{"id":2489,"date":"2020-05-11T12:02:36","date_gmt":"2020-05-11T11:02:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.doaj.org\/?p=2489"},"modified":"2020-05-11T12:02:36","modified_gmt":"2020-05-11T11:02:36","slug":"whats-in-a-name-a-study-of-african-and-arab-journals-in-the-doaj","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.doaj.org\/de\/2020\/05\/11\/whats-in-a-name-a-study-of-african-and-arab-journals-in-the-doaj\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s in a “NAME”? A study of African and Arab journals in the DOAJ"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a guest post by Souheil Houissa, editor of the North Africa & Middle East (NAME) group, and long-serving DOAJ volunteer. He wrote the article in February 2020 so the statistics are historical. (As of today, the group has processed 536 applications.) However, the general conclusions drawn throughout the article are still valid.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

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Journal applications are reaching the milestone of 500 titles assessed by the ‘North Africa & Middle East’ (<\/span>NAME<\/span><\/i>) editor group at <\/span>DOAJ<\/span><\/i>. This group took over from the former Arabic group in 2016, and I have been honoured to be the editor of this group.<\/span><\/p>\n

The purpose of the NAME group is to assess as many applications as possible coming from both Arab countries and West Africa, as the regions of former groups had very few applications. <\/span><\/p>\n

Thanks to the efforts of the 6 volunteering associate editors, we have so far accepted 290 journals and rejected a further 196 applications, for different reasons. T<\/span>he rest of the applications include some completed assessments, 14 are still <\/span>in progress<\/span><\/i>, and 4 applications were put <\/span>on hold<\/span><\/i>. In fact, these numbers are very little, a “peanut” comparing to the <\/span>DOAJ<\/span><\/i> 14267 journals, including 11290 searchable journals at the article level and about 4, 620717 articles altogether from 133 countries. <\/span><\/p>\n

Most applications are coming from other (mainly Muslim) countries: Indonesia; and Iran.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of the 155 applications from Indonesia, our group has rejected 67 applications and accepted 88 titles of the total 1598 Indonesian journals included in the DOAJ<\/i>. <\/span><\/p>\n

In 2017, the total number of applications submitted to DOAJ<\/i> reached its highest ever level for one year. Out of the 2488 journals added that year, nearly one quarter (602) of them came from Indonesia. Certainly, for that reason, the DOAJ<\/i> managing editors decided, in September 2017, to involve the NAME group in reviewing the growing number of applications. <\/span><\/p>\n

Of the Indonesian applications we have reviewed, 51 out of 91 have Arabic as the main full-text language. However, there were also 146 in English and 79 in Indonesian.<\/span><\/p>\n

Indonesia is ranked the second country with 1598 DOAJ<\/i> indexed journals, after the United Kingdom (1604), and before Brazil (1461). <\/span><\/p>\n

Iran took the 7th place in the <\/span>DOAJ<\/span><\/i> with 522 journals indexed. <\/span>NAME<\/span><\/i> editor group has accepted about 1\/6th of them, that\u2019s 86 journals after editing 131 applications. Iranian journals tend to use English (303 titles) as the main language more than the national language, Persian (239 titles). Some journals are bilingual and very few are in Arabic or French (2 journals each). <\/span><\/p>\n

From the end of 2016, we helped with the evaluation of mainly those Iranian journals publishing in English; that\u2019s 80 to only 6 in Persian. The highest number of accepted Iranian journals in the <\/span>DOAJ<\/span><\/i> was in 2018 with 128 journals.<\/span><\/p>\n

Journal applications from the Arab states are coming from:<\/span><\/p>\n