Updates to the Guide to Applying – flipped journals, AI, quality criteria, and OA exceptions

The quarterly update to the DOAJ Guide of Applying is introduced by Head of Editorial Matt Hodgkinson, clarifying the wording on flipped journals, adding best practices for AI tools, formalising our quality criteria, and allowing for some limited exceptions to OA.

As we announced in July, all updates to our guide to applying are being released quarterly. For this quarter, version 2.6:

1. We’ve clarified the wording on flipped journals, i.e., journals that move from closed to open access.

2. As I blogged about for Peer Review Week last month, we’ve added Best Practices for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automated tools. We suggest that:

• Journals should publish an AI policy
• Authors should disclose the use of generative AI (genAI), beyond straightforward language correction, editing, and formatting
• Automated tools should not be listed as authors
• GenAI should not be cited as a source
• Peer reviewers and editors should not use genAI to create their assessments
• Journals should be transparent about their use of automated tools, validate the tools, and have human oversight of their outputs

We will consider whether these should become requirements.

3. Following January’s Quality Team blog post by Cenyu and Paula, we’ve added our existing quality criteria to the guide. These additional criteria are used by the Quality Team when concerns about a journal or publisher’s quality or publishing practices arise during our regular review process or are raised by community members:

• Presence of clear and reliable key information on the journal’s website
• Composition of the journal’s editorial board
• Signs of poor peer review processes
• Reputation of the journal, including any association with paper mills, excluded journals or publishers, or other disreputable organizations
• Journal management and operation

4. We’ve updated the type of open access section to clarify when non-open access content is allowed in an open access journal and how this should be handled. We give more detail in our Licensing & copyright page, including that:

• Text excerpts and figures may be used with permission or under fair use within articles
• DOAJ does not index hybrid journals
• If editors want to occasionally use non-scholarly content like poems alongside their articles, it is OK if that content is not OA and is used with permission

Thank you to the editorial team, particularly Leena Shah, Deputy Head of Editorial (Workflow), and the Editorial Policy Advisory Group for their input and help with these updates.