Press release

Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, version 3

The 3rd version of the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing is published today.

Introduction

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) are scholarly organizations that have seen an increase in the number, and broad range in the quality, of membership applications. Our organizations have collaborated to identify principles of transparency and best practice for scholarly publications and to clarify that these principles form the basis of the criteria by which suitability for membership is assessed by COPE, DOAJ and OASPA, and part of the criteria on which membership applications are evaluated by WAME. Each organization also has their own, additional criteria which are used when evaluating applications. The organizations will not share lists of publishers or journals that failed to demonstrate that they met the criteria for transparency and best practice. Backgrounds on each organization are at the bottom of this post.

This is the third version of a work in progress (published 15 January 2018); the first version was made available by OASPA in December 2013 and published on the DOAJ web site in January 2014. We encourage its wide dissemination and continue to welcome feedback on the general principles and the specific criteria.

Principles of Transparency

  1. Website: A journal’s website, including the text that it contains, shall demonstrate that care has been taken to ensure high ethical and professional standards. It must not contain information that might mislead readers or authors, including any attempt to mimic another journal/publisher’s site.
    An ‘Aims & Scope’ statement should be included on the website and the readership clearly defined. There should be a statement on what a journal will consider for publication including authorship criteria (e.g., not considering multiple submissions, redundant publications) to be included. ISSNs should be clearly displayed (separate for print and electronic).
  2. Name of journal: The Journal name shall be unique and not be one that is easily confused with another journal or that might mislead potential authors and readers about the Journal’s origin or association with other journals. 
  3. Peer review process: Journal content must be clearly marked as whether peer reviewed or not. Peer review is defined as obtaining advice on individual manuscripts from reviewers expert in the field who are not part of the journal’s editorial staff. This process, as well as any policies related to the journal’s peer review procedures, shall be clearly described on the journal website, including the method of peer review used. Journal websites should not guarantee manuscript acceptance or very short peer review times. 
  4. Ownership and management: Information about the ownership and/or management of a journal shall be clearly indicated on the journal’s website. Publishers shall not use organizational or journal names that would mislead potential authors and editors about the nature of the journal’s owner. 
  5. Governing body: Journals shall have editorial boards or other governing bodies whose members are recognized experts in the subject areas included within the journal’s scope. The full names and affiliations of the journal’s editorial board or other governing body shall be provided on the journal’s website. 
  6. Editorial team/contact information: Journals shall provide the full names and affiliations of the journal’s editors on the journal website as well as contact information for the editorial office, including a full address. 
  7. Copyright and Licensing: The policy for copyright shall be clearly stated in the author guidelines and the copyright holder named on all published articles.  Likewise, licensing information shall be clearly described in guidelines on the website, and licensing terms shall be indicated on all published articles, both HTML and PDFs.  If authors are allowed to publish under a Creative Commons license then any specific license requirements shall be noted.  Any policies on posting of final accepted versions or published articles on third party repositories shall be clearly stated. 
  8. Author fees: Any fees or charges that are required for manuscript processing and/or publishing materials in the journal shall be clearly stated in a place that is easy for potential authors to find prior to submitting their manuscripts for review or explained to authors before they begin preparing their manuscript for submission.  If no such fees are charged that should also be clearly stated. 
  9. Process for identification of and dealing with allegations of research misconduct: Publishers and editors shall take reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred, including plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data falsification/fabrication, among others. In no case shall a journal or its editors encourage such misconduct, or knowingly allow such misconduct to take place. In the event that a journal’s publisher or editors are made aware of any allegation of research misconduct relating to a published article in their journal, the publisher or editor shall follow COPE’s guidelines (or equivalent) in dealing with allegations. 
  10. Publication Ethics: A journal shall also have policies on publishing ethics. These should be clearly visible on its website, and should refer to: i) Journal policies on authorship and contributorship; ii) How the journal will handle complaints and appeals; iii) Journal policies on conflicts of interest / competing interests; iv) Journal policies on data sharing and reproducibility; v) Journal’s policy on ethical oversight; vi) Journal’s policy on intellectual property; and vii) Journal’s options for post-publication discussions and corrections. 
  11. Publishing schedule: The periodicity at which a journal publishes shall be clearly indicated. 
  12. Access: The way(s) in which the journal and individual articles are available to readers and whether there are associated subscription or pay per view fees shall be stated. 
  13. Archiving: A journal’s plan for electronic backup and preservation of access to the journal content (for example, access to main articles via CLOCKSS or PubMed Central) in the event a journal is no longer published shall be clearly indicated. 
  14. Revenue sources: Business models or revenue sources (e.g., author fees, subscriptions, advertising, reprints, institutional support, and organizational support) shall be clearly stated or otherwise evident on the journal’s website. Publishing fees or waiver status should not influence editorial decision making. 
  15. Advertising: Journals shall state their advertising policy if relevant, including what types of adverts will be considered, who makes decisions regarding accepting adverts and whether they are linked to content or reader behaviour (online only) or are displayed at random. Advertisements should not be related in any way to editorial decision making and shall be kept separate from the published content. 
  16. Direct marketing: Any direct marketing activities, including solicitation of manuscripts that are conducted on behalf of the journal, shall be appropriate, well targeted, and unobtrusive.  Information provided about the publisher or journal is expected to be truthful and not misleading for readers or authors.

In the event that a member organization is found to have violated these best practices, or other specific requirements of the organization, OASPA/DOAJ/COPE/WAME shall in the first instance try to work with them in order to address any concerns that have been raised. In the event that the member organization is unable or unwilling to address these concerns, their membership in the organization may be suspended or terminated. All of the member organizations have procedures for dealing with concerns raised about member journals.

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About the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE, https://publicationethics.org/)

COPE provides advice to editors and publishers on all aspects of publication ethics and, in particular, how to handle cases of research and publication misconduct. It also provides a forum for its members to discuss individual cases. COPE does not investigate individual cases but encourages editors to ensure that cases are investigated by the appropriate authorities (usually a research institution or employer). All COPE members are expected to apply COPE principles of publication ethics outlined in the core practices.

About the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ, https://doaj.org)

The mission of the DOAJ is to curate, maintain and develop a source of reliable information about open access scholarly journals on the web; to verify that entries on the list comply with reasonable standards; to increase the visibility, dissemination, discoverability and attraction of open access journals; to enable scholars, libraries, universities, research funders and other stakeholders to benefit from the information and services provided; to facilitate the integration of open access journals into library and aggregator services; to assist, where possible, publishers and their journals to meet reasonable digital publishing standards; and to thereby support the transition of the system of scholarly communication and publishing into a model that serves science, higher education, industry, innovation, societies and the people. Through this work, DOAJ will cooperate and collaborate with all interested parties working toward these objectives.

About the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA, https://oaspa.org/)

OASPA is a trade association that was established in 2008 in order to represent the interests of Open Access (OA) publishers globally across all disciplines. By encouraging collaboration in developing appropriate business models, tools and standards to support OA publishing, OASPA aims to help ensure a prosperous and sustainable future for the benefit of its members and the scholarly communities they serve. This mission is carried out through exchanging information, setting standards, advancing models, advocacy, education, and the promotion of innovation.  

About the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME, http://www.wame.org)

WAME is a global nonprofit voluntary association of editors of peer-reviewed medical journals who seek to foster cooperation and communication among editors; improve editorial standards; promote professionalism in medical editing through education, self-criticism, and self-regulation; and encourage research on the principles and practice of medical editing. WAME develops policies and recommendations of best practices for medical journal editors and has a syllabus for editors that members are encouraged to follow.

Large-scale Implementation of Open Access in China

At the end of October, the National Science Library, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NSL, CAS), the National Science and Technology Library (NSTL) and ShanghaiTech University Library signed the Open Access 2020 Initiative. The Director of NSL, CAS, Mr. LIU Huizhou, said that open access is beneficial to scientific research, scientific communication and the development of a creative society. The signature of OA2020 means that China will actively contribute to the reform of the global scientific communication system. It will also accelerate the implementation of CAS’s open access policy.

China has long supported open access. In 2004, CAS signed Berlin Declaration on Open Access. In 2013, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and CAS signed GRC Action Plan on Open Access for Publications. In 2014, NSTL attended SCOAP3, and from then on Chinese authors can publish articles for free in journals funded by SCOAP3.

On the same year, CAS  and NSFC  made statements about making publications funded by public money open access, and requested researchers to deposit accepted articles in their institutional repositories or the NSFC’s Open Repository and to make them open access within 12 months after publication. CAS supports its researchers to publish in open access & quality controlled journals with reasonable APCs, and researchers can choose quality controlled journals according to the inclusion criteria of DOAJ. 

English version of the Expression of Interest document.

Chinese version of the Expression of Interest document.

International coalition to help sustain DOAJ and its further development in the coming years

scoss-1

SCOSS (The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services) today announced that major organizations have recommended to their member institutions to support DOAJ with funding that will enable DOAJ to move towards a new crowdfunding effort and away from its incremental annual contribution system. Under the new model organisations will work towards sustaining DOAJ for the coming 3 years, giving it more stability for the mid-term. This will enable DOAJ to develop a fully comprehensive, longer term development plan for its systems and services.

For a decade the funding of DOAJ has been based on contributions from individual libraries, library consortia and research funders from many countries around the globe. We are extremely grateful for their continuous support and we are looking forward to welcoming many of them as contributors under the SCOSS initiative.

These contributions have allowed DOAJ to develop step by step and thus become one the most important freely available resources for Open Access.

As an initial step, DOAJ will introduce a governance structure that will allow for more active influence from the community on strategic directions for DOAJ.

The new SCOSS funding drive will enable DOAJ to:

  1. Engage in strategic longer term development of the services and systems behind our operations.
  2. Provide adequate resource to cover the large number of applications coming in to DOAJ (currently 500+ per month).
  3. Actively curate its list thereby keeping the index more up to date and relevant.
  4. Enable publishers to update their own journal information, keeping records relevant.
  5. Continue efforts to assess and include journals from the Global South to make DOAJ even more comprehensive on a global scale.
  6. Continue our advocacy work directed at influencing decision makers to support a transition to open access for local language journals.
  7. Implement functionality that will allow DOAJ to actively harvest article-level metadata from the 10,000 journals that are currently indexed. Currently more than 70% of the journals are providing (parts of) their article-level metadata (aproximately 2,700,000 records) and are exposing these via the OAI-PMH service and our API.
  8. Enhance the DOAJ metadata via collaboration and integration with relevant organizations, enriching the metadata records with DOIs, integrated article-level metrics (ALMs), ORCID IDs etc.
  9. Stabilise and build out the platform that underpins the DOAJ and its database to ensure that it remains fit-for-purpose and operational at least until 2020.

Please contact Managing Director Lars Bjørnshauge – lars@doaj.org – for more information or visit the SCOSS web site for the complete details.

DOAJ and SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE SERVICES partner to achieve broader support for Open Access to scientific literature

The new agreement underpins the Directory of Open Access Journals in its work to reach new members and generate more support and shows the strong commitment of  Scientific Knowledge Services  to the Open Science movement.

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DOAJ announces the agreement with Scientific Knowledge Services (SKS) as its exclusive agent in a selection of countries from the EMEA region (details below). Scientific Knowledge Services will be responsible for facilitating financial support to DOAJ and in this way contribute to the work of DOAJ to assess and promote quality, peer reviewed Open Access journals.

This agreement focuses on generating new members and sponsors for DOAJ from the countries listed below, and includes planning, marketing, market research, supervision, training, maintenance of a customer database, record-keeping, and reporting to the DOAJ.

The selection of EMEA countries is listed below:

Albania, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech, Egypt, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine.

“We are pleased that SKS have partnered up with us”, says Lars Bjørnshauge, Founder and Managing Director of DOAJ. “We have great confidence in their solid knowledge, strong networks and good track record in the regions covered by this agreement,  as well as their ability to liaise efficiently with potential new members in these regions”.

Scientific Knowledge Services (SKS) is a Swiss company backed up by 20 years of experience in working with academic, public and research libraries, focusing on Open Science elements like Open Access (OA), Research Data Management (RDM) and Citizen Science, as well as licenses for online electronic resources. The Managing Director of SKS, Dr. Tiberius Ignat says: “We are strongly supporting Open Science and we believe that Open Access is a major component of modern research activities. We’ve been organising in Europe – for 3 years now – a series of workshops on Open Science with a great positive impact for local communities as well as international stakeholders. Our agreement with DOAJ came naturally in place. We also see this agreement as a recognition of our role in the Open Science landscape and it drives us to an even stronger commitment.”

 

About SKS

Scientific Knowledge Services (www.knowledge.services) is a Swiss registered company that has an extensive experience in working close with libraries and content providers to facilitate access to scientific knowledge. SKS has a well established practice in finding the right place where interests of libraries, universities, research organizations and content providers meet and in proposing winning solutions for all parties.

Scientific Knowledge Services routes its efforts in understanding each market, by connecting and dedicating time to local communities, assisting the content providers to better serve the specific information needs of each country and supporting the advancement of Open Science elements.

For business development inquiries:

Marika Markova, SKS

Executive Director

marika@scientificknowledgeservices.com

+420 607 462 982

For media inquiries:

Clara Armengou, DOAJ

Project and Communications Manager clara@doaj.org

 

The DOAJ Team is expanding!

I am very happy to announce that the DOAJ Team has expanded. We welcome to the team Ilaria Flava, based in Rome, Italy, and Clara Armengou, based in Barcelona, Spain.

Ilaria joins us as Managing Editor and will assist with the monitoring of our editorial groups, the processing of applications and communicating final decisions to publishers. Having already volunteered for DOAJ as Associate Editor, Ilaria is familiar with our modus operandi. She assumes responsibility for 7 international teams of volunteers and by adding Ilaria to our team of managing editors, we will increase our throughput.

Clara joins us as Community Manager and will be covering my absence for the next year. Clara, who was open access officer at Cambridge University Press among other things, is currently working as Science Communication Officer at University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Clara brings with her a vast amount of experience and by adding her to the team, we will continue to serve our online communities and, most importantly, all the publishers who are indexed in DOAJ. Clara will continue to raise awareness of DOAJ and the important issues surrounding open access, as well as support our Ambassadors’ activities across the global south.

You can read more about Ilaria and Clara on our About page.

DOAJ is International!

Adding Clara and Ilaria to our team means that DOAJ now operates from 15 different countries…

Algeria
Burkina Faso
China
Denmark
Egypt
Ethiopia
India
Italy
Mexico
Russia
South Africa
Spain
Sweden
The Netherlands
United Kingdom

… and between us we can speak over 25 languages. Open access knows no barriers and DOAJ strives to represent that as much as possible! How do you feel that we are doing?

Walt Crawford updates his analysis of DOAJ data

Walt Crawford is prolific! As if his first tranche of mega-analysis wasn’t enough work for him, he has released an update to The Gold Open Access Landscape 2011-2014, which I wrote about previously, that includes an initial analysis of the journals that were removed from DOAJ at the shut-down of the Reapplication project.* He completed the update in May 2016: this post is long overdue.

Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015, sponsored by SPARC, ‘provides an empirical basis for evaluating Open Access sustainability models‘. The rest of the study is based entirely on DOAJ, refining and updating the previous work. To give you a taster of what was achieved, Walt visited the web site of every journal indexed in DOAJ, even doing a second pass at those sites who hadn’t posted any content the first time around. In the age of analysing large metadata sets programmatically, with computers, this is a huge feat and one that I admire greatly.

What did Walt’s analysis reveal? Well, you can buy the paperback, a snip at only $6, directly from Walt and you can download the PDF free of charge too.

What did DOAJ learn from Walt’s analysis? We hadn’t realised quite how heavily Japan had been hit by the removal: 73% of the Japanese journals indexed in DOAJ were wiped from the Directory. We have since determined that most of those are on J-STAGE and have started a targeted campaign to get as many of those journals to submit new applications as possible. Singapore, Bangladesh and Nepal were also heavily hit. We also learned that journals published by universities and colleges suffered heavy losses. We are looking into this area with our DOAJ Ambassadors to see if we can find out why these losses were so great.

I can thoroughly recommend Walt’s work, not only for the obvious reason that he focusses so greatly on the [great!] DOAJ data but because, to my knowledge, no-one else is doing this type of analysis with such granularity.

As I write, I see that Walt has released an analysis of Open Access by Country 2011 to 2015, the 3rd part of his Gold Open Access Journals trilogy. As always, you can purchase the paperback or download the PDF for free.

Now, get reading!

*The final figure was 2851 journals removed and not 3300 as we had originally anticipated. The discrepancy was because we included, in the original count, journals that had already been removed from DOAJ and therefore had a reapplication pending but which would never be submitted.

DOAJ to remove approximately 3300 journals

UPDATE (11th May): the list of removed journals is here on the 3rd tab.

Today DOAJ will remove approximately 3300 journals for failure to submit a valid reapplication before the communicated deadline; a deadline which was extended twice to allow more time for reapplications. This batch removal is another step in DOAJ’s two year long project to increase the value and accuracy of the information provided in it.

Here are some details about the reapplication project from its launch in January 2015 to today:

  • The reapplication process is a necessary step towards ensuring that all journals in DOAJ (of which there were about 10000) met the higher criteria for indexing that DOAJ launched in March 2014. The criteria were produced as a response to the maturing open access arena, the greater demands made on open access publishing by questionable journals and publishers, and to retain DOAJ’s relevancy and importance in open access publishing.
  • Some journals have been in DOAJ since 2003 and have never refreshed their information with us.
  • As of today over 5000 journals have already submitted their reapplication to us and we are busy assessing those. Many reapplications have been accepted back into DOAJ.
  • The contact for every journal to be removed from DOAJ was emailed at least 4 times, informing them of our intention to remove their journals if they failed to submit a reapplication by the agreed deadline.
  • We send email via Mailchimp and took all the necessary precautions to ensure that our emails didn’t end up in Spam, get trapped in institutional firewalls, or failed to deliver for other reasons. We used the Mailchimp authentication options to “verify” that our emails were from a genuine source.
  • The first email, announcing the reapplication project and inviting people to reapply, was sent out in January 2015 and went to publishers with 11 or more journals in DOAJ. The second email went out to publishers with 10 or less journals in DOAJ in June 2015.
  • Reminders were sent out regularly, once a month as well as announcing the deadline to our largest communities: via this blog, Twitter and Facebook.
  • To ensure that our emails ended up with the correct contact, we spent a considerable amount of time tidying up our contacts database: we updated at least 1000 records.

Removed journals are welcome to submit a new application to DOAJ at any time. They will be placed in the queue along with other applications. We will add a third tab to our spreadsheet ‘DOAJ: journals added and removed‘ that will list all of the journals removed.

When a journal is removed from DOAJ, any article metadata will also become unavailable. This is standard functionality. We are confident that the majority of the journals removed have never supplied article metadata to us, or have done once but haven’t sent us anything for at least 2 years.

If you use DOAJ as a data source and would like to do your own analysis of the journals indexed,  download our journals CSV (https://doaj.org/csv) today before 11am BST, 12pm CEST. A copy of that spreadsheet is also available here.