As we head into 2025, the last year of our current strategy, we have much to look forward to. This year will be one of opportunities as we expand our team, reestablish DOAJ in Europe, relaunch our Ambassador programme and rebuild the heart of our editorial review system. You can follow our progress on our Roadmap.
At the start of this year, we said goodbye to Judith Barnsby, who played a key role in laying out the editorial processes that help us stay on top of the ever-increasing number of applications. (We processed over 1000 applications in January 2025 alone! A new record!) Bringing our new Head of Editorial, Matt Hodgkinson, on board is a chance to establish new strategic connections and examine our editorial strategy to ensure it remains globally relevant, equitable and inclusive. Another new key team member, Lene Rasmussen, our Operations Manager, joined us in October 2024. Lene comes to us from the world of pensions and brings a wide range of skills in operations, business administration and finance. We’re also expanding our Editorial team to bring in additional capacity and skills in German, Portuguese and Ukrainian, With our new team assembled, we will focus on improving our transparency and openness, and be even more rigorous in all our processes, while remaining a key open infrastructure at the very heart of global scholarly publishing.
Since 2013, DOAJ has been a managed service of an organisation established and registered in the UK, Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA). 2025 is the year we set DOAJ up as an independent foundation registered in Europe. This change will benefit DOAJ and its community, saving us essential resources and time (and money!) around administration, financial obligations and governance. It’s the final step of a 3-year process, and we’re looking forward to its completion by the end of March.
Another cornerstone of DOAJ, our Ambassador programme, was refocused in 2024, and we have started 2025 with a restructured programme. Heading this are our three new (but not new to us) Senior Ambassadors: Ina Smith, Ivonne Lujano, and Vrushali Dandawate. We look forward to hearing about their work throughout the year.
Almost everything we do is directly or indirectly connected to the editorial work done by our Editorial team and volunteers: helping, guiding, reviewing, curating, monitoring and updating, driving us forward. Their editorial workflow system for this crucial work was primarily built in 2013 and needs an update to reflect current processes. In 2025 and into 2026, we will invest time and money to reorganise and rebuild the editorial workflow, ensuring it is fit for purpose and capable of dealing with the ever-increasing number of journal records. We will also look at how we onboard journals and try to find ways to lower existing barriers to entry without lowering our standards or changing our criteria.
Both of these pieces of work will drive us towards our goal of indexing more good quality journals, especially Diamond journals of which there are thousands. DOAJ has always been a key index for diamond open access journals. As we complete our work as key project partners in DIAMAS and CRAFT-OA and begin our partnership with ALMASI, we will continue to raise the visibility of diamond journals in our directory. As previously announced, retiring the Seal is a crucial step in this direction, and we hope to have that completed by the end of March.
Finally, we will spend the year exploring further ways to develop our platform. Our community survey last year revealed clearly that, through our services, we play a vital role in the discovery of open access scholarship worldwide but that the needs of our user community differ globally. For those who use DOAJ as a source of journal metadata, we will develop systems to help with the recency and accuracy of our metadata. We will launch a premium metadata service for those who want our most up-to-date metadata. For those who use DOAJ to find open access articles, we will improve how we handle and display article metadata. For those who use DOAJ to find a journal to publish in, we will, after an extensive piece of research done in 2024, upgrade our existing classification system to enable a more accurate and granular discovery of journals and articles.
There’s a lot here—we have lofty plans—and if there’s one thing we have learnt during the first two years of our strategy, it is that we are ambitious. We’ll adjust as we go along and publish regular updates on this blog. For those of you who like to keep an eye on us, you can follow our public Roadmap, which will have more regular updates.
None of our achievements would have been possible without the unwavering support of the organizations that consistently allocate a portion of their budget to DOAJ. It is because of your support that we continue to reach new milestones and maintain our position as the most significant and inclusive directory of open access journals globally!
Dominic Mitchell
Deputy Director
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