Using the DOAJ

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.

 

UPDATE ON REAPPLICATIONS AND NEW APPLICATIONS

In March 2014 DOAJ implemented much more detailed criteria for listing, which enabled DOAJ to provide granular information enabling universities, research funders and governments to check journals for compliance with Open Access policy and mandate requirements. 
 
This led to a reapplication process that was a necessary step towards ensuring that all journals in DOAJ (of which there were about 10000) met the stricter criteria. The criteria were produced as a response to the increasing demands from various stakeholders about transparency of open access journals and to retain DOAJ’s relevancy and importance for the stakeholders in open access publishing.
 
During the last 32 months DOAJ has accepted 3,700 journals, rejected 6,500 applications, monitored journals on a daily basis, removed 1,450 journals and delisted 2,850 journals for not re-applying to stay indexed. DOAJ also receives more than 300 new applications per month. 
This large number of reapplications and new applications is taking longer to process than we had envisaged and the team at DOAJ are doing our best to handle them promptly and efficiently. We would like to thank you for your patience in these last months.
 
Please do not hesitate to contact DOAJ at feedback@doaj.org if you have any questions about your application.
 
We take this opportunity to thank for all the support we get from academic libraries, library consortia, research funders, publishers and aggregators.
Many thanks and best wishes for the New Year!
 

DOAJ is now more accessible in China

The DOAJ website has been moved from Google-hosted javascript services which were preventing DOAJ being used in China.

Some parts of China block Google and Google services. DOAJ was using Google-hosted javascript services for its search functions. We have moved away from these services, a move which is strategically vital if we want our DOAJ Ambassadors for China to have any success in raising awareness of the site and best practice in open access publishing.

Usage from China is only a fraction of all usage. We are looking forward to seeing that usage grow over the coming months.

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.

Widgets! Embed DOAJ directly into your site.

Happy New Year to all of you! We have a gift: two shiny widgets! You can now embed a set of search results or a DOAJ search box directly into your web sites.

Embedding search results
It works like this: 1) carry out a search in DOAJ 2) filter and refine the results until they are as precise as you need them 3) use the Embed button ‘share|embed’ button at the top of the search results to reveal the code that you will paste into your web page. The results that you embed in your site update automatically as DOAJ updates.

Some possible uses might be: a publisher can now display a list of all its journals or articles, indexed in DOAJ, on its own site; a library can display all DOAJ indexed journals with no APCs that have the Seal; a researcher might embed a list of all open access articles with a CC BY license that are pertinent to her research group.

Embed a DOAJ search box in your site
You can also embed a DOAJ search box directly into your site, allowing your users to search for open access, peer reviewed journals and articles directly. A user carrying out a search in this way will be taken to the search results in DOAJ. The search box can be embedded into your site, library portal, web page or blog, making quality open access material more easily accessible alongside other content.

We’ve created a new page for the widgets which has a little more technical detail on how to configure them so they behave exactly as you want them to. As ever, we’re always interested in your feedback!

 

 

The Gold Open Access Landscape 2011-2014

At DOAJ we are used to working with big sets of data. We have over 10000 journal records, over 8000 reapplication records, over 5000 user accounts, and more than 2 million pieces of article metadata. Making a change to that data is no small feat and sometimes it requires a great deal of manual editing. We receive regular notification when teams of individuals have used that data to do a study on open access publishing globally or locally, or in presentations, at open access events or in policy papers. This makes us happy because we know that DOAJ is the foremost trusted listing of open access journals and, since all the data in it is re-usable according to the terms of our CC BY-SA license, we believe it should be used and re-used as much as possible! Until recently we had never heard of a single person taking it upon themselves to go through every record in DOAJ and then use that data to write a book about the landscape of gold open access publishing.

Never until Walt Crawford that is. You might recognise Walt’s name either from his blog ‘Walt at Random‘ or from his regular ‘ejournal on the intersections of libraries, policy, technology and media’: ‘Cites & Insights‘. Walt is a regular commentator on open access issues and his blog has been active since 2005. In September 2015, Walt published the PDF version of his book ‘The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014‘ on Lulu and I think you should buy it! Why? Well for one, you benefit from DOAJ and DOAJ has directly benefited from the creation process of the book: we were able to update many journal records as a direct result of Walt’s work. We were able to undertake a clean-up project because of Walt’s research—the size of which we had never been able to do before from just one source. We were able to identify and remove over 200 journals from DOAJ which, over time, had changed from the quality, open access journals that they were when they were first accepted into the Directory.

Walt has published a very good post on his blog about why you should purchase his book so I’ll not reiterate those reasons here. However, if you have ever used DOAJ data in your work, or if you consult the DOAJ regularly, or if you believe that it is important that DOAJ remains central to open access publishing, or if you want to show support for the open access movement then I urge you to purchase a copy of Walt’s work.