Our community-driven data has long supported research into open access publishing trends. By providing open, downloadable historical datasets under CC BY licenses, we aim to promote transparency, good data practices, and meaningful contributions to scholarly communication.
Over the years, we’ve noticed how our community uses our data to understand trends, developments and changes in the open access publishing landscape. Being able to contribute to research on scholarly communications in such a meaningful way as a resource has been valuable – but also expected – as it is in line with our core values as a community-led open infrastructure. Many of our current and past team members have also contributed to the research landscape through publications, and our expertise and insights are often being called upon.
During November and December, DOAJ has a focus on data, specifically our own data! This post will give a bit of insight into the decision around this focus.
What is new?
- We have shared historical csv files to Zendo from 2003 to 2025 and given them a DOI.
- We have created a Zotero group of research using DOAJ data and information.
Isn’t DOAJ data already openly available?
Our most current data can always be downloaded from our website, completely open. However, being a live database, our data is constantly changing. Those using our data for research often download their own datasets, and though many share their data as good practice, there has not been one set place to keep track of all of these datasets, and the datasets available were always just the most up to date CSV file. In line with our recent recommitment to POSI (Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure), sharing our historical data aligns with accountability, transparency and sustainability.
We hope that by making historical data available online, we can contribute to good practice around open data, transparency and data citation. All files are of course open and shared under CC BY licenses.
How can you contribute?
There are three ways you can help us build the data and bibliographic resources we have initiated through Zenodo and Zotero, and make it easier for the community to find research using DOAJ:
1. Contribute to the DOAJ Data Zenodo community. If you use DOAJ Data for research, and download a new dataset through our public data dump, upload it to our Zenodo DOAJ Data Community. This means the dataset will get a DOI, which you can cite, and others can easily find the dataset(s) you’ve used, which increases transparency in research. It’s also extremely valuable to have a record of time stamped data used for research from a resource that is in constant change. We therefore highly encourage you to not only use the ones we have uploaded, but to also upload your own DOAJ datasets*.
*All datasets being uploaded to the DOAJ Data community on Zenodo are checked and verified by our team, so that only DOAJ data files are included in the community.
2. Add publications using DOAJ data to the Zotero group. We have started a record on Zotero with research using DOAJ – however, this is far from complete. Please help us populate this by adding research from your community to the list. This will help those working in the area find existing research, both historical and new. It also helps us keep track of how our community is using our database for research, and therefore gives us an indication of how our community wants us to adapt to developments.
3. Get in touch. Do you know of any good examples of researchers using our data, or perhaps you’re a keen DOAJ data user yourself? Get in touch with us, we would love to speak to researchers in our community who have used DOAJ for research.
Zenodo is a general-purpose research repository that allows anyone to share, preserve, and discover a wide range of research outputs for free
Zotero is a free, open-source reference management tool that helps users collect, organise, cite, and share research sources
