The current application form is now 6 years’ old. It is very long. It needs an upgrade in terms of functionality and its content needs a review. A new form will go live in Q2 2020.
The editorial team and our UX designer have carefully reviewed each question using the following criteria:
- Is the question needed to determine a journal’s inclusion in DOAJ?
- Does the question text ask exactly what we mean to ask?
- Does the question’s functionality allow for the correct answers to be collected?
- Is the question redundant after the functional upgrade?
- Can the question text be reduced, simplified, made clearer in the context of the new UI?
The editorial team then considered if other questions needed to be added to the form. We will be adding three new questions, (none of which are part of the Basic Criteria for inclusion):
- the country of the society/institution;
- whether the journal allows for ORCID integration; and
- whether the journals’ references adhere to the I4OC standards.
At this point, I’d like to underline two Very Important Things:
- Our form is changing, not our criteria. Some of the questions labelled for removal are outdated; for some of them, we check the information anyway so don’t need to ask for it on the form.
- Any additional changes that may be required for Plan S certification have no bearing on this work.
Once the new form goes live, journals will be encouraged to update their information with us as soon as possible.
From the form as it is today, the questions that are suggested for removal are:
| Question number |
Question text |
| 8 |
Platform, Host or Aggregator |
| 9* |
Name of contact for this journal |
| 10* |
Contact’s email address |
| 11* |
Confirm contact’s email address |
| 19 |
Amount (submission charges) |
| 20 |
Currency (submission charges) |
| 21 |
How many research and review articles did the journal publish in the last calendar year? |
| 22 |
Enter the URL where this information can be found |
| 27 |
Does the journal allow software/spiders to automatically crawl the journal content (also known as text mining)? |
| 29 |
Does the journal provide, or intend to provide, article-level metadata to DOAJ? |
| 30 |
Does the journal provide article download statistics? |
| 31 |
Enter the URL where this information can be found |
| 32 |
What was the first calendar year in which a complete volume of the journal provided online Open Access content to the Full Text of all articles? (Full Text may be provided as PDFs. Does not apply for new journals.) |
| 33 |
Please indicate which formats of the full text are available |
| 54** |
Will the journal allow the author(s) to retain publishing rights without restrictions? |
| 55 |
Enter the URL where this information can be found |
| 56* |
Your name (Applicant) |
| 57* |
Your email address (Applicant) |
| 58* |
Confirm your email address (Applicant) |
*All applicants will need to sign in or register before they can submit an application, therefore these 6 questions become redundant.
**This question is being merged with the one before it and re-worded to: ‘Does the author(s) or their institution retain both full, unrestricted copyright and publishing rights?’
Once the new form goes live, the specific answers for those questions being removed will no longer be available to download.
We welcome the community’s feedback on these changes and look forward to discussing them with you.
En una serie de mejoras de metadatos, DOAJ aceptará la carga de XML en formato Crossref a partir del 18 de febrero de 2020.
In a series of metadata improvements, publishers will be able to upload XML in the Crossref format to us from 18th February 2020.
ere we state that 77% of the journals in DOAJ have article content loaded to them. This is slightly misleading because a journal which uploaded only 5 articles to us in 2013 is counted in that 77%. It is more interesting to know how recent the articles are from a particular title and how much content they have uploaded to us. While this information has always been available by selecting a journal ISSN and using the ‘articles’ filter in Search, we’ve never been able to show all the information in one place.I think that this development will be welcomed by all our users, especially publishers, librarians and those doing research on open access publishing developments.