You might use it every day. You might not even know that it exists. Either way, the partially manually-updated change log is a legacy item left over from a time when DOAJ’s metadata services didn’t contain any information about when journals were added to or withdrawn from the index. Users would consult the two lists to ensure that their DOAJ holdings were up to date.
Should we retire it? Answer our very short survey
Better metadata, better transparency
Over the years, we have improved our metadata by adding new endpoints (such as an API) and building out others (such as our OAI-PMH feed) that now include this information. Discovery services have also started to take more frequent updates from us. Anecdotal evidence from at least 10 years ago now suggests that some discovery services only updated their DOAJ metadata every 6 months. Currency is as important as size, particularly with the advent of new super services such as OpenAlex.
The change log that we maintain has undergone some recent developments. We automated the journals added tab and we have updated and reviewed the reasons for rejection. However it remains problematic in several ways:
- It reflects a journal’s status at one point in time, which may not be the current status.
- A journal can appear, sometimes more than once, in both the Added and Withdrawn logs, causing confusion for users.
- Historic entries in the change log don’t get removed, which can also be misleading as to a journal’s current status.
- The Withdrawn tab relies on the team of Managing Editors to manually update it, a weak link in the editorial process.
DOAJ is considering retiring the spreadsheet because the base information of when a journal is added or removed is captured elsewhere:
- Journals added is recorded in the Atom feed, journal CSV, API
- Journal withdrawn is recorded in the OAI-PMH feed
We are seeking input from the community to help us understand how much the change log is used and how the information in it is used. Please let us know by answering the short survey.
