We are very glad to announce the launch of a series of educational videos. This first playlist is an introductory course created by the DOAJ Team itself to assist publishers, librarians, researchers and authors understand those standards and what an entry in DOAJ means.
Our goal is to continue developing our YouTube channel in order to create a comprehensive educational programme. Stay tuned and let us know your preferred topics!
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.
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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.
In accordance with the guidelines laid out by the GDPR, DOAJ has published a privacy information notice:
Please take a few moments to review the Policy. It includes information on:
If you have any questions, you can leave a comment here or contact me.
Dom Mitchell, DOAJ Operations Manager
Did you know about the search engine functionality in Chrome and other browsers?
Here some instructions on how to configure Chrome’s address bar to search DOAJ:
keyword search term in the address bar, replacing “search term” with your query.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 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…
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
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.
