Using the DOAJ

UPDATE: DOAJ’s site performance issues have now been solved

We are happy to inform that our site is now back to normal and our services have resumed. We are still working on a long-term stability strategy and we will be able to update you on that and also provide a more detailed explanation of our issues soon. Thank you again for your patience over the last few weeks.

——-

We deeply regret the current problems with the DOAJ site.  After much investigation and active measures, we can state that the DOAJ is effectively under attack from an unknown third party.

We have deployed a number of counter-measures to halt this attack, but with limited success, and are therefore forced to take even more extreme measures to attempt to mitigate this.  We hope that this will work but we cannot predict the outcome at this stage.

The DOAJ team would like to apologise for the intermittent service and to let you know we are doing our best to go back to normal operations.

New Privacy Information Notice

In accordance with the guidelines laid out by the GDPR, DOAJ has published a privacy information notice:

https://doaj.org/privacy

Please take a few moments to review the Policy. It includes information on:

  1. the information we collect from you and how we use it;
  2. why we need to collect personal data;
  3. how we store personal data;
  4. how we process it;
  5. for how long we store that data and when we delete data;
  6. who we share data with;
  7. how to delete your account and request that your personal data is deleted;
  8. how to submit a subject access request (SAR) to us;
  9. how to withdraw consent;
  10. how to complain.

If you have any questions, you can leave a comment here or contact me.

Dom Mitchell, DOAJ Operations Manager

Use DOAJ as a search engine!

Did you know about the search engine functionality in Chrome and other browsers?

To get DOAJ search results while on any web page, you can set your browser’s search box to interface the DOAJ search engine and land on DOAJ’s search results page.
This trick removes the need to first navigate to DOAJ from a web page, and then do the search or navigation.

Here some instructions on how to configure Chrome’s address bar to search DOAJ:

  1. Click the Chrome menu.
  2. Select: Preferences on Mac and Linux, or Settings on Windows or Chrome OS.
  3. Under Search, select Manage Search Engines.
  4. Under Other Search Engines, add DOAJ by entering a name and keyword. I used “DOAJ”
    • You will use the keyword to select DOAJ as the search engine from the address bar.
  5. Enter https://doaj.org/search?source={"query": {"query_string": {"query": "%s", "default_operator": "AND"}}}&ref=homepage-box as the URL. Click “Add”
  6. DOAJ search can now be accessed by entering keyword search term in the address bar, replacing “search term” with your query.

Update on discontinued journals

DOAJ will remove all journals that have ceased to publish unless they are continued by another title.

Although reversing a previous decision, we have taken this step after careful consideration in order to keep our metadata as relevant and as accurate as possible. Although there are clear advantages to retaining published articles from discontinued journals, there is also a downside. With the current number of discontinued journals in DOAJ standing at 208, over time this generates a lot of broken links—link rot increases over time—affecting the quality of our metadata. All of the library catalogues, discovery services, search engines and other downstream services which rely heavily on our metadata start inheriting that link rot.

[UPDATE: I should clarify that removing a journal and its content from DOAJ simply makes it unavailable to the public. DOAJ doesn’t delete anything. We are hoping to collaborate with an archiving partner to help preserve journal content. If those plans come to fruition there is no reason why some removed journals could not be reinstated. However, it is early days on those discussions. – Dom]

 

DOAJ’s Mission (updated March 2018)

DOAJ has just updated its mission to take into account our new Education and Outreach program. I thought that this would be a good opportunity to highlight and explain the elements of the mission in detail.

DOAJ’s mission is to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language. DOAJ will work with editors, publishers and journal owners to help them understand the value of best practice publishing and standards and apply those to their own operations. DOAJ is committed to being 100% independent and maintaining all of its services and metadata as free to use or reuse for everyone.

…to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals…

DOAJ’s aim has always been to increase the international reputation of open access publishing. Over the past couple of years, DOAJ has become a kite mark of quality, signifying that a journal a) meets the high criteria laid out in our application form and b) that a journal or publisher adheres to best practice as laid out in the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice. DOAJ encourages 100% open journals over hybrid journals, altmetrics over impact factors, any form of peer review to verify journal content quality, the use of permanent article identifiers and long-term digital preservation systems.

…research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language…

top10

Top 10 Countries in DOAJ

DOAJ realises that open access isn’t confined to the Global North and certainly not the English language. (A quick look at the top 10 countries with journals indexed in DOAJ will show you that.) Indeed, we see most advances in open access publishing coming from the Global South where open access is a default and is often mandated at government level. Open access isn’t limited to scientific, technical or medical journals (STM) but runs the entire gamut of scholarly publishing to include social sciences and humanities (SSH) titles too. DOAJ’s Education and Outreach program ensures that the DOAJ message remains globally relevant.

 

DOAJ will work with editors, publishers and journal owners to help them understand the value of best practice publishing and standards and apply those to their own operations.

DOAJ understands that standards and best practices can be daunting and that achieving those takes resource and can be hard to do alone. DOAJ wants to improve the overall quality, or perceived quality, of open access and believes that to do this, it must help journals and publishers to raise their game. Therefore DOAJ has a “helping hand” policy under which it will work with publishers, journal owners and editors to show them the value of best practice and standards and how to meet certain levels required to be accepted into DOAJ.

DOAJ is committed to being 100% independent…

DOAJ is owned by an independent C.I.C. (community interest company) called IS4OA. The statutes of the CIC ensure that DOAJ may not be sold. IS4OA was formed for the sole purpose of ensuring that DOAJ could continue as an independent entity after it moved away from Lund University in 2013. DOAJ is funded entirely by voluntary donations, either via membership or sponsorship and IS4OA is committed to keeping it that way.

…maintaining all of its services and metadata as free to use or reuse for everyone.

In the true spirit of open access—the BOAI definition of open access on which the DOAJ has built its criteria —the entire corpus of metadata in DOAJ will always be free to everyone. DOAJ will never charge for the provision of its metadata or for any of its services, be they online or in person. Other content on the site is licensed with a Creative Commons license and the codebase which DOAJ is built on is open source.

Dom Mitchell
Operations Manager

Parts of DOAJ metadata in my catalogue/discovery service/A-Z List have changed, are out-of-date or are missing completely. Why?

It’s time to update your index and/or ask your discovery service provider to do so!

We have received  several messages via our Feedback account from library catalogue administrators, their readers, and researchers asking why all of a sudden so many of the articles indexed from DOAJ are now missing? Within library catalogues, users are perhaps seeing a 404 message. On DOAJ itself, users are noticing that the article content included in DOAJ is much changed and reduced. Why is this?

Hopefully it is old news to you now that DOAJ has been undertaking its Reapplication project. Over the last 6 months, the DOAJ Team has made a final, huge push to process all the reapplications. This project is so very nearly complete: out of the 6359 reapplications submitted to us, only a handful are still to be re-checked. 2072 of the reapplications did not pass our new standards. This means that the range of journals in DOAJ has changed considerably; very quickly over a relatively short period of time.

Aggregators / Service Providers / Library Catalogue administrators: we strongly advise you to re-index / update / download again the DOAJ article metadata offering—via OAI-PMH, or our API—so that your catalogues have the most up-to-date version of our index. The DOAJ index changes weekly so it might be time to revisit how often you come to us for updates and increase that frequency. Learn more about how to interact with DOAJ.

If you are using the search or browse features at DOAJ, then be aware that some of the journals you are used to seeing in the Directory may no longer be there.

If you have any questions about the effect of the reapplication project on DOAJ, about indexing DOAJ via our API or OAI-PMH services, or even how to search and browse, then please leave a comment here or send email to feedback@doaj.org.

We have improved our XML validation

xml

We are happy to announce that we have improved the features of our xml validation. As an article XML is uploaded to DOAJ from the publisher area we will check to see if the uploaded file meets a number of criteria:

  • Is it actually XML? (have you given us a PDF by mistake?)
  • Does the XML meet the DOAJ article schema requirements?
If your upload doesn’t meet either of those criteria you will get an error message straight away.  It will either tell you we didn’t think the file was XML, or it will give you a message from our validator which identifies the first problem found when validating.
If your file does pass those checks, it will get entered into our upload queue.  You will need to check back on your upload page in a while to see if the upload was processed successfully.  When we process your upload, we carry out some more checks to make sure that the data in DOAJ remains consistent:
  • Do you reference any ISSNs that belong to journals you don’t own?  You can’t attach articles to someone else’s journals.
  • Do you reference any ISSNs that don’t appear in DOAJ at all?  We only take uploads for journals we know about, and your journal records need to contain all the correct identifiers if you want to reference them.
  • Do you reference ISSNs that are owned by more than one user?  Sometimes it’s possible for the DOAJ to think that more than one user has a stake in an ISSN.  In these cases we need to resolve who the true owner is before you can upload.
If any of these situations arise with your file upload, we won’t import any of the articles, and instead record an error against the upload.  When you look at the upload record on the page you will see a link in the Notes column which says “show error details“.  When you click on that it will tell you in what way the articles failed to process, and which ISSNs were causing the problems.
If you see any other error messages on your upload page, you should click on the “show error details” link if it is available.  If not, you should contact us at feedback@doaj.org and we will get back to you as soon as we can.