Author: DOAJ

DOAJ gets its first sponsor from Mexico! | ¡DOAJ consigue su primer patrocinador de México!

 DOAJ has had excellent connections and representation throughout Latin America for many years, thanks to previous work by Redalyc, sponsorship from SciElo and, more recently, our fantastic DOAJ Latin America Ambassador. This week we welcome our first sponsor from Mexico: the Tecnológico de Monterrey.

This sponsorship is of great importance to both DOAJ and the open access movement throughout Latin America where open access publishing has been a de facto for many years. As Ivonne wrote in her blog piece: “DOAJ is committed to collaborate with publishers of this region in order to improve best practice, as well as openness for readers and for authors” and this sponsorship reflects the work we are doing there.

The institution is highly committed to open access and open science movements. They have a couple of institutional repositories, one of them specialized in open educational resources, and they also promote citizen science. Two of their journals are already indexed in DOAJ, we hope the rest will be listed soon.

We welcome Tecnológico de Monterrey as a DOAJ sponsor!

 

DOAJ ha tenido excelentes conexiones y representación en toda América Latina durante muchos años, gracias al trabajo previo de Redalyc, al patrocinio de Scielo, y más recientemente, a nuestra fantástica Embajadora Latinoamericana de DOAJ. Esta semana recibimos a nuestro primer patrocinador en México: el Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey.

 

Este patrocinio es de gran importancia tanto para el DOAJ como para el movimiento de acceso abierto en América Latina, donde la publicación en acceso abierto ha sido de facto durante muchos años. Como Ivonne escribió en su blog: “DOAJ se compromete a colaborar con los editores de esta región con el fin de mejorar las mejores prácticas, así como la apertura para los lectores y para los autores” y este patrocinio refleja el trabajo que estamos haciendo allí.

 

Esta institución está altamente comprometida con el acceso abierto y los movimientos científicos abiertos. Ellos tienen repositorios institucionales, uno de ellos especializado en recursos educativos abiertos y también promueven la ciencia ciudadana. Dos de sus revistas ya están indexadas en DOAJ, esperamos que el resto sea listado pronto.

 

¡Damos la bienvenida al Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey como patrocinador del DOAJ!

Increasing the impact of open access in Indonesia: a universities consortium and 3 new Ambassadors

Further to our last post about developments in Indonesia, important ties between Indonesia and DOAJ have now been established.

An ADRI consortium of more than 60 institutions has signed up as a DOAJ consortia member. The consortium is one of the biggest registered with DOAJ, reflected by the high amount of traffic and the number of new applications that DOAJ currently receives from Indonesia. We are absolutely delighted to have the consortium join us.

Furthermore, three new Ambassadors have been appointed. From 1st September 2017, the Ambassadors will start working on promoting DOAJ’s practices and standards, and Best Practices in Open Access publishing. This work has two goals: to improve the quality of Indonesia’s open access journals and to improve the quality of the applications submitted to DOAJ. The three appointed ambassadors are:

Dian Eka Indriani
Sudarmawan Samidi
Haris Rosdianto

Due to the scale of operations in Indonesia, we have also appointed 2 honorary Ambassadors: Professor Toho Cholik Mutohir (in Indonesian) and Abdul Wahid Maktub. Professor Mutohir is a lecturer at Surabaya State University and Abdul Wahid Maktub is Special Advisor to the Minister of Research, Technology and Higher Education of the Republic of Indonesia. Congratulations to you all. We are delighted to have you onboard and look forward to working with you.

The five new Ambassadors will work alongside the existing DOAJ Ambassadors from other territories and the DOAJ Team in Europe.

Indonesian Universities Consortium

adrilogo

Following the enrollment of ADRI, Indonesia, we are very pleased to announce that we have a consortium of Indonesian universities in the making.

Next week DOAJ will conduct a three days workshop in Bali, Indonesia to recruit Ambassadors in Indonesia. Indonesia comes in second  as users of the DOAJ, and we expect hundreds of journals to be listed in DOAJ in the future.

 

 

Three DOAJ journals win free indexing in ScienceOpen!

We recently partnered with ScienceOpen to help them to offer free indexing to Open Access journals with no APC, as part of our mission to enhance open scholarship. 

Last month, we recommended 10 journals to ScienceOpen so they could take part in the free indexing competition.

In the latest round of the free indexing competition, we are pleased to announce three new journals from across Europe that will be integrated into and promoted on SienceOpen platform. These are:

  • Management: Journal of Contemporary Management Issues, from Croatia
    • Published by the University of Split, this journal publishes articles from the Social Sciences, including topics in industries, land use, labour, and industrial management.
  • Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, from Spain
    • Published by the Universidad de La Laguna, this journal publishes articles in Spanish, Castilian, and English in the fields of Language and Literature, Linguistics, Communication, and the Mass Media.
  • Studia z Filologii Polskiej i Słowiańskiej, from Poland
    • Published by the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences, this journal publishes articles from the field of Linguistics in Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and English.

These join other recent successful applicants to the competition, and help to increase the visibility of important Open Access research.

If you run a free to publish Open Access journal, participate in the competition today and get indexed on ScienceOpen for free! See the guidelines for indexing here.

 

The Hungarian Library Consortium EISZ supports DOAJ!

We are extremely happy to welcome the Hungarian Library Consortium, EISZ as a member of DOAJ. 60 of the IESZ members are supporting DOAJ.
 
EISZ is the national library consortium of Hungary, operated in the Library and Information Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. EISZ coordinates the national license subscriptions of electronic journals, databases with full text as well as bibliographic contents and e-book collections. The mission is to provide high level services for the Hungarian research community through an effective and transparent collaboration with the universities, special and public libraries, governmental and healthcare institutions. 
Katalin Urban from EISZ says: “It is our main goal to support open access and for this reason we decided to support the Directory of Open Access Journals”.

DOAJ EDITORS ON THE EFFECTS OF THE NEW DOAJ CRITERIA

This is a guest post by Andrea Marchitelli, Paola Galimberti and Andrea Bollini, who write about their experience of being DOAJ editors and their published paper: “Helping journals to improve their publishing standards: a data analysis of DOAJ new criteria effects”

After DOAJ implemented new criteria for inclusion of open access journals and invited all journals listed in the directory to reapply, a large number of journals was removed from the database, most for failing to submit an updated application within the deadline. DOAJ volunteers, Paola Galimberti as an  Editor and Andrea Marchitelli as an Associate Editor for Italy, wanted to investigate if their contribution, and the contribution by DOAJ volunteers all over the world, was effective in trying to improve the quality of journals indexed in the directory.

When the idea to write an article about the first results of the reapplication process became more clear, Paola and Andrea decided to involve Andrea Bollini, Chief Technology Innovation Officer at 4SCIENCE and Dominic Mitchell, DOAJ Community Manager, in the analysis of data.

Being active participants in the DOAJ community was really helpful when designing the article structure, because it made it possible to know, from an internal point of view, the steps of the reapplication process and all the checks needed to verify reapplications, where to look for the necessary data, and so on.

The starting point for this investigation was the scepticism about open access journals caused by Beall’s lists, by some retraction and misconduct cases that involved open access journals, and by some articles that suggested open access to be a way of publishing low quality journals under the pressure of the publish or perish system.

The main interest as editor and associate editor for a volunteer group deeply involved in this process was to examine the results of the implementation of the new criteria, and their capability to improve the quality of the directory and the reliability of the indexed information.

A dataset of 12,595 journals included in DOAJ since its very beginning in 2003 until May 15th 2016, was examined and compared to other sources. This operation had an immediate effect. The number of journals deleted from DOAJ during this period was 3,776; the majority of them (2,851 journals) were excluded because publishers failed to complete the reapplication on time; 490 had ceased publication or were otherwise inactive; 375 were excluded for ethical issues; 53 because they were no longer open access or the content was embargoed, the final 7 were removed for other reasons. The top five countries in terms of the percentage of journals removed were: Japan (74% of journals removed); Pakistan (60%); Canada (51%); United States (50%); and Mexico (49%).

Our study has shown that 158 of the removed journals were included in Beall’s lists; 1130 journals indexed in DOAJ were included in Scopus and/or JCR. Our analysis demonstrates that, thanks to the new acceptance criteria, and to the improved screening process performed by volunteer groups under the direction of the new criteria, there was a noticeable quality improvement of the journals indexed in DOAJ.

As members involved in this quality improvement process, the authors would consider the work made by DOAJ staff and volunteers in the different groups as a very effective result.

Full-text article: Marchitelli, Andrea, Paola Galimberti, Andrea Bollini, & Dominic Mitchell. “Helping journals to improve their publishing standards: a data analysis of DOAJ new criteria effects.” JLIS.it [Online], 8.1 (2017): 1-21. Web. 8 Feb. 2017. DOI: 10.4403/jlis.it-12052.