News update

We’re paving the way for greater things to come.

As hinted in a post yesterday, DOAJ is getting a nip and a tuck today, to make way for larger projects later this year:

A completely new search front-end. It looks very similar to the old one, but with some major improvements under-the-hood (more powerful, more responsive, more accessible), and gives us the capability to build better, cooler interfaces in the future.

At 3pm BST today, we will start an upgrade to two elements of the site: Bootstrap and Edges. Bootstrap is ‘an open source toolkit for developing with HTML, CSS, and JS’ and is what we use to display the site. Edges is Cottage Lab’s own open source library for presenting the search and navigation capabilities to the user.

What’s changing?

Users will see that much of the orange colour in search results and navigation is replaced with grey. This colour may be temporary until a full redesign is carried out.

Some standardisation has been applied to the treatment of navigation and sorting features, like buttons, dropdowns, etc

The site will be much more responsive on smaller screens.

The fonts will be cleaner and easier to read, on large and smaller screens.

Some accessibility changes, one step on our way to becoming compliant with world recognised accessibility standards.

Why are you making these changes?

We’re paving the way for a much larger redesign project which is coming down the pipe. The project will take in a UX assessment, a rebrand, a site redesign, and much more. These two upgrades are necessary to accommodate the outputs of that project.

If you have any questions, or would like to know more, leave a comment here.

 

The community has chosen: introducing the new DOAJ Council.

Continuing the implementation of our new governance model, the DOAJ Council has been elected. The following individuals received the majority of the votes cast by the DOAJ community:

Shelley Allen, Emerald Publishing, United Kingdom
Perry Collins,University of Florida Libraries, USA
Frederick Fenter, Frontiers, Switzerland
Dora Elvira García-González, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico
Piero Grandesso, University of Bologna, Italy
Suzanne Kemperman, OCLC, USA
Christian Knudsen, Royal Danish Library, Denmark
Gail McMillan, Virginia Tech and University Libraries, USA
Donna McRostie, University of Melbourne, Australia
Rainer Rees-Mertins, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Switzerland
Karen Rowlett, University of Reading, United Kingdom
Stephanie Savage, University of British Columbia, Canada
Franck Vazquez, MDPI, Switzerland

The website will be updated with their names and a conflict of interest statement from each.

Two Council seats remain and these will be filled by invite only. DOAJ is looking for representatives from other organisations, preferably organisations operating out of low income countries or organisations whose mission matches that of DOAJ’s.

On behalf of all the DOAJ Team, I wish each of our new Council members a warm welcome!

The Top 10 most accessed articles in DOAJ so far this year

Digging into the metrics in DOAJ’s Google Analytics can be fun and enlightening. (And a total sink hole of my time.)

Here are the Top 10 most accessed articles in DOAJ so far this year. An interesting and somewhat curious collection largely driven, I suspect, by academic reading lists in schools, colleges and universities.

The article in Number 1 position is also the most accessed article for the whole of 2018. Accesses came from Indonesia, China, India, USA, Nigeria, Argentina, Canada, Iran, Mexico and Norway

What do you think of these stats?

Article details Unique Page Views
Study progresses on continuous curvilinear capsulorhexis
Guoji Yanke Zazhi. 2015;15(10):1737-1740
DOI 10.3980/j.issn.1672-5123.2015.10.16		 3,734
The Importance of Reflective Practice in Nursing
International Journal of Caring Sciences. 2013;6(3):319-326		 3,455
Creswell J.W.: Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches, London: Sage publications, 2009
Politeia. 2016;6(12):191-194		 3,245
García Avilés, José Alberto. Comunicar en la sociedad de la red. Teorías, modelos y prácticas.
Cuadernos de Información y Comunicación. 2017;22(0):325-327 DOI 10.5209/CIYC.55987		 2,849
Using the Sixth Edition of the APA Manual: A Guide for Students
Georgia Educational Researcher. 2009;7(2)
DOI 10.20429/ger.2009.070201		 1,969
Active Learning: The Dewey, Piaget, Vygotsky, and Constructivist Theory Perspectives
Jurnal Ilmu Pendidikan. 2016;9(3) DOI 10.17977/jip.v9i3.487		 1,948
Methods and Teaching Strategies Used by Teacher Education Faculty Members in one State University in the Philippines
Asia Pacific Journal of Multidisciplinary Research. 2015;3(5.3):36-44		 1,796
The Use Of Ansoff Matrix In The Field Of Business
Analele Universităţii Constantin Brâncuşi din Târgu Jiu : Seria Economie. 2017;2(special issue):141-149		 1,661
Project Scope Management Process
Baltic Journal of Economic Studies. 2018;4(1):118-125 DOI 10.30525/2256-0742/2018-4-1-118-125		 1,592
The Helpless Angel in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper
International Journal of English Language and Translation Studies. 2018;06(03):130-136		 1,579

New Pilot to encourage Finnish Open Access Journals to apply to DOAJ

PRESS RELEASE

TSV loves DOAJ logoDOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) and the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV) are collaborating on a pilot project to encourage and help peer-reviewed open access (OA) journals published in Finland to be indexed in DOAJ. The Pilot runs from May 2019 to May 2020.

DOAJ has set an international standard for peer-reviewed OA journals. The index currently includes 13500 journals from over 131 countries publishing in 75 languages, showing the regional and linguistic diversity of research. 

For a variety of reasons, not all open access journals are indexed in DOAJ. A recent paper by Björk showed DOAJ covers 42% of OA journals published in Nordic countries, and there are considerable country differences – 68% of OA journals from Norway but only 23% from Finland.

In an open letter concerning Plan S, DOAJ called on representative groups in the social sciences, humanities and arts to collaborate with them and help them to identify journals that are fit for purpose, and which should be indexed in DOAJ. The TSV Publication Forum (Julkaisufoorumi in Finnish) answered that call and has identified ~160 potential OA journals published in Finland, of which 29 are already in DOAJ. TSV proposed a collaboration with DOAJ to help getting the rest of the Finnish OA journals indexed.

The pilot project will determine if these journals are DOAJ compliant and, if not, what they need to do to meet the basic DOAJ criteria. DOAJ, TSV Publication Forum and TSV Publication Services will work together to facilitate the process of the journals’ possible inclusion in DOAJ by communicating criteria, translating instructions, and organising workshops for training and preparing applications. A further goal  of the pilot is to encourage Finnish journals that are not yet OA to consider open access publishing. 

TSV Publication Forum maintains a national classification of peer-reviewed journals and book publishers that is based on evaluation by field-specific expert panels. All the identified potential OA journals have been approved to be peer-reviewed academic/scholarly journals. Many of the journals also use the TSV label for peer-reviewed scholarly publications, showing their strong commitment to high standards of peer-review and research integrity.

Most peer-reviewed journals in Finland are not-for-profit and are published by learned societies. TSV’s strategy for 2019-2023 includes developing open publication by member organisations so the pilot project launched with DOAJ is very much on the Federation’s agenda. TSV is also the national coordinator of Finland’s open science policy, and is currently working with stakeholders to create a national open access strategy as well as recommendations for responsible evaluation of a researcher.

Further information: 
Dominic Mitchell (dom@doaj.org)
Janne Pölönen (janne.polonen@tsv.fi)

The community has chosen: introducing the new DOAJ Advisory Board

Towards the end of last year, I wrote about the new governance model that DOAJ was implementing in 2019. The first step of that process is now complete and the community has chosen a new DOAJ Advisory Board. I am absolutely delighted to introduce them here:

Leslie Chan, University of Toronto, Canada
Jan Erik Frantsvåg, The University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway, Norway
Mark Hahnel, Digital Science (Figshare), UK
Rolf Halse, NSD – Norwegian Centre for Research Data, Norway
Emma Molls, University of Minnesota, USA
Anja Oberländer, University of Konstanz, Germany
Solange Maria Dos Santos, SciELO, Brazil
Lisa Schiff, California Digital Library, USA
Steven Vidovic, University of Southampton, UK

Our website will be updated with the new names and a conflict of interest statement from each of them will be added there.

The inaugural Advisory Board meeting will be held in the autumn before which a Chair person for the Board will be voted in.

The DOAJ Council will be announced in September.

Finally, I would like to thank our outgoing Advisory Board for their dedication, input and wisdom over the years:

Kevin Stranack, PKP (Public Knowledge Project)
Caren Milloy, JISC
Cameron Neylon
David Prosser, RLUK (Research Libraries UK)
Iryna Kuchma, EIFL (Electronic Information For Libraries)
Stuart Shieber, Harvard University
Martin Rasmussen, Copernicus Publications
Paul Peters, Hindawi Publishing Corporation
Arianna Becerril-García, Redalyc
Susan Murray, AJOL (African Journals Online)

Regarding a Delta Think blog post analysing the DOAJ

Delta Think logo

In its series Open Access News & Views, Delta Think recently published an analysis of the DOAJ. We very much enjoyed the piece and found it to be one of the most well-informed articles written about us. We would like to add to the discussion by commenting on a few of the issues raised in the article.

Comparing apples with oranges

The main problem, when you compare ROAD, Web of Science (WoS), Scopus and DOAJ, is that all of these services have different definitions and criteria as to what constitutes a valid journal entry in their databases.

In general, one can say that DOAJ’s criteria are the strictest and therefore DOAJ is not an index of all open access (OA) journals but an index of gold standard, quality, peer-reviewed OA journals. So therefore not all OA journals meet our criteria.

Being indexed in DOAJ acts like a badge of quality. A quality stamp based on the business operations of a journal and its reliability, how closely that journal adheres to best practices and which standards it uses. Scopus and WoS are not in the business of measuring any of those. (We would take this opportunity to point out that DOAJ holds many more journals which aren’t in Scopus.)

The Scopus selection process is explained here: https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scopus/how-scopus-works/content/content-policy-and-selection

Regarding WoS you can find more information here: https://www.clarivate.com/products/web-of-science/open-access

ROAD criteria are perhaps the most relaxed: open access to all content; no moving wall or embargo; no hybrid journals; mainly research papers; the audience is mainly researchers and scholars.

We hope that together, we can achieve more transparency on inclusion criteria and we think that this would be welcomed by the community. DOAJ has an excellent working partnership with ISSN (who run the ROAD database); we are in communication with Scopus regularly; and we would welcome the opportunity to work more with Clarivate, who produce Web of Science.

We know that all these services take DOAJ metadata, either directly via OAI-PMH, our journal CSV file or our data dumps, or indirectly by using data feeds from third parties. What we have yet to establish, in the case of Scopus and ROAD, is how often they take the data from us–we believe for Scopus this could be as seldom as every six months–and how they then filter it.

Another point worth highlighting is that, to date, DOAJ has relied on publishers applying to be assessed and indexed and we have done very little soliciting of journals. However throughout 2019/2020 we will start approaching relevant OA journals not currently indexed and working with them to help them submit a quality application. This initiative is part of a funding drive for this year.

Regarding the implementation of Plan S

DOAJ expects to be involved in the implementation of Plan S and this will lead to additional criteria for journals to become Plan S compliant. In any case, we expect that Plan S will make it even more relevant for journals to be assessed and listed in DOAJ.

DOAJ reaches its SCOSS funding target within 18 months and sets its sights on new work

(Repost from the SCOSS website.)

We are delighted to announce that the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) has reached its funding target to cover its operational costs as were outlined in its SCOSS application. Eight consortia and 175 institutions/organisations from 18 different countries have committed support to DOAJ. “We’d like to thank our supporters. That this many organisations stand behind this initiative and promised this amount of funding shows how important sustaining open access infrastructure is,” said Lars Bjørnshauge, DOAJ Managing Director.

There are organisations that have already made the decision to help fund DOAJ, but are still deliberating over the details of their financial commitment. Though the funding goal has now been met, these organisations may still commit financial support. Furthermore, the SCOSS Board has allowed DOAJ to present a new work package, both to these organisations and any additional organisations that come forward in 2019. The package describes additional activities that DOAJ would like to pursue with the extra funding, should it be granted.

The Board has supported the second work package on the conditions that DOAJ reports on progress made in a progress report on the activities delineated in the SCOSS application form, and that DOAJ describes the new work package in detail and includes a budget for the amount of funding needed. For details see the financial overview and the new work package.

SCOSS endorses this plan through the end of 2019.