One of our legacy metadata endpoints, our OAI-PMH feed, has been greatly improved with an enhancement that improves the accuracy of our metadata. Our OAI-PMH feed now includes a signal to systems, using a delete flag, when a journal and its article metadata have been withdrawn from DOAJ.
At DOAJ, we rely on publishers to send us their metadata, a contribution they make voluntarily. This tradition of voluntary sharing has been a cornerstone of our service, and we greatly appreciate publishers’ ongoing support. Publishers provide metadata about their journals during the application process and their article metadata once their journal is indexed. We make all our journal metadata freely available under a CC BY-SA licence and waive the article metadata rights with a CC0 waiver. We do this because we want our metadata to be consumed, used and re-used throughout the research process.
And it is used! All major search engines, discovery services, library portals, AI solutions like ChatGPT, and scholarly communications tools like journal finders use our metadata. The metadata is available from various “endpoints”, which are the different places a user can go to to retrieve it. We have our website search, a CSV, an Atom feed, an API, a Public Data Dump, and an OAI-PMH feed.
The OAI-PMH feed is a dynamic change log, constantly signalling that our metadata is updating. With new journals being added—21,117 journals, 10.54 million articles and counting—and sometimes withdrawn, the OAI-PMH feed signals a change to any system consuming it. Discovery products, such as those from Clarivate, which provided funding for the work, use the OAI-PMH feed to push regular customer updates. Adding the delete flag means that systems no longer need to do a complete overwrite of their DOAJ metadata holding.
Dominic Mitchell, Deputy Director of DOAJ, said: ‘The feedback we have received from the discovery and aggregator community about this enhancement has been fantastic. We are delighted that Clarivate agreed to finance this small but much-needed improvement. It’s been on our To Do list since we migrated to our current platform in 2013, and it feels great to finally knock it off the list!’
The sponsorship that Clarivate provided is one of the ways that organisations can support DOAJ. If your organisation is interested in sponsoring a specific enhancement or feature, please get in touch!
