{"id":7828,"date":"2026-04-13T03:08:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T03:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.doaj.org\/?p=7828"},"modified":"2026-04-13T03:14:44","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T03:14:44","slug":"updates-to-the-guide-to-applying-appeals-integrity-and-ethics-and-wording","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.doaj.org\/de\/2026\/04\/13\/updates-to-the-guide-to-applying-appeals-integrity-and-ethics-and-wording\/","title":{"rendered":"Updates to the Guide to Applying \u2013 appeals, Integrity and Ethics, and wording"},"content":{"rendered":"

The quarterly update to the DOAJ Guide of Applying is presented by Head of Editorial Matt Hodgkinson<\/strong>: a revised appeals process, a new name for the Quality team\/criteria, i.e., Integrity and Ethics, new publishers, and a few wording changes.<\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Updates to the DOAJ guide to applying<\/a> are released quarterly as of last year<\/a>. For this quarter, version 2.8<\/strong>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A.<\/strong> Appeals<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We allow appeals<\/a> of our decisions to remove and exclude<\/a> journals and publishers. Last year, our appeals committee considered over 50 appeals. In more than 75% of cases, we declined the appeal. To improve the process, we are making these changes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. We will no longer consider changes made to a journal or publisher after our decision. Too many publishers have tried to rush policy and process updates to support an appeal. Appeals will now only consider whether a decision was made in error and will not be a chance to show improvements.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. We are clarifying that publisher-level appeals cannot be appealed by individual journals asking for an exception to the exclusion. If a publisher is excluded, only the publisher may appeal.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. We are clarifying that appeals must contain specific information to be considered.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    B. Integrity and Ethics<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Our Quality Team, which investigates potentially questionable journals and publishers, is being renamed to the Integrity and Ethics team and the Quality criteria they use are now the Integrity and Ethics criteria<\/a>. \u201cQuality\u201d is an ambiguous term and it is also confusing because we have a section on the \u201cQuality control process<\/a>\u201d for journals in our basic criteria. We believe the new name will be clearer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    C. Journals transfers to a new publisher<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    We recently updated the reasons why a rejected application<\/a> does not need to wait six months to reapply to include that the journal was transferred to a publisher with no other journals already in DOAJ. However, we don\u2019t reject<\/em> applications for that reason: that only applies when we remove an indexed journal. We decided to remove journals when this happens because we need to do full checks on the new publisher and how it is managing the transferred journal. We\u2019ve removed that item and instead noted this in the section on journal transfers on the Publisher information page<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    D.<\/strong> Minor wording changes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    More minor wording changes, following our clarification of what we mean by \u201cmust\u201d, \u201cshould\u201d, and \u201cmay\u201d in the last update:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      \n
    1. On the licensing & copyright page<\/a>, we\u2019ve changed \u201cyou may not\u201d to \u201cyou must not\u201d when referring to altering the terms of a Creative Commons license, to avoid any potential misunderstanding. We\u2019ve also made clear that for non-open access content, citing sources and stating the copyright holder, license, and any permission or fair use rationale are required.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    2. We already required journals to use two independent peer reviewers, with an exception for the arts & humanities, and we\u2019ve updated the wording in the quality control section<\/a> to make this clear.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    3. We\u2019ve fixed a typo in the Integrity and Ethics criteria.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

      Thank you to the editorial team<\/a>, particularly Leena Shah<\/strong>, Editorial Programme Manager, and\u00a0 Cenyu Shen<\/strong>, Deputy Head of Editorial (Integrity and Ethics), for their input and help with these updates.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      The quarterly update to the DOAJ Guide of Applying is presented by Head of Editorial Matt Hodgkinson: a revised appeals process, a new name for the Quality team\/criteria, i.e., Integrity and Ethics, new publishers, and a few wording changes. Updates to the DOAJ guide to applying are released quarterly as of last year. For this…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":378,"featured_media":5683,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","_kadence_starter_templates_imported_post":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[609,618],"tags":[1310,75,369,423],"class_list":["post-7828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-advice-and-best-practice","category-news-update","tag-appeals","tag-application-form","tag-open-access","tag-publishers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.doaj.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.doaj.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.doaj.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.doaj.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/378"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.doaj.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7828"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.doaj.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7828\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7836,"href":"https:\/\/blog.doaj.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7828\/revisions\/7836"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.doaj.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.doaj.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.doaj.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.doaj.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}