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Our application form is changing

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:

  1. Is the question needed to determine a journal’s inclusion in DOAJ?
  2. Does the question text ask exactly what we mean to ask?
  3. Does the question’s functionality allow for the correct answers to be collected?
  4. Is the question redundant after the functional upgrade?
  5. 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:

  1. 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 Some of the questions labelled for removal are outdated; for some of them, we check the information anyway so don’t need to ask for it on the form.
  2. 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.

India MCI includes DOAJ on the list of medical databases

Blog post by our Managing Editor, Leena Shah.

The Medical Council of India (MCI) In one of its recent announcements on 12th Feb 2020 has amended the “Minimum Qualifications for Teachers in Medical Institutions Regulations, 1998 ” to add a list of medical databases and indexes for aspiring medical professionals to publish their articles. We are very happy to say that this announcement includes DOAJ as one of the options along with other medical databases like Medline, PubmedCentral, etc.

DOAJ is a dynamic growing index and currently lists about 1295 quality, peer reviewed, open access medical journals of which approximately 800 journals do not have any article processing charges. Follow the simple steps below to find the journals in DOAJ:

Step 1 – click on the search button https://doaj.org/search

Step 2 – choose “journals” on the left facet

Step 3 – Under Subject choose Medicine [ 785]  or Medicine (general) [510]

Step 4 (optional) – Click on “NO” under APC to find journals that do not have APC

 

medicinesearch

Announcement: New DOAJ Ambassadors for 2020

We are excited to announce that we have appointed four new DOAJ ambassadors in Latin America, North America and Africa.

Gimena del Rio Riande from Argentina will be our second ambassador for Latin America sharing this role with Ivonne Lujano from Mexico. Gimena is a researcher at IIBICRIT, the institute for Bibliographic Research and Textual Criticism at CONICET, the main agency that fosters science and technology in Argentina.

Most of her research projects are related to Open Science and Digital Humanities, with a focus on the Global South. She is also the president of the Asociación Argentina de Humanidades Digitales (AAHD), and part of the Board of Directors of Force11, OpenMethods-DARIAH, Hypotheses, and Area (Open Education Network in Argentina).

Adrian Stanley will be our new ambassador for North America. Adrian is the recent past President for the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP). He has previously lived and worked in China and is well connected with the global publishing community, especially in places like Brazil (SciELO) and Japan (J-Stage). In his day job, he is the Managing Director, Publishers for Digital Science, which supports, invests in and incubates new startup companies like Altmetric, Dimensions, and Figshare.

Thomas Herve Mboa Nkoudou from Cameroon is our new ambassador in Africa. He will join the existing team of ambassadors for East, North and South Africa as the representative for West and Central Africa.  He is a PhD candidate in Public Communication at Université Laval (Canada) and deeply engaged in advocating for open science and promoting best practices of Scholarly communication in Africa. He has been involved in promoting Open access in Haiti and African French-speaking countries (projet SOHA) and is the initiator and organizer of the yearly Africa Open Science and Hardware Summit (AfricaOSH). He is a member of the OpenCon organizing committee and an instructor at Force11 Scholarly Communication Institute. He has made it his mission to make scientific resources produced in African- based universities more visible locally and abroad.

 John G. Dove, based in the United States has a career in executive management of information-intensive businesses including several that served libraries and academic institutions. His ambassador activities will focus on increasing the support to DOAJ from the community.

He is now an independent consultant and open access advocate who works with organizations that are seeking to accelerate their transition to open access.  He advises both for-profits and non-profits and has a particular interest in identifying what steps are necessary to flip an entire discipline’s scholarly record to open access. He serves on NISO’s Information Discovery and Interchange Topic Committee, has written for Learned Publishing, Against the Grain, and Scholarly Kitchen. John serves on the Board of Trustees of his local public library in Revere, Massachusetts. He has a B.A. in Mathematics from Oberlin College. 

We welcome all 4 new ambassadors to our team at DOAJ and look forward to working with them for a world where open access and open science will be the default for doing and communicating on Science and Arts.

DOAJ to add Crossref compatibility

metadata-from-crossref-logo-200In a series of metadata improvements, publishers will be able to upload XML in the Crossref format to us from 18th February 2020.

In 2018, we asked our publishers what would make their interaction with DOAJ easier and 46% said that they would like us to accept Crossref XML. Today we only accept XML formatted to our proprietary DOAJ format.

There are a few clarifications that we’d like to make around this improvement:

  1. We are not switching off DOAJ XML. If you are already supplying DOAJ XML to us, you may continue to do so. Nothing changes for you.
  2. If you want to switch to Crossref XML, you may do so whenever you like. However,…
  3. You cannot mix Crossref and DOAJ XML in the same file.
  4. An ISSN is usually but not always present in Crossref XML. When sending Crossref XML to DOAJ, an ISSN must be included for the upload to be successful.
  5. The process of getting article metadata into DOAJ doesn’t change: you will still need to continue to send it to us, for now.
  6. Crossref XML is uploaded from the same page that DOAJ XML is uploaded to us: https://doaj.org/publisher/ but you must now choose which format you want to send to us:
    format
  7. Publishers on the OJS platform, using the DOAJ plugin to generate XML, should continue to do so. No change is needed.

If you have back data in the Crossref format that you want to send to us, just upload the file to us in the normal way. Crossref facilitate various ways for you to retrieve your metadata from them if you don’t have it already.

Further announcements will be made next week.

 

OAPEN joins Think. Check. Submit.

TCS-Logo-H-RGB

OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) has joined the group of organisations endorsing the Think. Check. Submit. (TCS) initiative. This is an obvious yet important strategic development for TCS as there is as much need for the TCS tools and resources in the world of books, as in the world of journals. The addition of OAPEN to the core team allows TCS to broaden its remit and draw directly on the experience of OAPEN Director, Eelco Ferwerda.

Eelco said: “We’re delighted to join this important initiative to help authors select a reliable publishing venue. Quality assurance is an important part of our work, and by joining Think. Check. Submit. we can focus on the specific challenges facing authors of monographs.”

Think. Check. Submit. carried out a large survey of its users at the end of 2018 and the resounding opinion was that TCS needed to develop its tools and resources further to accommodate the fast-changing world of scholarly publishing. 

Sofie Wennström, representing the founding organisation LIBER & based at Stockholm University Library, said of the addition of OAPEN: “This is a great addition to the team, allowing us to develop Think. Check. Submit. to include good author advice about academic output formats beyond journal articles. Librarians working with scholarly communication support often get feedback from researchers in various disciplines that they want the long-format academic work to count. Providing a tool for sharing knowledge about book publishing was also suggested by users in a recent survey by Think. Check. Submit.”

About OAPEN

The OAPEN Foundation was established in 2011 to support the transition to OA books. The OAPEN Library hosts one of the largest collections of freely accessible academic books. OAPEN works with publishers and funders to build a quality-controlled collection of OA books, and provides services for publishers, libraries, and research funders in the areas of deposit, quality assurance, metadata enhancement, dissemination, and digital preservation.

About Think. Check. Submit.

Think. Check. Submit. provides a checklist that guides researchers through the process of deciding which journals and now books are best for their research. The process is intended to go beyond individual journal decisions to help researchers build up their journal evaluation skills. The checklist is now available in nearly 40 languages.

Think. Check. Submit. is run, and funded, by a coalition from across scholarly communications in response to discussions about deceptive publishing. Details of the organizations contributing can be found at https://thinkchecksubmit.org/about/. The current Think. Check. Submit. committee can be found at http://thinkchecksubmit.org/faq/committee/.

DOAJ is a founding member of Think. Check. Submit.

SILVER SPONSOR COPERNICUS PUBLICATIONS ANSWERS OUR QUESTIONS ON DOAJ AND OPEN ACCESS

Dr Xenia van Edig, Business Development, answers our questions.

-Your organisation has been supporting DOAJ for a few years now. Why is it important for Digital Science to support DOAJ?

As an information hub for all those interested in high-quality peer-reviewed open-access journals, the DOAJ is an extremely important platform. It is independent and committed to high-quality and peer-reviewed open access in all fields of STEM and HSS. With the re-vetting of all its content in 2016 and with the introduction of the DOAJ seal, its mission to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage, and impact of open-access journals has become even more evident. For us as an exclusively open-access publisher, it is therefore only logical that we support DOAJ.

–What benefits does being indexed in DOAJ bring to your journals?

Indexing in DOAJ increases the visibility of our journals and demonstrates that our journals adhere to best practices in open-access publishing. Furthermore, many libraries and institutions understandably only provide financial support for article processing charges (APCs) for journals which are indexed in DOAJ and therefore receive an external quality seal.

-Do you think that the DOAJ has been and/or still is important for the development of Open Access publishing?

Absolutely. The DOAJ plays a leading role in the development of best practices in open-access publishing. For example the DOAJ developed – together with OASPA, WAME and COPE – the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.

-What is Copernicus doing to support that development? Do you have any exciting projects underway?

Copernicus Publications has been an open-access publisher since 2001. In the past 18 years, we have helped many learned societies and academic institutions launch new open-access journals or transform their existing journals into open-access journals. In addition, we have been promoting open access in the peer-review process since 2001 by implementing the Interactive Public Peer Review, which is now applied by 20 of the 42 journals we publish. The current rise of preprint servers and the formation of initiatives promoting open peer review prove that this peer review model is still innovative.

We are also committed to enabling reproducibility of published research. Therefore, we provide authors with the opportunity to connect their article with underlying or related materials such as data, model code, physical samples, and videos deposited in suitable repositories through DOI linking. In this regard, we also signed the Enabling FAIR Data Commitment Statement in the Earth, Space, and Environmental Sciences.

These past years have focussed on making content accessible. The next ongoing challenge is to overcome the barriers regarding APC payments. We recently launched a national licence in Germany, with many universities and research centres participating. Together with our partners in libraries and funding bodies, we strive towards a seamless open-access experience for authors without worrying about APC payments.

-What are your personal views on the future of Open Access publishing?

I hope that further progress will be made in accelerating the transition towards a world where research outputs are publicly available and reusable. However, I fear that current major initiatives are focussing too much on the big legacy publishers – leaving out smaller publishers and those who are purely open access. While “read and publish” deals might be a step in transforming the publishing ecosystem, funders, consortia, and institutions should not forget about those who stood up for open access when the topic was not on “everyone’s lips”. Furthermore, even though many journals published by Copernicus are financed via article processing charges, APCs are not the only business model for open access.

-What do you think that the scholarly community could do to better
support the continued development of the Open Access movement
in the near future?

I think the current evaluation system for grants, tenure, etc., which still heavily relies on the journal impact factor, favours established journals and puts newer publication venues and innovative outlets at an unfair disadvantage. Of course there are many open-access journals with high impact factors, but there is a structural disadvantage since many open-access journals are newer.

In addition, faculty and students need to be more educated about open access. For many academics, their academic freedom to freely choose a journal for their articles seems to hinge on the fact that they do not want to deal with access and reuse rights. Many academics seem to think that everything is fine because they have access to the literature through the subscriptions of their institutions’ libraries. Furthermore, they do not have to deal with APCs when publishing in subscription journals. This means a lot of advocacy for open access is still needed.

-Much has been said recently about whether open access is succeeding or failing, particularly in terms of the original vision laid out by the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002. Do you think that open access has fallen short of this vision, or has it surpassed expectations?

Whether something is a good idea or not cannot be measured in number of articles or successful journal transformations. I think that most people involved in the open-access movement had hoped for a quicker transition. However, only because it has been slower than envisioned, the vision of BOAI – the public good of “the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it” – is still the goal to achieve. Around 17 years ago open access was not on the political agenda like it is today (e.g. Plan S). Therefore, I would say the movement has been successful.

 

 

First institution from the Middle East to support DOAJ!

We are very happy to be able to welcome King Abdullah University of Science & Technology, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as the first institution from the Middle East to support DOAJ based on the recommedations of SCOSS (www.scoss.org).

J. K. Vijayakumar (Vijay), Library Director says:

“As a strong supporter of Open Access movement and as the first adopter of OA policy in the region, KAUST Library believes in DOAJ’s mission and their valuable contribution to enhance best practices in OA publishing supported with standards and metadata. We feel proud to join the global group of DOAJ funding supporters” 

Thank you very much for your contribution!