, high-quality online academic research, coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic, has highlighted the critical importance of support for essential library infrastructure services such as DOAJ.
About NERL
The NERL Consortium consists of a core group of 30 of the most research-intensive institutions in North America. It is a national leader in negotiated licensing whose mission is to serve as an advocate for the collective power and influence of libraries and their parent institutions. NERL is based at the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) in Chicago.
About CRL
The Center for Research Libraries is an international consortium of university, college, and independent research libraries collectively building, stewarding, and sharing a wealth of resource materials from all world regions to support inspired research and teaching. CRL’s deep and diverse collections are shaped by specialists at major U.S. and Canadian research universities, who work together to identify and preserve collections and content, to ensure its long-term integrity and accessibility to researchers worldwide.
About DOAJ
DOAJ is a community curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer reviewed journals. DOAJ deploys more than one hundred carefully selected volunteers from among the community of library and other academic disciplines to assist in the curation of open access journals. This independent database contains over 15,000 peer-reviewed open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities. DOAJ is financially supported worldwide by libraries, publishers and other like-minded organizations. DOAJ services (including the evaluation of journals) are free for all, and all data provided by DOAJ are harvestable via OAI/PMH and the API. See https://doaj.org/ for more information.
3 Comments