This is a guest post by Sophy, our UX Designer. Accessibility has always been a top priority in doaj.org’s redesign project, along with improving: user experience, navigation, and responsiveness on various devices, browsers, and operating systems. We approached the project with the idea that accessibility, as opposed to branding and visual design, is foundational to…
This is a guest post from John G. Dove, one of our DOAJ Ambassadors for North America. Covid-19 is hitting all of our institutions, such as libraries and the organizations which support them, very hard. At the same time, it is shining the public’s eye on the importance of access to information in general and…
This is a guest post by Souheil Houissa, editor of the North Africa & Middle East (NAME) group, and long-serving DOAJ volunteer. He wrote the article in February 2020 so the statistics are historical. (As of today, the group has processed 536 applications.) However, the general conclusions drawn throughout the article are still valid. Journal…
This is a guest post by Gaëlle Bequet, Director of the ISSN International Centre. ISSN is a partner of DOAJ. As of December 2019, the ISSN International Centre is the sole operator of the Keepers Registry. This service aggregates preservation metadata and ISSN descriptive metadata to report the archival status of digital journals. The Keepers…
We are excited to announce that we have appointed four new DOAJ ambassadors in Latin America, North America and Africa. Gimena del Rio Riande from Argentina will be our second ambassador for Latin America sharing this role with Ivonne Lujano from Mexico. Gimena is a researcher at IIBICRIT, the institute for Bibliographic Research and Textual…
It’s a new year and a new decade. This year, DOAJ turns 17 and much like a teenager, we have seen a major growth spurt over the last 4 years, peaking at a total of 14.25 million unique users at the end of 2019. 2020 will see further transformation into a maturer, more rounded service….
As hinted in a post yesterday, DOAJ is getting a nip and a tuck today, to make way for larger projects later this year: A completely new search front-end. It looks very similar to the old one, but with some major improvements under-the-hood (more powerful, more responsive, more accessible), and gives us the capability to build…
A very Happy New Year to all our readers. We wish you all the best for 2019. It’s going to be an exciting year for DOAJ and for open access. Much of the work which you can read about below will come to fruition in 2019 , as well as new opportunities presenting themselves. With…
A great blog post from the summer, published on the DataSalon blog and written by Jon Monday, caught our attention recently. Written in celebration of 25 years of the World Wide Web, the blog post looks ‘back on some design features from the early days of the Web’ which have been consigned to “browser history”….
You can’t run a service like DOAJ on a shoestring, or fund it on a hand-to-mouth basis, which is how DOAJ has been funded until last year, so large amounts of sustained funding are really crucial to the database’s security, stability, scalability and, ultimately, survival. Last month, DOAJ came under attack and the whole process…
