DOAJ is launching premium metadata services on 17th March 2026 to support the sustainability of our core services. This means we will charge some users for access to the most up-to-date version of our metadata while ensuring that our core metadata services remain open to all. As always, we will listen to the community for feedback and aim to make iterative improvements to the services.
DOAJ remains committed to keeping our core metadata services open, community‑owned, and freely accessible, even as we introduce new premium metadata services. These value‑added offerings are designed to support long‑term sustainability while preserving free access to all essential metadata functions.
It costs money to keep metadata services online and open. For example, in 2025, our API received 412 million hits. Maintaining response times, security levels, system stability, and uptime at those levels requires developers, infrastructure, stress testing, and monitoring, all of which carry costs. We expect costs in 2025 to be even higher, especially after the surge in AI-bot-related traffic. The community isn’t obliged to support us financially. Anything given is done so voluntarily. Where would we find the funds to keep us operational if that support were to stop?
Open metadata, particularly FAIR metadata, drives open-access scholarship and increases the visibility and impact of open access scholarship. Our unique open dataset is integral to many discovery, indexing and cataloguing services, as well as to research projects, language models and AI-assisted learning. Our metadata is so embedded in discovery systems that it’s sometimes invisible, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing! This is because, as an open infrastructure that has been around for more than 20 years, we have grown with the community and have always ensured our services are completely open. We have always been there, always been reliable, always trusted.
In 2023, Research Consulting conducted a sustainability review of DOAJ. It was a review of DOAJ’s perceived value in the open access scholarly publishing community through a sustainability lens. In other words, to what extent do the funds generously given by the community every year match the value of DOAJ and its services? The results were published in the LSE Blog on 5th September 2023 and highlighted the challenges of funding open infrastructures and how sustainable growth requires survival strategies.
One of the review’s conclusions was that monetising the large-scale commercial use of DOAJ’s metadata services could increase revenue, while striking that all-important balance between financial sustainability and adherence to our POSI principles to which we have recently recommitted. To this end, we will monetise the commercial use of our metadata while ensuring we don’t stem the flow of FAIR metadata to the global community.
About the Premium Metadata Services
From 17th March 2026, we will split some of our metadata services into two distinct groups. (See the table below.) Other players in the industry, such as our friends at OpenAlex, are hosting larger, faster APIs that contain our metadata, so rather than focussing on capacity, we’re focussing on timeliness and the value of accessing the most up-to-date version of our metadata.
Therefore, our new Premium Metadata Services are built around the most recent versions of our journal and article metadata. They will be available for a fee and as a supporter benefit, either as a group or on a service-by-service basis.
The regular metadata feeds will contain an older version of the metadata–one month old–and will be open to everyone.
This table summarises the Premium Metadata Services:
| Metadata service | Model | Recency |
| OAI-PMH | Open to all | Last month |
| Premium | As current as you can get | |
| Public Data Dump | Open to all | Last month |
| Premium | Daily updates | |
| Journal CSV | Open to all | Last month |
| Premium | As current as you can get |
All users will still be able to access the latest version of our metadata via our website search, our API, widgets, and our Atom feed, all of which remain completely open.
What is the price?
Pricing will be on a case-by-case basis, honouring previous agreements and relationships with our existing supporters. It would be unrealistic, inequitable and somewhat naive to assume everyone can pay the same for these services. We will ask some organisations to pay what they can afford. For other organisations, we will include pricing in the existing suggested support amounts. For others, we will offer a separate price for premium metadata services.
As always, waivers will be available for researchers and students from LMICs. We will also have generous and flexible rules for cases where fees cannot be paid or where we have pre-existing agreements with an individual or organisation. Any existing publisher supporter who wants access can be automatically upgraded for the current year by contacting us. All supporting libraries will have access to the most up-to-date metadata. Enquiries about this should be sent to Dominic Mitchell, dominic [at] doaj.org.
Importantly, we will monitor, assess, and adjust as we proceed.
Our promise to the community
With the introduction of the new premium metadata services, it’s worth emphasising our values and what remains unchanged.
We are committed to keeping DOAJ’s metadata open and available for, and owned by, the community. We have publicly declared this and are committed to doing so regularly.
Our core services are always open. We do not charge for:
- applications to be reviewed
- journals to be indexed
- metadata to be updated
- article metadata to be uploaded
- the community to use and search our index
By introducing new premium metadata services, we aim to ensure our sustainability through value-added offerings for our metadata users.
We promise to listen to feedback from the community, particularly those who ingest our metadata. We are open to consultation and will always reply to comments and suggestions.
