Our year ahead: 2026 strategic activities

We have published our new strategy and are now sharing details about our activities for 2026. They include: reviewing editorial processes and transparency; a multifaceted look at both our article and journal metadata; reviewing and renewing technology solutions; and, continuing our active participation in projects about Diamond open access.

In 2025, we received 8,887 applications, and 64% were rejected. We’re spending much of our time working on records that never see the light of day in our index. To put it bluntly: a large proportion of the money we receive from you, the community, is being spent on rejected applications. One of our highest priorities for the forthcoming strategic period and most certainly for 2026 is to shift that focus. The aim is to receive fewer low-quality applications, freeing up resources so we can work with publishing communities that strive to uphold high ethical standards and maintain the accuracy and recency of the journals and articles we index.

Transparency and trust

One thing we have learnt over our twenty-plus years of open access experience is that total transparency is often the key to a successful plan. We believe that reducing the number of low-quality applications can be achieved by:

Providing more detailed feedback to our publishing and journal community when communicating with them about their journals or applications.
Providing more detailed and transparent information on our website and in our communications.

Therefore, in 2026, we will:

Make sure that all implicit criteria used by our expert Editorial team are explicit in our Guide to applying.
Ensure that rejected applicants and removed or excluded publishers understand why we made our decision.
Share more information with the community about rejection and removal reasons.

Ensuring quality

Followers of our blog will know that we write a lot about quality and that we have a dedicated Quality Team, headed up by Cenyu Shen, our Deputy Head of Editorial (Integrity and Ethics). Cenyu wrote about the Quality Team’s work in January last year. Developing further themes that Cenyu raised then, this year her team are focussing on standardising the review, investigation and decision-making processes to help with a greater efficiency in dealing with the increasing number of cases referred to the Quality Team.

Keeping our journal metadata as up to date as possible

The knock-on effect of receiving so many low-quality applications is that we have less time to focus on the journals we already index. This has been a standing challenge over the past six years. Although it is ultimately the publishers’ responsibility to update and maintain journal metadata, we have a responsibility to our community to ensure a level of accuracy that the community expects.

Over the past five years, we have developed automated checks in our application form, a URL checker that we can run across all the links in our index and, more recently, experimented with various AI-assisted prompts to check for endogeny. We have also improved the efficiency of our journal processing by reorganising our forms and streamlining internal processes. Further developments are possible, particularly in the realm of AI, so this year, we are looking at:

Ways to optimise our editorial workflow, including a complete overhaul of our in-house editorial system. Our new Platform Manager, Brendan O’Connell, will be spearheading this work alongside our Editorial Team and Cottage Labs.
Other automated checks in 1) our application form that provide instant feedback to the person filling in the form, and 2) in the editorial review forms that help the Editorial team to facilitate a decision.
A journal preassessment service that will allow applicants to measure their journal against our criteria before submitting a live application.

A technology taskforce

Naturally, technology touches everything we do at DOAJ, not least the editorial processes described above. A key activity for 2026 is for us to investigate how to harness new and emerging technologies that help us meet our mission. For example, it is more out of necessity than lack of enthusiasm that we have adopted a wait-and-see approach with AI; we know harnessing its power will help us but we must do it carefully and in a way that doesn’t eclipse the much-needed manual verifications DOAJ is known and trusted for. Other technologies around hosting, search, and discovery are also developing at a fast pace. A much-needed technology task force will help provide clarity in this fast-changing area.

Updating our article metadata

Some of the most exciting developments are the changes we have planned for our article metadata. Our community consultation (Slide 26 onwards) in 2024 confirmed two long-held suspicions:

Many people use DOAJ as their first port of call when looking for research articles.
DOAJ users want more information included in article metadata.

Furthermore, whereas DOAJ’s article offering has remained static over the years, many of our colleagues in the open access space have made considerable changes to the metadata elements that they support, which means we are falling behind somewhat. OpenAlex (funder metadata), Crossref (author affiliations) and PKP (metadata enrichment) are just three examples.

The first three updates earmarked for 2026 are:

Ingest and display references
Properly support authors with multiple affiliations
Include support for organisation IDs, such as ROR

All three require changes to how we ingest and display articles, so expect to see an updated article XSD file and updated article pages on our front end.*

We are delighted that Crossref has agreed to fund this work. Receiving this funding allows us to move these updates forward in a separate development stream, ensuring they can be completed by the end of this year.

*Author’s note: increasing the metadata we display means increasing the metadata we collect. Since DOAJ started including article metadata in 2006, we have deliberately kept the metadata template for both ingesting and displaying articles as simple as possible. We believe this encourages more people to upload article metadata to us, especially if it’s a manual task. For example, over the last 12 months, more than 17,800 unique visitors to the DOAJ publisher dashboard manually entered article metadata. We can’t ignore that this is a substantial percentage of our DOAJ journal community.

Influence and impact

Influence and impact are notoriously hard to measure but we can get a grasp on how influential we are by understanding where DOAJ is mentioned in publishing policies, open access policies, national mandates, and funding mandates. For the first time, we will begin capturing and measuring where we are mentioned and where we have an impact on national publishing programmes.

We are continuing our involvement in the EU ALMASI project, which is aimed at aligning and mutualising nonprofit open access publishing services internationally. The project is in its second year and aims to improve understanding of the current landscape of nonprofit OA publishing in Africa, Europe, and Latin America. There are packages of work that will co-design and align measures for quality standards and training resources, as well as institutional and national policy development to ensure the sustainability of nonprofit OA publishing. DOAJ is excellently placed to contribute actively to this project.

Finally, DOAJ is a project partner for a fourth EU project, AEGIS, which we hope will kick off this year. AEGIS aims to further sustain and develop outputs and products from the CRAFT-OA project.

Hopefully, this blog post has given you some food for thought. Where can you help us with our activities this year? Does anything we are doing touch on your own organisation, or your own goals for the year+ If so, we’d love to hear from you and of course, if you have any questions about anything you have read here, please don’t hesitate to contact us.