We consulted with the community about the metadata we collect. The responses are helping us to ensure that DOAJ is up-to-date and meets the needs of its users. We will remove some links, we will remove some questions, and we are considering better support for some metadata elements. We will retire the DOAJ Seal at the end of March 2025. This is Part Two of a two-part blog post. Go to Part One.
Retiring the Seal
A significant finding from the survey is that the Seal is widely misunderstood and misused by the community and this confirms our concerns that it is no longer serving its original purpose.
The Seal was introduced in 2014 to encourage journals to strive for best practices centred on content findability and usability. Initially, it was highly effective, with the criteria pushing journals to engage with publishing best practices:
- Sherpa/Romeo suddenly had a queue of journals waiting to register their self-archiving policy.
- Between 2013 and 2018, the percentage of DOAJ-indexed journals without DOIs decreased from 55% to 33%.
- Today, just under 60% of all DOAJ-indexed journals allow authors to retain all rights.
- We now hold metadata for 10,561,701 indexed articles.
By 2015, it had become apparent that the Seal was also causing confusion. We heard of publishers and editors who didn’t want to submit a journal application until their journal was compliant for the Seal. Furthermore, we had unintentionally created a journal ranking system, which goes against our mission of giving equal visibility to all journals regardless of discipline, geography and language. Over time, due to the nature of the criteria, it became clear the Seal was easier to achieve for better-resourced journals: as of today, only 1683 (7.9%) journals have the Seal, and of those, 88% come from the economic North and larger commercial publishers.* The results from the survey showed that the community associates the Seal with high editorial quality and prestige and some even use the Seal as a yardstick of whether they should access or recommend the journal or not.
There are other best practices relevant to today’s open scholarship arena and our vision of an equitable and diverse scholarly ecosystem. Hence, we plan to introduce a series of journal labels that highlight a new set of equitable journal attributes. Two examples are Diamond and that the author retains all rights and others are being considered.
We will retire the Seal by the end of March 2025. This means it will no longer be visible on our site or in our metadata. Later this month, we will publish more detailed information and a timeline.
As always, if you have any questions on these two blog posts or the slides, leave a comment or get in touch.
*Calculated by removing journals from low and middle-income countries from the total.
