’10 web design features that are now browser history’ – or, at least, they should be.

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”.

Or at least they should have been.

At DOAJ, we review hundreds of journal applications every month from all corners of the globe, covering every topic imaginable. The applications themselves are always of varying degrees of quality and, sadly, so are the websites they refer to. From mid-December 2017 to mid-September 2018, our Triage function rejected without review 1754 poorly completed applications! Many of the reasons for rejection without review refer directly to a poorly constructed, poorly signposted website.

At least 6 of the items in Jon’s post are still seen by the DOAJ Team on a regular basis: hit counters; guestbooks; blinking text; scrolling text; animated gifs; and under constructions signs. So saying that they have been consigned forever to the bin may not be completely accurate but it certainly is wishful thinking on our part!

Sponsorship model and pricing for 2019

Last year, we launched our new sponsorship model. This was after feedback from existing sponsors that we needed to be clearer about the benefits and costs of sponsorship.

For 2019, after feedback from users, we will no longer be displaying sponsors on our homepage. This will help our homepage to render better on smaller screens.

DOAJ sponsorship costs and benefits for 2019

DOAJ 2019 sponsorship costs and benefits

 

In 2019, a Gold sponsorship for commercial organisations is £15,000 and £7500 for non-commercial entities.  A Silver sponsorship is £10,000, and £5000 respectively; a Bronze is £5000 and £2500 respectively. If you would like to know what the money is spent on, you can read this publishers report from 2017 (2018’s is coming soon) or this post about our new mission statement which covers the areas on which we are focussing. Alternatively you can send me an email and I would be very happy to give you more information.

If you are interested in becoming a 2019 Sponsor for one of the most important online resources in academic publishing, and in joining our existing group of fantastic sponsors, then please contact me directly: dom@doaj.org. I look forward to hearing from you!

Infrastructure and why sustainable funding so important to services like DOAJ

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 from diagnosing the problem to resolution revealed just how fragile the DOAJ ecosystem can be under those circumstances.

Below is a guest blog post is by Steven Eardley, the DevOps Engineer at our technology partner, Cottage Labs.  You may remember that the SCOSS initiative was launched last year to provide DOAJ and Sherpa/RoMEO with levels of sustainable funding that would ensure the survival of 2 services which had been earmarked as vital to the open access movement. I asked Steven to write this post because, after DOAJ took a battering, I thought it would be useful for our community to understand exactly what happens when DOAJ becomes unresponsive, what it takes to keep DOAJ up and running, and what a difference sustainable funding can make for a service like DOAJ.

Thanks for reading!

Dom

The Directory of Open Access Journals experienced some sustained and repeated downtime events mid July to mid August, which required significant intervention from Cottage Labs. This post describes what happened and explains how we mitigated the issue, and illustrates some of the inherent vulnerability which needs to be addressed.

The system
The main DOAJ database is built on ElasticSearch which we run over a number of virtual machines. The DOAJ web application is built on the Flask web framework and is written in Python.

As well as the search interface on the website, searches to our database come from the OAI-PMH interface, our Atom feed, and ‘widgets‘ embedded on users’ sites. The DOAJ also has an API for programmatic interactions with our content allowing, for example, publishers to upload their content. To keep the ElasticSearch index performing correctly for the rest of the site, we tend to tweak the rate limit for the API during periods of high load.

The problem
The DOAJ website communicates with its database (“data store”) via the web (also know as the ‘query endpoint’), giving us control over what kinds of requests are permitted and the ability to filter responses to prevent data from being leaked unintentionally. Not all of the requests to ElasticSearch come from our own servers however because the DOAJ search pages utilise JavaScript which runs on users’ browsers. This means that the data store must be publicly accessible for our search pages to work. We keep the rate limit for this fairly high so pages are responsive.

During the period mentioned, we saw an elevated request rate via the query endpoint which resulted in all of the site functions slowing down. Eventually the index was overloaded and the DOAJ website stopped responding. Recovery tended to be fairly quick and site performance would be restored for a number of hours. However, the downtime was persistent and reoccurring, sometimes multiple times in a day.

The cause
While we could see the quantity of queries to our index had at least doubled from its normal rate, we couldn’t identify the source of the queries causing the trouble and couldn’t look for long-term trends. We will find resource to improve this in the future but monitoring of this kind is costly and is currently out of budget. Therefore, we mainly had to diagnose via inference. Our immediate action was to disable the application components one by one, endeavouring to pinpoint the source of the excess load. We turned off the API, the Atom feed, the back end editorial admin pages, and finally the OAI-PMH interface. The latter had a small impact on the index stability – we saw reduced memory use in the index and it was coping somewhat better with the load. This pointed us towards the source of the problem: deep paging.

Deep Paging – ElasticSearch’s kryptonite
Deep paging essentially means that someone or something is scrolling through a large number of objects sequentially leading to high memory commitment; the server must hold the entire context in memory to get deeper and deeper into the results. We determined that someone was sending thousands of requests per hour directly via the query endpoint, instead of through the API, and furthermore essentially trawling through all results over a long period of time. That is to say: they weren’t using a provided feature, rather bypassing the features and using a hidden route.

Each time the system went down, the traffic took a while to resume, presumably because the trawl had to be started again from the beginning.

The solution
Our next task was therefore to block these external sources of deep paging. First, we changed the permitted referral parameter (e.g. “`ref=ui“` in the request URL) and the traffic dropped off. Success? Not quite. These parameters are easy to spoof so it was of no surprise that not long later, the site went down once again amid further high traffic. We tried the same configuration change again, this time changing the referral parameter to “`please-use-our-api“` – the ‘begging’ approach to reducing system load! Unfortunately that bought us even less time than before.

At this point we categorised this as something like a denial of service attack – although the chances are it wasn’t intentionally malicious, circumvention of our countermeasures and being a direct source of instability for thousands of other users is at least inconsiderate!

User agent blocking was the next measure we attempted to reduce the load. Since the query route is really just for our use, we decided it was reasonable to block some programmatic user agents, such as the Node.js http module, or the wget and curl utilities. Again we saw a temporary alleviation of the high load.

Of course, user agent strings are sent from the client from each request, so they can be altered at source. By now we’d identified the user’s IP address, and watched a few intermittent requests come in as the user was iterating and figuring out what we’d changed. Within a couple of hours, the torrent of requests resumed and our infrastructure once again creaked under the strain.

Since we’re not keen on IP banning and other heavy-handed measures we decided to address the problem within our application code and give the query endpoint some rules to filter out the sorts of traffic that give the index trouble: we now cap the results to a reasonable number expected to be viewed from the search page; we enforce paging limits to disallow queries that page a long way into our data set; and the query endpoint will reject a request that doesn’t look like it came from a user.

The lesson
We were a little complacent about our query endpoint’s obscurity. For a long time we’d planned to tighten up the rules on the search interface but, with DOAJ’s long list of other developments, it wasn’t a priority. Our endpoint was open and available to function like a little bonus undocumented API and this was stretched to the limit when it was being used to harvest all of our data rather than just facilitating search functions. This is a lesson for the design stage of the software process: keep the roles of system components as distinct and single-purpose as feasible.

In addition, this persistent grab of our data constituted a feature request – it should be easier to download our entire DOAJ dataset and we will be implementing that over the coming weeks.

The improvements
We have a handful of improvements coming soon in response to these lessons:

  • We’ll be re-writing our OAI-PMH interface to mitigate deep paging and high memory use.
  • The Search API will also see some more restrictions to paging depth and number of results – this will more closely reflect its role as a discovery interface and not a harvest endpoint.
  • Create a dump of our entire dataset on a regular basis, that way the entirety of the DOAJ’s data is more easily accessible to the public without strain on our infrastructure.

Watch out here and on our social media channels for further announcements regarding these new developments.

Are we overestimating the problem of “predatory” publishing?

In order to unravel the unjustified association of open access with bad or even predatory publishing Tom Olijhoek and Jon Tennant wrote this blog post, recently published in the LSE Impact Blog.
Last summer an international association of investigative journalists launched a massive media offensive on the problem of predatory publishing in science. The data shown were taken from the 2015 study by Cenyu Shen and Bo-Christer Björk, but without proper reference to it.
The study launched by the association of investigative journalists suggests a link between predatory publishing and open access publishing, and that the problem is huge.
However, according to Tom Olijhoek, the DOAJ Editor-in-Chief, and Jon Tennant, a leading voice in and advocate of open science, the facts tell a different story: predatory publishing does also exist in toll-access journals, and the total revenue of predatory open access publishers is 0,5 – 1,5 % of the total revenues of open access publishers.
Let us know what you think by leaving a comment here.

Learn about DOAJ and Open Access Best Practices

We are very glad to announce the launch of a series of educational videos. This first playlist is an introductory course created by the DOAJ Team itself to assist publishers, librarians, researchers and authors understand those standards and what an entry in DOAJ means.

Our goal is to continue developing our YouTube channel in order to create a comprehensive educational programme. Stay tuned and let us know your preferred topics!

Silver Sponsor Digital Science Answers Our Questions on Open Access Publishing and the DOAJ

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Jon Treadway, COO at Digital Science answers our questions.

-Your organisation has been supporting DOAJ for a few years now. Why is it important for Digital Science to support DOAJ?

The DOAJ is a crucial piece of infrastructure in the scholarly publishing industry. At Digital Science, since our inception 7 years ago we have looked to support and work in partnership with industry bodies rather than trying to reinvent or control them. Our relationship with DOAJ is one example of that approach, but one could equally point to our work with ORCID or VIVO.  We’ve also tried to set up broader initiatives that support players such as DOAJ, such as our GRID project or our collaboration on Blockchain for Peer Review.

-What is Digital Science doing to support Open Access development? Do you have any exciting projects underway?

The launch of Dimensions earlier this year was exciting, or at least we hope it was! Among many things, it is a research information system that offers researchers free access, without registration, to citation data. It integrates with the DOAJ, and so allows users to limit results only to those journals included in the database. Increased visibility for the DOAJ means increased visibility for Open Access journals and publishers, which can only be good for its development.

-What are your personal views on the future of Open Access publishing?

Open Access has established its credibility, its viability and its ability to achieve the goal of making research more accessible to millions of researchers. The biggest challenge may be the erroneous belief that Open Access makes it unaffordable for researchers in less wealthy institutions or developing nations to publish, that financial barriers to access are being removed only to be replaced by financial barriers to publication. Open Access is a broad church, with a wide variety of publishing options.

-What do you think that the scholarly community could do to better support the continued development of the Open Access movement in the near future?

This is not a new answer, but the more the community can move away from overly simplistic measures of impact, the more researchers will feel able to choose where to publish based on other factors, like price or quality of service or accessibility. I think that there will to be further shifts in library budgets to allow explore a wider range of models. I also think that there is still a basic culture change that needs to take place in the field.  Many academics (especially in arts and humanities) don’t yet see the value of open access and find it challenging.

-Much has been said recently about whether open access is succeeding or failing, particularly in terms of the original vision laid out by the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002. Do you think that open access has fallen short of this vision, or has it surpassed expectations?

Paradoxically, I think it has fallen short of the vision but has exceeded expectations. Cultural change takes a long time, and even longer time in academia and academic publishing. In that context, the progress of the Open Access movement over the last 15 years has been nothing short of stunning. It is easy to overlook that.

The Long-Term Preservation of Open Access Journals

The long term preservation of open access journals is one of the 7 criteria for the DOAJ Seal because DOAJ believes that it is an extremely important business process which a publisher of academic content should commit to. This couldn’t be more applicable than in the Global South where financial support and rigorous standards around journal publishing aren’t always available and, sadly, journals tend to just disappear from the Internet without warning. This is a huge problem for the academic footprint of the Global South, not to mention the hundreds of authors whose published papers just aren’t online any more and cannot be retrieved or ever cited.

When DOAJ established its criteria for the Seal in 2014, we were conscious that anything with a cost associated with it effectively put up a barrier to those low income or financially unstable journals to getting the Seal. DOAJ is committed to smooth that path as much as possible. In 2013, DOAJ announced a working agreement with CLOCKSS, one of the archives included on our application form, to seek out funding for a joint project which would get as many of DOAJ’s long-tail of single journals archived and preserved as possible. Unfortunately, those plans didn’t come to fruition and since then, the archiving and digital preservation landscape has changed somewhat.

What remains to be done is clear however: we must help ALL journals get into an archiving and digital preservation program and therefore I am delighted to welcome this guest post by Craig Van Dyck, the Executive Director of the CLOCKSS Archive.

Thanks for reading.

Dom, DOAJ Operations Manager

Users of scholarly content rely upon long-term access to that content. Scholarly research is long-lived, and users need to be able to re-access content repeatedly.

One concern about digital scholarly journals is that they could disappear from the web, which would undermine scholars’ ability to access the materials that they need.

In response to this concern, several Preservation services are available. These services work somewhat differently, but they all aim to ensure the long-term availability of scholarly content on behalf of end-users. Prominent services are CLOCKSS and Portico in the US, Scholars Portal and the Public Knowledge Project Preservation Network (PKP PN) in Canada, and CINES in Europe. Publishers are welcome to participate in any or all of these services. And some national libraries also have archival collections.

In today’s environment, it is considered best-practice for a scholarly publisher to include its content in a preservation service. To receive the DOAJ Seal, journals must be included in a preservation system.

In this post, we will focus on CLOCKSS, with some reference to PKP PN, because those two services both use the LOCKSS technology, which is arguably at the high-end of the spectrum of preservation solutions.

LOCKSS Technology

LOCKSS stands for Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe. The technology was invented at the Stanford University Library about 20 years ago. It relies upon multiple copies of the digital content being hosted at geographically distributed nodes. The software (which is open source) includes a unique polling-and-repair mechanism. The multiple nodes are constantly exchanging information about the content that they hold. If one node reports a difference vs. the other nodes, that one node is out-voted by the other nodes, and the variant node’s piece of content is replaced by the correct content from one of the other nodes. In this way, the archive is “dark”, meaning that end-users do not access the content, but the technology ensures that the data is in good repair.

The CLOCKSS Archive

  • The C in CLOCKSS stands for Controlled. This is because CLOCKSS uses twelve servers located at blue-chip libraries around the world, all with first-rate infrastructure and security. CLOCKSS is a free-standing 501(c)(3) charitable non-profit organization, using the LOCKSS technology and working with the LOCKSS technical and operational teams at Stanford, to preserve scholarly content for the long-term. CLOCKSS is certified as a Trusted Digital Repository. In its Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification report by the Council for Research Libraries, CLOCKSS received the only perfect score for technology.
  • CLOCKSS includes many Open Access publishers. For example, 24 publishers using the open source OJS publishing system are preserved in CLOCKSS. In total, CLOCKSS is preserving over 20,000 journal titles, with over 30 million journal articles and 75,000 books, growing rapidly each year.
  • One unique aspect of CLOCKSS is that when content is “triggered” for access, CLOCKSS makes the content freely available to all, under a Creative Commons license, which is a sign of the commitment to the concept of Open Access. A “trigger” occurs if a journal has disappeared, or will soon disappear, from the web. To date CLOCKSS has triggered 53 journals.
  • CLOCKSS can access publishers’ journals in two different ways: by harvesting the content from the publishing platform; or by the publisher providing the content to CLOCKSS by FTP.
  • Another unique aspect of CLOCKSS is the governance structure. The Board of Directors is comprised half by libraries and half by publishers. The scholarly community itself is thus responsible for the policies and practices of CLOCKSS.
  • Publishers sign an Agreement with CLOCKSS, which governs rights and responsibilities. There is a small annual cost for participating in CLOCKSS. CLOCKSS is financially sustainable, which is an important element for a long-term preservation archive. 350 libraries around the world, as well as 250 publishers, contribute to CLOCKSS’s sustainability.

Public Knowledge Project Preservation Network (PKP PN)

  • The Public Knowledge Project is a multi-university initiative developing (free) open source software and conducting research to improve the quality and reach of scholarly publishing. PKP is based at Simon Fraser University in Canada, which is where the Open Journal Systems (OJS) software was originally developed.
  • The PKP Preservation Network is an additional capability that enables easy long-term preservation of journals using OJS version 2.4.8 or higher. PKP PN uses the LOCKSS preservation software.
  • There are currently 800 journals preserving their content in PKP PN.
  • There are no fees for participating in the PKP PN. A journal manager must agree to Terms of Use.

Conclusion

It is strongly recommended that scholarly journals and books should be preserved for the long-term in a preservation system. Content that is not preserved is at-risk of being lost. And publishers who do not contribute their content to a preservation system are at-risk of not being considered a serious publisher. The value of long-term preservation is well worth a small cost.

Craig Van Dyck
Executive Director, CLOCKSS Archive
cvandyck@clockss.org