In the world of open access publishing, DOAJ is a trusted cornerstone, facilitating the free flow of knowledge and advancing scholarly communication. In pursuit of long-term sustainability for our services, we’re launching a transparent and streamlined model for publishers to support DOAJ from 2024 onwards.
Most of DOAJ’s financial support comes from libraries, supplemented by contributions from publishers. We are proud to provide a valuable and essential service to publishers and grateful to those organisations within our community that support our mission and contribute to our operational costs. Our metadata and services can only remain open and free if those who can contribute do so.
We recently shared our new library supporter model, which was a direct outcome of our work on sustainability earlier this year, with the help of Research Consulting. This blog post outlined the challenges we face as an organisation as the number of journals applying for indexing continues growing and the publishing world develops new open access models. Our new (and for the first time) publicly available publisher model is another outcome of that work.
We are pleased to share our revised and simplified model for publisher support and benefits. The model is based on the principle of fair contribution, including rates for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and a pricing structure to enable community-led, no/low-APC (Article Processing Charge) publishers to join our community of supporters and contribute to our sustainability.
While there are risks in sharing potentially commercially sensitive information in this way, we’re driven by the principles of openness and transparency in alignment with our adoption of POSI. In particular, our decision was prompted by last year’s self-assessment against the FOREST framework‘s values of transparency and principles of consistent and clear pricing. This transparency underscores our commitment to open dialogue and sustainable practices that will shape the future of DOAJ and the broader academic community.
We hope that our new model will encourage more publishers to support us. We urgently require more funding to enable us to manage the growing number of journals within our current turnaround times, maintain and improve our metadata to aid discovery of our indexed journals, and protect the reputation of journals within the index by keeping out questionable journals.
In the dynamic landscape of open access publishing, DOAJ’s commitment remains steadfast. By overhauling and publishing our supporter model openly, we’re inviting the community of open access publishers to stand alongside us in shaping the future of scholarly communication – one that’s open, global and trusted.
