Progress report

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.

New article on DOAJ available at ScienceOpen

We have just published an article in the open access journal ScienceOpen Research, giving an overview of the history and current status of the DOAJ. Please read and share the article! We would welcome your participation in the post-publication peer review of this article and/or any comments.

Criteria for open access and publishing
Authors: Tom Olijhoek, Dominic Mitchell and Lars Bjornshauge
DOI: 10.14293/S2199-1006.1.SOR-EDU.AMHUHV.v1

After a brief historical overview, DOAJ policies regarding open access, intellectual property rights and questionable publishers are explained in detail. The larger part of the article is a much requested explanation on how DOAJ uses its new set of criteria for the evaluation of open access journals and the rationale behind choosing the seven extra criteria that qualify for the DOAJ Seal. A final section is devoted to the extended possibilities that DOAJ offers to scholars and publishers for searching the database and for uploading metadata.

Reblog: Top 10 publishers in DOAJ (by number of titles) 2014 to 2015

We’re a big fan of the work of the Sustaining Knowledge Commons team. The post below, published yesterday, takes a look at the change in the Top 10 list of publishers indexed in DOAJ from 2014 to 2015.

Source: Top 10 publishers in DOAJ (by number of titles) 2014 to 2015

In her post, Heather says: “The percentage of journals in DOAJ published by the top 10 publishers has increased slightly, from 14% to 16%.” I think there are 3 main reasons why:

1) We have seen a renewed interest in DOAJ from large publishers since we relaunched in 2013 and increased our visibility and transparency (expanded our communications and activities, launched the updated application form and started the Reapplications project).

2) We are now processing applications faster than ever before and part of that is due to the streamlining of the process for ‘bulk’ applications from multi-journal publishers, increasing our capacity but leaving us more time for the smaller publishers.

3) These publishers have launched more open access titles.

We are in regular discussion with 8 out of the 10 publishers listed in the blog, mostly as they update their information with us (Medknow to Wolters Kulwer Medknow) and submit their reapplications.

Our new CSV file is online!

Our new, improved CSV file of journal metadata is now online and ready to be downloaded!

The updated file includes all of the new information that we have been collecting and recently started displaying with our site upgrade such as APC information, whether the journal is part of an archiving program, which type of peer review and more! The old file had 17 columns of information; the new one has 54!

Remember that the amount of information in the CSV will increase as each journal has their reapplication accepted to remain indexed in DOAJ. There are currently 510 journals with the new information completed.

All information in the CSV file is shared with you under the terms of a CC BY-SA license.

As always, let me know if you have feedback or questions!

 

Development plan for 2015/6

Recent discussions with a partner reminded me that we haven’t published a development plan.

I’ve put together a high level list of our developments: what we are currently doing and what we have next on the list. As it stands, it will take us through to mid-2016 but it is a very fluid document. We have the flexibility to add in items and move others so the 2016 items will be revisited in January 2016 and reviewed to make sure nothing else has cropped up in the meantime.

Some of these items I have already announced in earlier posts. I’ve collected those here.

As always, I’d welcome your feedback.

We are getting better at ingesting metadata. Until then: give us your metadata!

I just saw a tweet about an article published on PeerJ called ‘For 481 biomedical open access journals, articles are not searchable in the Directory of Open Access Journals nor in conventional biomedical databases‘. The article concludes:

DOAJ is the most complete registry of biomedical OA journals compared with five conventional biomedical databases. However, DOAJ only indexes articles for half of the biomedical journals listed, making it an incomplete source for biomedical research papers in general.

This made me very happy, especially when I read that the authors compare DOAJ with Medline, PubMed Central, EMBASE and SCOPUS to reach their conclusion. Those are some impressive databases to be ranked alongside.

Of course, the authors’ conclusion has a very large BUT in it: DOAJ contains article metadata for only half of the journals it indexes. Why is this and what are we doing about this?

The biggest issue for us is that since our launch in 2003 providing DOAJ with article metadata has been optional. DOAJ never made it compulsory for an indexed journal to upload its metadata. DOAJ encouraged it and made it easier for publishers to provide it but it has never been a criteria for being indexed. One of the reasons for this is that there is such a huge range of publishers in DOAJ and some of them simply don’t have the resources to create and provide metadata so by making this compulsory, a very large amount of small, open access journals would have been excluded.

Another issue is that, like PMC, DOAJ requires XML to be delivered to its own DTD. For journals that are not on the Open Journal System—OJS journals have a plugin that generates DOAJ XML automatically—or for those journals that have a huge content archive, processing and converting existing content into DOAJ XML is no small task. There are cost barriers, there is a lack of understanding around XML and there is a general reluctance, particularly by the larger publishers, to convert content to yet another DTD. DOAJ has toyed with the idea of accepting more XML flavours, the most obvious being JATS, since it is a standard DTD within STM publishing. What about SSH journals, or those journals that produce XML using their own proprietary DTD? As much as DOAJ wants to facilitate article upload, with limited finding there simply isn’t one solution that will work for everyone.

However, there is good news which I highlighted in an earlier post. This year, DOAJ will launch an API and a metadata harvester. Among other things, the API will enable the bulk upload of article metadata. The metadata harvester will seek out article metadata for journals that are indexed in DOAJ.

Until we get those two features on their feet, I would absolutely URGE publishers to give DOAJ their metadata. Those who do so already said that being in DOAJ increases traffic to their sites and increases visibility of content and we know from our Google Analytics that DOAJ is the starting place for many searches for open access content. If you need help in generating XML, then contact me and I will point you to some resources that I have used to troubleshoot XML problems in the past.

Who knows? At some point in the near future Messrs Liljekvist, Andresen, Pommergaard and Rosenberg might be able to publish an update to their paper with the conclusion that: ‘DOAJ is the most complete registry of biomedical OA journals compared with five conventional biomedical databases.’ Full stop. Or even better:

DOAJ is the most complete registry of OA journals.

Onwards!

The new site upgrades are live; it’ll take some time for the data to settle

All of our new site upgrades were successfully rolled out to the site last Wednesday. We’d like to hear what you think of the upgrades!

A few comments about what you will see now on the site:

  • I mentioned that we will need some time for the data to settle. The site displays the new dataset only. That means that the data will grow as publishers resubmit their reapplications and those are accepted back into DOAJ. If you have been monitoring the data closely, there will be a large jump in the figures you are reporting on so you’ll need to account for that in any analysis that you do. Specifically, the number of journals with or without APCs has changed and the totals for the number of articles published per year have also shifted. I shall publish a blog post shortly that contains the last counts of the APC data and articles per year before the site was upgraded. This will serve as a historic record only but it is important that it is available online.
  • Every journal has an extended ‘home page’ on DOAJ that reveals all the new data we’ve been collecting in our new form. There’s all the important bits up at the top, especially the APC information and then, by clicking on the ‘More’ button, you can reveal information about licensing, copyright and best practices that the journal adheres to.
  • We’ve improved the way that tables of contents are displayed so you can now see clearly the volumes, issues and, if a journal has one, a continuation.
  • We’ve tidied up the URLs. For example URLs for journals now look like this http://doaj.org/toc/2175-8042 instead of like this http://doaj.org/toc/0006191878084b8d8bddae52ce72c948. An improvement; I hope you agree!
  • Try our built-in URL shortening service from Bit.ly. It turns this:
    https://doaj.org/search?source={%22query%22%3A{%22filtered%22%3A{%22filter%22%3A{%22bool%22%3A{%22must%22%3A[{%22term%22%3A{%22_type%22%3A%22article%22}}%2C{%22term%22%3A{%22index.license.exact%22%3A%22CC%20BY%22}}%2C{%22term%22%3A{%22index.classification.exact%22%3A%22Health%20Sciences%22}}]}}%2C%22query%22%3A{%22match_all%22%3A{}}}}%2C%22from%22%3A0%2C%22size%22%3A10} into http://bit.ly/1IQ11j3 in two clicks!
  • Finally, we’ve added OpenURL back to the site so for any of you who were using that service to link out to DOAJ, you should find that those links now resolve again.

Thanks for your patience as we settle into the new data structure. It’s going to take some time for things to even out, not least because our site upgrade has revealed the true nature of the data and we have some data clean-up tasks to do.

If you have any specific questions about what you are seeing then do get in touch!

Further development: metadata harvester and API

Here’s some good news for a Thursday.

In May we will be starting our next development projects: a metadata harvester and an API.

For the harvester, we will run a pilot phase collecting the PLoS metadata. Just by gathering PLoS metadata alone, we will very quickly double our existing article count. In 2016, we’ll scale up the harvester to seek out and collect article metadata for as many DOAJ-indexed journals as possible that do not have metadata associated with them.

The API will have two functions. Although we haven’t finalised the details, it is our intention that it will allow publishers to bulk upload their own article metadata without having to manually upload an XML file. For our mega-publishers, such as Redalyc, SciELO, BMC and PLoS, this will ensure their journals are always up-to-date in DOAJ with the latest article content. It will also allow bulk applications by publishers of new journals. Secondly, the API will provide an interface into our database that will allow custom queries of the data and advanced analysis.

These developments take serious funding so if you haven’t yet donated to us then please consider becoming a Publisher Member, a Member or a Sponsor. With the community’s help, we can greatly improve the visibility of quality, peer-reviewed open access content.

I’ll post more details as soon as I know them.

Twelve exciting and important developments due for release

If the SPARC piece we recently featured in didn’t give you a good idea into the amount of work that we’re undertaking to improve DOAJ—and ultimately the overall quality of open access publishing—then this [incomplete] list of our developments for 2015 should provide you with a fuller picture.

We’re coming to the end of a fairly small but significant and, in my opinion, very exciting project that will do the following:

  • improve the visibility of individual articles, both locally in DOAJ and outside in external search engines
  • improve overall discoverability in, and linking from, external databases
  • improve metadata extraction for re-use
  • give visibility to new datasets from the information we are collecting in the new application form with a level of granularity we’ve never had before
  • update the UI and add better browsing
  • add a much needed visualisation for existing continuations and ultimately, the management of new ones
  • reduce DOAJ’s overall response times

As I have mentioned in previous posts, DOAJ’s front end is currently straddling two datasets and this project will start to reveal all the lovely, new data that we have been collecting since March 2014, in all its glory. As publishers reapply (1072 out of ~9700 journals have already submitted their reapplications), the old dataset will drop away and the new, updated data will be displayed on the site.

This will have a few implications, the most important being that our extractable (CSV*, OAI-PMH etc) and reportable (statistics, figures) datasets will vary wildly over the coming 6 months as we bed down into the new dataset and flush out the old stuff. For example, you will notice a big shift in our APC numbers, the total numbers for the countries of publishers, the numbers of journal languages and the accuracy of journal classifications. Get in touch if you’d like more detailed information on this part and, to use a cliché, pardon our dust as we clear away the old and build out the new.

Here’s a partial list of everything we will do this year. It’s only partial because we haven’t yet finalised the list for the latter part of 2015. I’ll be able to update you on that at a later date. I’ve broken it into two sections: Behind The Scenes, all features that are effectively invisible to the site user but will make a huge difference for the publishers and any service using DOAJ data; and The User Interface, where site users will notice improved site interaction and site response times.

* Our CSV file will be updated after this project completes.

 

Behind The Scenes

OpenURL

I am very pleased to report that our OpenURL service will be reinstated AND upgraded. When we migrated from our old platform in 2014, we were unable to move the OpenURL 0.1 service. We know that many of our institutional and business partners rely on OpenURL to connect out to the content in our database and this has led to some understandable frustration as the links have failed to resolve. We’ll be relaunching with OpenURL Version 1.0.

A landing page for every article

Another ‘feature’ that we are reinstating, every single article entry in DOAJ will have, once again, its own landing page. This will increase the visibility of open access content in search engines and in turn, traffic to journal sites. Individual articles will appear in search engine results. Site visitors will be able to surf directly to an article from an external engine search. We will be able to display more concise and specific information, within DOAJ, at the article level.

Structured metadata

We will be structuring the metadata of article content to give it fixed and recognisable fields, tagged in a way that will make it easier to index, ingest, link to and find.

Google Scholar compatibility

The structuring of the metadata will, among other things, allow Google Scholar to crawl and index every single article item in DOAJ. Although some article content appears in Google Scholar currently, our unstructured metadata means that the Google Scholar indexers are left to guess a lot of the information and, when they can’t do that successfully, they skip it. My contact at Google Scholar provided us with the metadata specifications needed to ensure indexing in Google Scholar and we are confident that this will have a great impact on traffic to the original articles on publishers’ sites. It can take Google Scholar up to 8 weeks to crawl new content (an up to 9 months to come back and re-crawl additional content!) so we will have to be patient before we see any noticeable results.

Improved OAI-PMH

The last of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ improvements, we’ll be adding more granularity to our OAI-PMH service. At the moment, we’re generating OAI metadata using standard Dublin Core which, while meeting basic needs, isn’t specific enough around certain DOAJ-specific information such as citation.

 

The User Interface

An upgrade to our facets

We have upgraded the software that enables our facet searching. We have done this to both facilitate future developments around searching but also to make the process of selecting and filtering using facets more intuitive. We will also be introducing new facets that will reveal the new information we are collecting about journals, such as type of peer review, full text format, and The DOAJ Seal.  We’d be interested to know what you think about the new interface.

Subject browser

Probably the most exciting feature we are adding is a fully functional subject browser. We have received a fair bit of feedback asking for better browsing by subject capabilities. In DOAJ, all journals and their articles are classified according to the Library of Congress Classification. Every journal has one or two subjects assigned to it when it is accepted into DOAJ. Users will now be able to expand and collapse a tree to reveal the subject categories, or start by typing a keyword to reveal relevant categories. The number of records assigned to that subject will be revealed and a button offered to take users to the results.

Improved search results

We’ve cleaned up the search results for both journal and article entries. We’ve standardised the display of search results for articles to the Vancouver citation style and where relevant, we’re adhering to the NISO PIE-J standard that details recommendations for the presentation and identification of  e-journals. This means a simpler, cleaner display with standardised information clearly identified in search results for both journals and articles. Importantly, we’ve surfaced the APC information in search results: not simply whether a journal charges APCs or not, but how much they charge and in which currency.

Revealing the new application form data

All of the data that we are capturing in the new application form will now be displayed against the journals and their articles. We are redesigning the journal landing pages so that the most pertinent information is higher up the page (such as APC data), long URLs are hidden and we’ve adopted a two column treatment to give greater visibility to all of the new data. New data includes: permanent article identifier, waiver policy, archiving policy, plagiarism policy, machine-readable license and deposit policy. We’ve decided to simply display this information on the journal landing pages, rather than create facets for all of them: a facet for every new category would make the search interface clunkier and slow down response times. We’d be interested to hear from you of you feel that some of the new categories definitely need a facet in search.

Shareable, stable URLs

A regular user of DOAJ will tell you how the URLs are incredibly long and don’t “share” very well. They were slightly unstable: if a piece of metadata in the URL included a special character, such as an accent, then when that URL was shared, it often broke. We’ve stabilised the platform so that users can share URLs and the links will never break. The URLs will still be long so we’re plugging in Bit.ly, right next to the search results, so that users can generate a shortened but stable URL to share.

Display of continuations

DOAJ has been studying the NISO PIE-J recommendations in the context of continuations, of which we have several hundred in DOAJ. (A continuation is when a journal changes its title, ISSN(s) or both and these have, until now, been invisible in DOAJ.) We will be adding the correct visualisation of continuations to the journal landing pages. Note that this won’t allow us to create new continuations: that piece of work will be done later in the year.

DOAJ Seal

We’ve been publishing our list of journals that have received the DOAJ Seal since January 2014 but, so far, we’ve been unable to display that information on the site. We will shortly start adding the DOAJ Seal logo to journal landing pages and journal entries in search results.

Greater visibility to APCs: amount, currency, URL

There has been a lot of focus in research on author processing charges (APCs) and submission charges, particularly in the last 16 months or so and DOAJ data is often used as a basis of that research.  Heather Morrison’s recent article in Publications and Walt Crawford’s research published in Cites and Insights are two very recent examples.

DOAJ wants to raise the visibility of charges information even further to facilitate future research and to make it easier for authors, researchers and funders to make informed decisions on where to publish. As part of our commitment to raising the level of quality of data in DOAJ, we released yesterday a small but important change to the display of charging information. All journals accepted into DOAJ after March 2014, or back into DOAJ after a successful reapplication, will have the following information displayed against them:

  • Does the journal have APCs or Submission charges?
  • If so, how much and what is the currency of those charges?
  • What is the URL where that information is clearly displayed and stated on the journal web site?
  • If there are no charges, what is the URL where that information is clearly displayed and stated on the journal web site?

During our review of applications we request that ‘no charges’ is stated explicitly on the journal’s site and we will ask publishers to add that information if they have not already done so.

You will find the new information on each journal’s table of contents page; that is to say the long, detailed view of all the information and metadata that we hold for a journal accessible by clicking a journal’s title in search results. Two examples would be here where the journal has no charges, or here where the journal has APCs.

There are further improvements in the pipeline: we will move the information above the [more detail] link on these pages; we will add charge information to all records in search results; we will include amount and currency in our downloadable CSV file; and we will point the Publication Charges facet in search to the new data. These changes are scheduled for completion in April.