As part of our continuous efforts to improve the visibility and discoverability of the journals we index, we have implemented three changes to enhance discovery:
(1) When you supply metadata to us, the ISSNs must be in the appropriate tag.
(2) The articles index page now has its unique URL: https://doaj.org/toc/articles/… plus the ISSN.
(3) We’ve added ‘country’ as a search filter to the dropdown on our homepage.
DOAJ plays an important part in the discoverability of quality, peer-reviewed, open access content. We create journal metadata built around our criteria, and the publishers themselves upload article metadata to us. We’re always looking for ways to improve content discoverability in the platform, and we’ve recently made two small but significant changes.
When you think of how widely distributed DOAJ metadata is, it’s actually quite daunting. We generate multiple metadata formats and make them available for free, increasing their global distribution. In the last 30 days, we have recorded hits to our API from, among others, Germany, Ireland, Indonesia, Brazil, Canada, Spain, Singapore and China. Users in Poland, France, Switzerland, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom have downloaded our metadata via our OAI-PMH service. It’s the same story for our Public Data Dump service, OpenURL, and journal CSV. And then there’s the 708,000 unique visitors to the site.
More precision around ISSNs
On 26th September 2023, we closed a loophole in our article metadata delivery by insisting that the type, print or electronic, assigned to an ISSN in metadata matches exactly what we hold in the journal record. The change was welcomed by many of the aggregators and discovery services downstream of DOAJ. It also leaves us with a huge metadata cleanup task that we are working on now. We are about to correct the ISSN values of approximately 1,3 million articles where either the wrong ISSN is in the wrong ISSN field or the same ISSN has been supplied in both ISSN fields.
A unique URL for the collection of a journal’s articles
Each journal entry in DOAJ has its own page, which is where you can find all the information we collect about journals and the article metadata. Although there has always been an Article tab, it has never had its own URL and was, therefore, impossible to link to. All journal homepages have a URL like this: https://doaj.org/toc/… plus the ISSN. The articles index page now has its unique URL: https://doaj.org/toc/articles/… plus the ISSN.
Search by country
Filtering search results by country has always been possible in DOAJ but we are seeing more and more interest from users on national profiles in DOAJ. To make this easier, we add ‘country’ as a search filter to the journal search and quick search.
We hope these three small changes will make our metadata even more useful and trustworthy.
If you have any suggestions for how we might make our metadata even more useful, please leave a comment!
