We consulted with the community about the metadata we collect. The responses are helping us to ensure that DOAJ is up-to-date and meets the needs of its users. We will remove some links, we will remove some questions, and we are considering better support for some metadata elements. This is Part One of a two-part blog post. Go to Part Two.
In April 2024, we compiled a community questionnaire, made it available in four languages, and sent it to our global community. The consultation’s objective was to gather the community’s reactions to the metadata we collect. We received almost 1700 responses–a fantastic response!–from a wide range of countries.* Gold Leaf, whom we commissioned to do the work, then held twenty semi-structured interviews to dig deeper into the survey responses.
The findings were revealing, and we present them here. We’ve also published the headlines as a slide set. This post adds some context to those slides.
Much of the questionnaire was a temperature check on metadata–what we collect and don’t collect, display or don’t display. The results are also helping us decide on changes to the Seal, article metadata, and our rules around journal issues with mixed access control.
The findings are helping us to understand better our place in the discovery chain and how central we are to the discovery process. The consultation revealed that:
- Each stakeholder group has a different reason for using DOAJ, relying on us for different services or metadata items
- Users trust DOAJ and see it as essential to the scholarly publishing ecosystem.
- Our stakeholders don’t understand everything we do.
- Reasons for using DOAJ differ significantly between the economic north and south.
- Users aren’t aware of how far our metadata permeates the scholarly publishing ecosystem, for example, in discovery services they use daily.
If DOAJ is to remain operationally efficient and meet the needs of future researchers, librarians, and funders, we must find more efficient ways of getting updates to journal metadata and ensure that we are only storing and distributing links that are essential for the community.
We will stop displaying some links
Based on the consultation, we have made some decisions. Links to the following will be removed from our metadata:
- to the journal’s open access statement
- to the journal’s plagiarism policy
- to an example of an article with embedded license
We are not changing our criteria and the application form is not changing. Applicants will still need to provide these to help us with our review.
We will remove two questions from the application form
The following questions will be removed from the application form and our metadata:
- Does the journal allow for ORCID iDs to be present in article metadata?
- Does the journal comply with I4OC standards for open citations?
Neither of these questions is included as criteria: our criteria are not changing.
We will not change our policy around journal issues with mixed access
The survey results showed that most of our users do not want us to start accepting journals where some content in an issue is open access and some is closed access. Librarians represented the largest majority here and we are pleased to have received such an overwhelming response.
Next steps
We will also be removing the Seal, which has its own blog post; Part II to this one. We have added other findings described in the slides to our task list for future discussions, such as how and when we capture information about a journal’s open data and open research policies.
As always, if you have any questions on these two blog posts or the slides, leave a comment or get in touch.
*We didn’t receive any responses from China. We think that this might be due to the firewall that prevents access to SurveyMonkey but we cannot confirm this.
