Sign up to receive updates from us

DOAJ has never had a method to push updates to our users. We have always just posted information on this blog in the hope that it will find its audience. We are aware that some stakeholders miss important updates so we have launched an update service.

We will use the update service to inform you about:

  1. Our strategy and changes to it;
  2. Our technical roadmap and progress updates;
  3. Funding and funding models;
  4. If we add a new feature to the website.
  5. If we start a new campaign for signing up journals.
  6. Governance, particularly if we enrol new members to our Board, Council, or Editorial Sub-Committee
  7. When we need more volunteers to help us review journals.

Sign up here: http://eepurl.com/g3Y4v5

All sign-ups are managed via our Mailchimp account. DOAJ has a Privacy Policy which adheres to the guidelines laid out by the GDPR.

[This pst was UPDATED and CORRECTED on 25th May. DOAJ is not launching a newsletter service but a service which will push updates to people who have signed up.]

What’s in a “NAME”? A study of African and Arab journals in the DOAJ

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 applications are reaching the milestone of 500 titles assessed by the ‘North Africa & Middle East’ (NAME) editor group at DOAJ. This group took over from the former Arabic group in 2016, and I have been honoured to be the editor of this group.

The purpose of the NAME group is to assess as many applications as possible coming from both Arab countries and West Africa, as the regions of former groups had very few applications.

Thanks to the efforts of the 6 volunteering associate editors, we have so far accepted 290 journals and rejected a further 196 applications, for different reasons. The rest of the applications include some completed assessments, 14 are still in progress, and 4 applications were put on hold. In fact, these numbers are very little, a “peanut” comparing to the DOAJ 14267 journals, including 11290 searchable journals at the article level and about 4, 620717 articles altogether from 133 countries. 

Most applications are coming from other (mainly Muslim) countries: Indonesia; and Iran.

Of the 155 applications from Indonesia, our group has rejected 67 applications and accepted 88 titles of the total 1598 Indonesian journals included in the DOAJ.

In 2017, the total number of applications submitted to DOAJ reached its highest ever level for one year. Out of the 2488 journals added that year, nearly one quarter (602) of them came from Indonesia. Certainly, for that reason, the DOAJ managing editors decided, in September 2017, to involve the NAME group in reviewing the growing number of applications.

Of the Indonesian applications we have reviewed, 51 out of 91 have Arabic as the main full-text language. However, there were also 146 in English and 79 in Indonesian.

Indonesia is ranked the second country with 1598 DOAJ indexed journals, after the United Kingdom (1604), and before Brazil (1461). 

Iran took the 7th place in the DOAJ with 522 journals indexed. NAME editor group has accepted about 1/6th of them, that’s 86 journals after editing 131 applications. Iranian journals tend to use English (303 titles) as the main language more than the national language, Persian (239 titles). Some journals are bilingual and very few are in Arabic or French (2 journals each).

From the end of 2016, we helped with the evaluation of mainly those Iranian journals publishing in English; that’s 80 to only 6 in Persian. The highest number of accepted Iranian journals in the DOAJ was in 2018 with 128 journals.

Journal applications from the Arab states are coming from:

  • Iraq (61),
  • Algeria (25),
  • Egypt (22),
  • UA Emirates (21)
  • Morocco (9)
  • Jordan (5)
  • Saudi Arabia (4)
  • Yemen (4)

Some journals are based in the United States (19), bearing in mind that the country of the journal is linked to the address where the publisher is based.

Journals of Arab countries

Only 18 from the 22 Arab states are represented in the DOAJ; there are no applications from the Comoros, Djibouti, Mauritania, and Somalia.

Country Applications* Journals** DOAJ ***
1 Iraq 61 30 45
2 Algeria 25 5 24
3 Egypt 22 17 32
4 UA Emirates 21 12 10
5 Morocco 9 6 18
6 Jordan 5 3 4
7 Saudi Arabia 4 4 18
8 Syria 4 – –
9 Yemen 4 4 6
10 Tunisia 3 2 5
11 Lebanon 2 – 1
12 Oman 2 2 7
13 Bahrain 1 – 1
14 Kuwait 1 1 1
15 Libya 1 1 3
16 Soudan 1 – –
17 Palestine – – 1
18 Qatar – – 4
Total 166 87 180

*NAME group applications ** Journals accepted by NAME *** All journals in DOAJ. 

Table 1: Journals of Arab countries

As shown in Table 1, the NAME group has reviewed 166 journal applications and decided to include 87 of them, out of the 180 journals accepted in the DOAJ so far. The difference between the two numbers is justified by the change of the DOAJ editor groups at the end of 2017; many applications that were made in 2017 and before remained with the main database. For example, there are 24 journals in the DOAJ from Algeria, but we can find only 5 journals with the NAME group that have applied in July 2017 and later. (Public searching doesn’t include this distinction.) However, many titles were removed because they failed to reapply after 2014 or have not answered the changing requirements, and sometimes duplications may occur.

fig1

Fig.1: Journals of Arab countries

Journals of African countries

I have added South Africa to the list of African countries covered by NAME editor group to the table below to reflect an idea about the “gap” that exists between this country and the rest of the continent. (See also Ina Smith’s guest blog post: ‘Overview of the African open access landscape with a focus on scholarly publishing‘.)

This gap is also represented between Africa and the Arab countries on one hand, and the rest of the world (as shown in the DOAJ) on the other.  South Africa has 100 journals, whereas the rest of African countries together have only 29 accepted journals. Only four (4) of them were included by our group among 11 received applications.  

Country Applications* Journals** DOAJ ***
1 South Africa – – 100
Country Applications* Journals** DOAJ ***
2 Nigeria 3 1 8
3 Ghana 1 – 6
4 Kenya – – 5
5 Angola – – 2
6 Cameroun 1 – 1
7 DR Congo 1 – 1
8 Malawi 1 – 1
9 Mali 1 1 1
10 Ruanda 1 1 1
11 Uganda 1 1 1
12 Zimbabwe 1 – 1
13 Ethiopia – – 1
Total (without SA) 11 4 29

*NAME group applications ** Journals accepted by NAME *** All journals in DOAJ

Table 2: Journals of African countries

There are 525 journals in the African Journals On-Line (AJOL) database but only half of them are open access. 

fig2

Fig. 2: Journals of African countries

Some journals are also in the DOAJ, for example, two Tunisian journals are in AJOL. Arab North African countries have modest participation in AJOL as well.

On the other hand, many Sub-Saharan African countries are more represented in AJOL than in the DOAJ. For instance, Nigeria is the first with 222 journals (only 8 in the DOAJ) followed by 96 for South Africa, then Ethiopia (30), Kenya (29) and Ghana (27) that each has around 5 DOAJ titles. Except for South Africa which nearly has the same representation in both databases, the other African countries are modestly represented in the DOAJ.

Languages

English is the common language in the DOAJ in general and in the NAME group as well. It dominates the national languages such as Arabic, Persian, or Indonesian both for the applications and the Journals, but most journals are bilingual or multilingual. Besides English, Journals use Arabic and/or French for the Arab countries, and Persian or Indonesian with Arabic sometimes for the others.

English Arabic  Indonesian French Persian
NAME  Applications 468 119 79 34 11
NAME  Journals 264 56 48 11 6
DOAJ Journals 10.859 161 1307 985 239
Table 3: Languages of the Journals 

The table shows that almost half of the applications in every language was rejected. Journals in the NAME group represent only a small proportion of journals in English, Indonesian, Persian or French. The rest is assessed and accepted by other DOAJ specialised groups in those languages. On the other hand, Arabic, that is supposedly the national language of most countries covered by the group, represents only 34% (that is 56 journals out of 161 in Arabic). We may think that the remaining journals were treated in other groups, but in fact, many journals remain in the account of former DOAJ Arabic groups. NAME accepted 48 journals out of 1307 in Indonesian (nearly 4%), and only 11 from 985 journals in French (about 1,1%), and just 6 journals in Persian (2,5%). English is used in 264 journals of this group, and out of the 10.859 journals using English in all the DOAJ, they only represent about 2,4 %. Ranking the languages used in the DOAJ shows English in the first place, while Indonesian comes in the 4th rank, followed by French in the 5th whereas Persian takes the 11th level, and Arabic is placed the 13th. Spanish and Portuguese are the most used languages after English.

fig3

Fig. 3: Languages of the Journals

Figures show the same rank and proportions of those five full-text languages in both applications and accepted journals, but a few other oriental languages exist among the rejected applications. 

fig4

Fig. 4: Languages of  NAME Journals

Journal subjects

Journal subject classes are usually the same as the topics suggested as keywords in the applications:

  • 34 journals were classified in medicine,
  • 23 in education,
  • 16 in Islam and
  • 13 in science.

The results for NAME journals broken down by keywords have the same order. In DOAJ, social sciences took the second place in subject classes (604 titles), after medicine (786), and before both education (556) and education (general) (552). 

Journal Licensing 

The DOAJ requires that journals allow reuse and remixing of content in accordance with a Creative Commons license or other types of license with similar conditions. 

License CC BY CC BY-NC CC BY-SA CC BY- NC-SA CC BY-NC-ND CC BY-ND
Journals 113 61 45 36 22 1
Table 4: Licenses of the Journals

The CC BY license is the least restrictive, it allows distribution, remixing, adaptation, even commercially, and provided that the work is clearly attributed to the original author and source. This offers a maximum diffusion and use of licensed Journals. CC BY is the most used license in the NAME group journals:

  1. CC BY – 41%
  2. CC BY-NC – 22%
  3. CC BY-SA – 16%
  4. CC BY-NC-SA  – 13%
  5. CC BY-NC-ND – 8%

If we look at all the journal licenses in the DOAJ, we notice the dominating use of CC BY license and the low use of CC BY-ND, but the order is almost reversed for the rest. Some 385 journals are using their publishers’ own licenses. 

Many journal applications were rejected by our group editors because of ignorance or misuse of licenses. There is a lack of awareness about Creative Commons licenses. Some journals mention more than one license on their website because they misunderstand the difference, and many others confuse the licenses withholding copyright and retaining publishing rights without restrictions by authors (Questions 52 and 54).

Journals per year

fig5

Fig. 5: Number of Journals/ Year

The earliest date of an application received by the NAME group is 19/5/2015 but a bulk transfer of applications started in November 2016. My own records as  DOAJ Editor show that the earliest application I assessed was from April 2014 and the “last updated” date is not found for about 12 journals.

Generally, DOAJ has been accepting journals gradually in the first decade from 2003 to 2012. DOAJ decided in 2013 to expand its criteria. In 2014 the number of journals in the database went down because all journals were made to reapply under the new criteria. Some journals were removed after they failed to reapply in time or did not meet the new requirements.

In 2016 and 2017, the number of journals increased dramatically as many journals were accepted after reapplication and many others joined after awareness campaigns were organised. Furthermore, twelve DOAJ ambassadors were appointed in different regions of the world.  From 2018 on, journals have been added steadily at a reasonable rate and many regions and languages are reaching interesting levels in the DOAJ database.    

APCs, the DOAJ Seal, and Peer review   

After the update about Article Processing Charges (APC) in April 2016, journals were urged to provide the information about it. Around one quarter of the total journals in DOAJ ask for an APC and the same percentage is reflected in the NAME journals (70 journals). 

The DOAJ Seal is a qualification given to journals having best practices to answer requirements “related to accessibility, openness, discoverability, reuse and author rights”. Only two journals in the NAME group have been accredited with the DOAJ Seal: PSU research review (2018, UK) and Arab journal of nutrition and exercise (2018, UAE). This is very little compared to the total journals in DOAJ: 1381 journals have the Seal; 13157 journals do not.

When it comes to editorial review/peer review, DOAJ checks if journals have editorial boards and which type of review is done. The database shows:

  • Double-blind peer review (7382);
  • Blind peer review (4015);
  • Peer review (2593);
  • Editorial review (136); and
  • Open peer review (132).

On the other hand, the numbers for the types of peer review of journals from the NAME group are:

  • Double-blind peer review (119);
  • Peer review (65);
  • Blind peer review (43);
  • Editorial review (1).

In both cases, journals tend to favour the use of double-blind peer review, but they differ in other choices.

Conclusion

As we have no access to other groups’ details on their applications and rejections and because features of applications and accepted journals are not the same, comparisons and analysis could not be exhaustively made. However, we have managed to come out with certain conclusions that may help editors and managers to bring necessary changes to the process to assure best practices in terms of applications, assessments and use of the DOAJ database, especially concerning Arab and African journals.

Although many Arab journals are online, participation in the DOAJ is very little, and African journals tend to adhere to other databases. Rejection of applications from Arab countries is quite high and that is due to a reluctance towards OA, ignorance of the main features of Gold OA, and lack of appliance to principles of transparency and best practice for scholarly publications. Efforts need to be made to encourage publishing in Arabic and national languages, to assist publishers to meet requirements of peer-reviewing, publication ethics, copyright and licensing.

Raising awareness of Open Access is still needed among academia, journal publishers, and decision-makers in Africa and the Middle-East.

Provisional ISSNs versus confirmed ISSNs

At DOAJ, we insist that the ISSN for your journal is fully registered and confirmed at the time you submit an application to us. DOAJ does not allow provisional ISSNs. Applications which contain provisional ISSNs are rejected without review.

According to the ISSN International Centre in Paris, a provisional ISSN is assigned to a journal by the local national ISSN centre. An application for an ISSN can be submitted up to three months before the journal is launched.

The national ISSN centre is then responsible for sending the details of the new ISSN to the International Centre. The International Centre then registers the ISSN in their database as which point the ISSN has the status registered but not yet confirmed, that is to say, “provisional”.

A provisional ISSN becomes fully confirmed when the publisher informs their national ISSN centre that the resource has published two issues that contain at least five articles. (Each national centre has the right to adapt this and add restrictions to this requirement.)* The national centre then sends additional information to the International Centre to complete the basic record. Only then, will the record appear in the ISSN Portal as confirmed.

It is important that, before you submit your application to DOAJ, you check the ISSN Portal, and make sure that the ISSN(s) for your journal(s) is confirmed and that the title(s) match what you have on your site and in your application form.

*Corrected to add detail – thanks to Ammad Zafar for contacting us.

We can now fix article metadata ourselves

As part of our continued strategy to enhance our metadata offering, and looking forward to 2021 when our strategic focus will be on DOAJ’s place in the discovery chain, we are constantly looking for ways to improve the quality and recency of the DOAJ article metadata.

Errors in article metadata are usually reported to us by users of discovery services at libraries or by the discovery services themselves. The errors are often a broken URL or a missing article.

Since 2013, DOAJ’s stance on correcting metadata has been to contact the journal’s publishers and ask them to send an update to us. However, this approach is of limited success:

  • some publishers don’t respond,
  • some don’t know how to make the correction and,
  • since we do matching on the URL, the process often leads to duplicated articles.

As of yesterday, DOAJ can edit article metadata itself, including the URL, directly in the database. This makes changes immediate and goes a long way to improve the reliability of the DOAJ metadata. Importantly, it allows us to act quickly on queries sent to us by our discovery service colleagues.

The crux of the matter, when it comes to the accuracy of DOAJ metadata, remains unchanged however: all 3rd party services should update their copy of the DOAJ metadata regularly. DOAJ metadata updates every 30 minutes. Some 3rd party services only update their copy of our metadata every 6 months.

COVID-19: turnaround times may be affected

As with most organisations, COVID-19 is having an effect on DOAJ. Although we are an organisation without physical offices (virtual, already remote-working and Cloud-based), our team members and volunteers are all affected in real ways.

This means that we may take longer than usual to process applications. Many applications are processed in under 3 months but this may increase over the coming weeks. We ask you to be patient.

If you are a publisher waiting to hear from us about an application, the standard rules still apply:

  • do not email for a status update if you submitted your application less than 3 months ago.
  • before you contact us, check that emails from us aren’t in your spam folder. (Remember that our volunteers will email from their own email addresses and not DOAJ ones.)
  • always contact us using the Contact Us form and include the journal title and ISSN(s).

On behalf of everyone at DOAJ and all our volunteers, I’d like to thank you for your understanding but, more importantly, take great care of yourselves in these times of uncertainty.

Dom Mitchell
DOAJ Operations Manager

Heads up! Our API is changing.

The DOAJ is changing its application form. This means that there will be downstream implications across all of our metadata output channels, including the API.

A new version of the API will be released in Q3 2020. This new version will not be fully backwards compatible.

Those of you submitting applications via the API, or who are using the API for journals search and retrieval, will need to adjust your integrations.

Not all functions will be affected: for those of you who are uploading article metadata to us, nothing will change; there is nothing for you to do.

If you have any questions, please post them here.

Further announcements will happen here and on our Twitter feed.

Our application form is changing

The current application form is now 6 years’ old. It is very long. It needs an upgrade in terms of functionality and its content needs a review. A new form will go live in Q2 2020.

The editorial team and our UX designer have carefully reviewed each question using the following criteria:

  1. Is the question needed to determine a journal’s inclusion in DOAJ?
  2. Does the question text ask exactly what we mean to ask?
  3. Does the question’s functionality allow for the correct answers to be collected?
  4. Is the question redundant after the functional upgrade?
  5. Can the question text be reduced, simplified, made clearer in the context of the new UI?

The editorial team then considered if other questions needed to be added to the form. We will be adding three new questions, (none of which are part of the Basic Criteria for inclusion):

  • the country of the society/institution;
  • whether the journal allows for ORCID integration; and
  • whether the journals’ references adhere to the I4OC standards.

At this point, I’d like to underline two Very Important Things:

  1. Our form is changing, not our criteria. Some of the questions labelled for removal are outdated; for some of them, we check the information anyway so don’t need to ask for it on the form.
  2. Any additional changes that may be required for Plan S certification have no bearing on this work.

Once the new form goes live, journals will be encouraged to update their information with us as soon as possible.

From the form as it is today, the questions that are suggested for removal are:

Question number Question text
8 Platform, Host or Aggregator
9* Name of contact for this journal
10* Contact’s email address
11* Confirm contact’s email address
19 Amount (submission charges)
20 Currency (submission charges)
21 How many research and review articles did the journal publish in the last calendar year?
22 Enter the URL where this information can be found
27 Does the journal allow software/spiders to automatically crawl the journal content (also known as text mining)?
29 Does the journal provide, or intend to provide, article-level metadata to DOAJ?
30 Does the journal provide article download statistics?
31 Enter the URL where this information can be found
32 What was the first calendar year in which a complete volume of the journal provided online Open Access content to the Full Text of all articles? (Full Text may be provided as PDFs. Does not apply for new journals.)
33 Please indicate which formats of the full text are available
54** Will the journal allow the author(s) to retain publishing rights without restrictions?
55 Enter the URL where this information can be found
56* Your name (Applicant)
57* Your email address (Applicant)
58* Confirm your email address (Applicant)

*All applicants will need to sign in or register before they can submit an application, therefore these 6 questions become redundant.

**This question is being merged with the one before it and re-worded to: ‘Does the author(s) or their institution retain both full, unrestricted copyright and publishing rights?’

Once the new form goes live, the specific answers for those questions being removed will no longer be available to download.

We welcome the community’s feedback on these changes and look forward to discussing them with you.

The Keepers Registry is now available on the ISSN portal

This is a guest post by Gaëlle Bequet, Director of the ISSN International Centre. ISSN is a partner of DOAJ.

KeepersLogotype_BD

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 Registry is now fully integrated with the ISSN Portal. The latter provides a complete and accurate overview of a serial title’s journey from initial publication to transfer of responsibility and to long-term preservation by archiving agencies. The ISSN Portal is indeed the authoritative database for serial title identification and tracking.

Both libraries and publishers want easy and persistent access to scholarly materials across the Internet. The shift from print to digital format for all types of continuing resources, particularly journals, and the need to archive not just digital serials but also ongoing ‘integrating resources’ is a challenge. Archiving agencies are addressing this challenge and supporting the Keepers Registry as a tool to monitor the archival status of digital content.

Craig Van Dyck, Executive Director of CLOCKSS, USA, posits that “The Keepers Registry performs several critical functions: exposing information about which scholarly journals are preserved, and which volumes, and by which preservation archives; providing a normalized platform for users to find the information, and for archives to integrate with; and a social structure for archives to come together to collaborate. Digital preservation is an evolving field, and collaboration is key to moving forward. The ISSN International Centre makes a lot of sense as a home for the Keepers Registry.”

The Keepers Registry collects preservation metadata, supplied on a regular basis by 13 archiving agencies globally. National libraries, non-profit organisations, academic consortia cooperate with the ISSN International Centre to disseminate up-to-date information about archived serial titles and titles at risk.

Jeffrey van der Hoeven, Head of the Digital Preservation department at the Nationale Bibliotheek van Nederland (KB), Netherlands, explains that “From the perspective of long-term preservation, the Keepers Registry fulfills an important role for KB in determining the integrity of its collection”.

Grant Hurley, Digital Preservation Librarian at Scholars Portal, Canada, states that “The Keepers Registry is a crucial component of our collective preservation ecosystem. Keepers Registry gives its stakeholders the ability to evaluate what materials are being preserved and by whom, and therefore, what materials may still be at risk. As a preservation service provider, Scholars Portal benefits from exposing its holdings data in a consistent and reliable way, which ensures its preservation practices are transparent and supports the trust of its user communities.”

Our partner archiving agencies are: Archaeology Data Service, British Library, Cariniana Network, CLOCKSS Archive, Global LOCKSS Network, HathiTrust, Library of Congress, National Digital Reservation Program China, National Library of the Netherlands, PKP Preservation Network, Portico, Scholars Portal, Swiss National Library.

Keepers Registry is available for free through the ISSN Portal.

For information about specific professional services or to join the Keepers Registry as an archiving agency, please contact the ISSN International Centre (Email: sales@issn.org)

A statement regarding the JCT tender for Plan S

In the recent tender document published by cOAlition S for the development of a Journal Checker Tool (JCT), it is stated very clearly that DOAJ is the preferred source of data for the gold open access journal compliance route. DOAJ already collects and publishes the 3 pieces of metadata which must be included in the first iteration of the JCT. 

DOAJ has decided that it will not officially partner with any provider bidding for the tender and neither will it submit a joint bid with a provider. Instead, the DOAJ team is focusing on the changes needed to the platform so that it is ready for future iterations of the JCT. Providers submitting a tender to cOAlition S should be aware that these changes have costs and these will need to be covered. 

DOAJ will gladly work with all parties submitting a tender and provide them with a breakdown of those costs, as is stated as required on page 6 of the tender document.

CLOSED: Looking for ten experts for our Editorial Sub-committee

Applications are now closed.

DOAJ is looking for volunteers for a new editorial sub-committee. The sub-committee will provide advice to the DOAJ Editorial Team, Board and Council on editorial matters.

The sub-committee will meet for one virtual meeting every quarter, probably of about 1-2 hours.

If you are interested, please send an email to our Editor-in-Chief, Tom (tom@doaj.org), which includes:

  • which of the field(s) below you can offer expertise in;
  • details of any previous editorial experience that you have; and
  • the names of two people who can confirm your experience.

DOAJ is looking for ten experts in the following fields:

  • medicine
  • life sciences
  • physical sciences
  • social sciences
  • humanities
  • the arts
  • statistics
  • publishing/research ethics

The aim of the sub-committee is to provide advice on editorial issues uncovered during the review of an application or a journal which is already in DOAJ. These are often issues raised by the DOAJ Editorial Team and which require specialist input. For example:

  • editorial process, workflow, publishing procedures
  • content quality
  • publishing technologies and best practice
  • publication ethics
  • legal and copyright issues

The sub-committee operates in an advisory capacity. Advice may be sought on DOAJ’s own editorial policy, or we may call upon the sub-committee to provide objective advice on appeals or complaints brought to DOAJ, often from publishers who have had an application rejected or a journal removed.

Candidates should have direct experience in academic publishing, as publishers, editors,
reviewers or librarians. If you know of anyone in your network who you think would be suited to this position, please share this post with them and ask them to contact us.

When selecting members for the sub-committee, DOAJ will ensure that diversity is maintained, particularly diversity in language and subject. DOAJ is an adopting organisation of the C4DISC Joint Statement of Principles.