The community has chosen: introducing the new DOAJ Council.

Continuing the implementation of our new governance model, the DOAJ Council has been elected. The following individuals received the majority of the votes cast by the DOAJ community:

Shelley Allen, Emerald Publishing, United Kingdom
Perry Collins,University of Florida Libraries, USA
Frederick Fenter, Frontiers, Switzerland
Dora Elvira García-González, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico
Piero Grandesso, University of Bologna, Italy
Suzanne Kemperman, OCLC, USA
Christian Knudsen, Royal Danish Library, Denmark
Gail McMillan, Virginia Tech and University Libraries, USA
Donna McRostie, University of Melbourne, Australia
Rainer Rees-Mertins, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Switzerland
Karen Rowlett, University of Reading, United Kingdom
Stephanie Savage, University of British Columbia, Canada
Franck Vazquez, MDPI, Switzerland

The website will be updated with their names and a conflict of interest statement from each.

Two Council seats remain and these will be filled by invite only. DOAJ is looking for representatives from other organisations, preferably organisations operating out of low income countries or organisations whose mission matches that of DOAJ’s.

On behalf of all the DOAJ Team, I wish each of our new Council members a warm welcome!

The Top 10 most accessed articles in DOAJ so far this year

Digging into the metrics in DOAJ’s Google Analytics can be fun and enlightening. (And a total sink hole of my time.)

Here are the Top 10 most accessed articles in DOAJ so far this year. An interesting and somewhat curious collection largely driven, I suspect, by academic reading lists in schools, colleges and universities.

The article in Number 1 position is also the most accessed article for the whole of 2018. Accesses came from Indonesia, China, India, USA, Nigeria, Argentina, Canada, Iran, Mexico and Norway

What do you think of these stats?

Article details Unique Page Views
Study progresses on continuous curvilinear capsulorhexis
Guoji Yanke Zazhi. 2015;15(10):1737-1740
DOI 10.3980/j.issn.1672-5123.2015.10.16		 3,734
The Importance of Reflective Practice in Nursing
International Journal of Caring Sciences. 2013;6(3):319-326		 3,455
Creswell J.W.: Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches, London: Sage publications, 2009
Politeia. 2016;6(12):191-194		 3,245
García Avilés, José Alberto. Comunicar en la sociedad de la red. Teorías, modelos y prácticas.
Cuadernos de Información y Comunicación. 2017;22(0):325-327 DOI 10.5209/CIYC.55987		 2,849
Using the Sixth Edition of the APA Manual: A Guide for Students
Georgia Educational Researcher. 2009;7(2)
DOI 10.20429/ger.2009.070201		 1,969
Active Learning: The Dewey, Piaget, Vygotsky, and Constructivist Theory Perspectives
Jurnal Ilmu Pendidikan. 2016;9(3) DOI 10.17977/jip.v9i3.487		 1,948
Methods and Teaching Strategies Used by Teacher Education Faculty Members in one State University in the Philippines
Asia Pacific Journal of Multidisciplinary Research. 2015;3(5.3):36-44		 1,796
The Use Of Ansoff Matrix In The Field Of Business
Analele Universităţii Constantin Brâncuşi din Târgu Jiu : Seria Economie. 2017;2(special issue):141-149		 1,661
Project Scope Management Process
Baltic Journal of Economic Studies. 2018;4(1):118-125 DOI 10.30525/2256-0742/2018-4-1-118-125		 1,592
The Helpless Angel in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper
International Journal of English Language and Translation Studies. 2018;06(03):130-136		 1,579

Myth-busting: all open access journals can be listed in DOAJ

This is a myth.

People think that DOAJ exists to index all open access journals. A journal can only be indexed if it passes all of our criteria.

The Directory of Everything Open Access

The Directory of Everything open access would be a wonderful thing but of how much use would it be? DOAJ understands that users want: advice on where to publish; guidance on the reputation and credibility of a journal; peer-reviewed open access content published by quality journals. We serve a community who are interested in finding places to publish or read research for DOAJ-approved journals.

Of course, there are arguments that seeing all the open access research is better than only seeing a selection of it, but for sites which do this, where are the quality filters? In fact Unpaywall, which does aim to show as much open access content as it can, suggests to keep using DOAJ as the quality filter.

What defines an open access journal anyway?

And herein lies the problem. There are many grades, shades and colours of open access but only some of those are recognised by DOAJ. DOAJ takes its lead from the definition of openness and open access as described by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI):

By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

 There are many journals which have open access content in them but not all journals, or the articles in them, adhere to this founding definition of open access. Therefore a user will not find these journals or articles in DOAJ. Equally, open access articles from ceased journals are not included. Hybrid publishing is another example. Hybrid publishing is full of problems and there are concerns of double dipping. Essentially, hybrid publishing goes against every statement from the BOAI definition above so, from the beginning, DOAJ decided not to include hybrid journals.

DOAJ compared to SCOPUS and Web of Science

In an attempt to understand the number of OA journals which are not in DOAJ, we have recently started a detailed analysis of the journal lists of the 3 most used indexing services: SCOPUS, Web of Science (WoS) and DOAJ. As all 3 services serve to list quality journals according to a set of similar criteria, we would have expected these lists to overlap to a large extent.

However, when looking at the list of OA journals listed in DOAJ, SCOPUS and WoS[1], we found huge differences. Where DOAJ listed 12,582 journals (as of January 2019), SCOPUS listed 5920 journals and WoS only listed 4485 journals.

Annotation 2019-09-17 070103

Image by Tom Ojihoek

The reason for these discrepancies lies in the differences between the criteria for acceptance into each index; the differences in inclusion processes–DOAJ relies very much on action by the publisher to provide data–and the differences in update frequencies of each index. For instance, we found that many of the journals listed in SCOPUS but not in DOAJ had either not submitted applications to DOAJ or had submitted applications that were rejected. In other words, many of the journals that DOAJ is apparently lacking (but which are listed in SCOPUS or WoS) do not fulfill the DOAJ criteria while others are not listed in DOAJ because they simply did not apply.

Of the massive number of journals in DOAJ but which are not in SCOPUS or WoS, many are non-English journals from the Global South meaning that DOAJ’s coverage is greater, more diverse and more truly represents the global nature of open access.

It is clear from these data that not all open access journals can or should be in DOAJ.

Reference
1. Bruns, A., et al., 2019. ISSN-Matching of Gold OA Journals (ISSN-GOLD-OA) 3.0, Bielefeld University. DOI: 10.4119/unibi/2934907 We are very grateful for the work done by Bruns et al and that their raw data was available for us to analyze.

New Pilot to encourage Finnish Open Access Journals to apply to DOAJ

PRESS RELEASE

TSV loves DOAJ logoDOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) and the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV) are collaborating on a pilot project to encourage and help peer-reviewed open access (OA) journals published in Finland to be indexed in DOAJ. The Pilot runs from May 2019 to May 2020.

DOAJ has set an international standard for peer-reviewed OA journals. The index currently includes 13500 journals from over 131 countries publishing in 75 languages, showing the regional and linguistic diversity of research. 

For a variety of reasons, not all open access journals are indexed in DOAJ. A recent paper by Björk showed DOAJ covers 42% of OA journals published in Nordic countries, and there are considerable country differences – 68% of OA journals from Norway but only 23% from Finland.

In an open letter concerning Plan S, DOAJ called on representative groups in the social sciences, humanities and arts to collaborate with them and help them to identify journals that are fit for purpose, and which should be indexed in DOAJ. The TSV Publication Forum (Julkaisufoorumi in Finnish) answered that call and has identified ~160 potential OA journals published in Finland, of which 29 are already in DOAJ. TSV proposed a collaboration with DOAJ to help getting the rest of the Finnish OA journals indexed.

The pilot project will determine if these journals are DOAJ compliant and, if not, what they need to do to meet the basic DOAJ criteria. DOAJ, TSV Publication Forum and TSV Publication Services will work together to facilitate the process of the journals’ possible inclusion in DOAJ by communicating criteria, translating instructions, and organising workshops for training and preparing applications. A further goal  of the pilot is to encourage Finnish journals that are not yet OA to consider open access publishing. 

TSV Publication Forum maintains a national classification of peer-reviewed journals and book publishers that is based on evaluation by field-specific expert panels. All the identified potential OA journals have been approved to be peer-reviewed academic/scholarly journals. Many of the journals also use the TSV label for peer-reviewed scholarly publications, showing their strong commitment to high standards of peer-review and research integrity.

Most peer-reviewed journals in Finland are not-for-profit and are published by learned societies. TSV’s strategy for 2019-2023 includes developing open publication by member organisations so the pilot project launched with DOAJ is very much on the Federation’s agenda. TSV is also the national coordinator of Finland’s open science policy, and is currently working with stakeholders to create a national open access strategy as well as recommendations for responsible evaluation of a researcher.

Further information: 
Dominic Mitchell (dom@doaj.org)
Janne Pölönen (janne.polonen@tsv.fi)

University of Vienna hosts the DOAJ

University of Vienna logoTomorrow is the start of DOAJ’s biannual meeting, where team members and colleagues come together to discuss DOAJ strategy and developments, editorial policy and processes. Most of all, it is our chance to re-establish team connections, learn from each other’s experiences and renew friendships.

Previous meetings have taken place in Stockholm, Rome, Copenhagen, and Barcelona. This year, we are heading to beautiful Vienna in Austria, the world’s stage for classical music, opera and schnitzel! We are extremely lucky and honoured that the Library at the University of Vienna has agreed to host us for the 3-day meeting.

The University of Vienna, and Austria as a whole, have been extremely supportive of DOAJ over many years. The Austrian Science Fund (FWF) was the first state funder to agree to provide funding to DOAJ on a nationwide scale. They renewed their investment in 2017, this time joined by the Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy (BMWFW). 

We thank University of Vienna unreservedly for their hospitality over the next few days.

Myth-busting: Journals must meet the DOAJ Seal criteria to be indexed in DOAJ

This is a myth.

There is a common misunderstanding that for a journal to have its application accepted and be indexed in DOAJ it must meet all the criteria for the DOAJ Seal. There is an assumption, born out of that misunderstanding, that journals in DOAJ without the Seal are of inferior quality. This is also a myth.

What ‘Indexed in DOAJ’ means
Being indexed in DOAJ means that a journal application has passed our editorial review. Editorial review consists of an investigation by the DOAJ Editorial team and our volunteers who have researched whether or not the journal and its publisher do what they claim to do on the journal site and in their application to us. The investigation consists of checking all of the 50+ answers in an application to make sure that the information on the website is easy to find, clearly and accurately presented and matches the application. The editorial board is scrutinised and sometimes members of the board are contacted and their institutional connections verified, their work on the board is confirmed and which other boards that member sits on.

Being indexed in DOAJ means that the journal adheres to high levels of quality in its publishing services and services to authors and users, including: peer review, licensing terms, a strong open access statement, a fully functional editorial board and more. Being indexed in DOAJ means that the journal is a trusted open access journal and, in fact, many do meet one or more of the Seal criteria.

 

What the DOAJ Seal means
The DOAJ Seal is a stamp of quality. Journals that are awarded the Seal have verified that they correctly fulfil all seven criteria that DOAJ has chosen specifically as indicators of a Logo for the DOAJ Seal.clear commitment to open access best practices, of high levels of commitment to publishing standards and best practices, and that the open access model they adhere to is the most open.

 

The Seal has been allocated to just over 10% of the journals accepted into DOAJ since 2014. In some cases, the Seal has been withdrawn because the journal can no longer fulfil all seven criteria.

Journals cannot apply for the DOAJ Seal. The Seal is awarded after careful assessment of the journal website. If you think that your journal qualifies for the Seal, you should contact us to have it assessed.

It is important to remember that, whether they have the Seal or not, all journals in the DOAJ have met our criteria for inclusion as trusted, quality, open access journals.

Myth-busting: DOAJ takes too long to reach a decision

This is a myth.

From about 2012 until 2017, DOAJ was struggling to keep on top of the amount of applications being received.

Implementing new acceptance criteria and making 9900+ journals reapply exacerbated the problem and suddenly we had many reapplications and new applications coming in at the same time.

Triage
All applications go through an initial review to filter out incomplete or substandard applications. We call this process Triage. (From March 2015 to November 2017, Triage rejected 3112 sub-quality, incomplete or duplicate applications.)  Today, the average turnaround on an application from submission to initial review is a few days at the most.

From submission to decision
To improve the time taken to review an application and reach a decision to accept or reject, a revised and improved editorial workflow was implemented. You can read a full explanation on each of the 7 points in our progress report for 2018. The effects of those changes, which we have been monitoring carefully since 2018, are significant. 

Today we have no outstanding applications that were submitted in 2018, and only a small number dating from the first quarter of 2019 remain to be completed. We aim to reach a decision on all applications submitted within 6 months (and are still working hard to reduce that time too) although many are now completed in 3 months or less.

Even so, why does reviewing an application take time?
There are over 50 questions in our application form. Much of the work involved in reviewing an application is correspondence with the applicant and manually checking each answer. Each answer is checked for 3 things: that the answer in the form is correct; that the URL provided contains the information required in the question; that the information on the site is complete and correct.

Incommunicado
A contributing factor to the myth that DOAJ takes too long to reach a decision is the perception that DOAJ never responds. In the past, we did reject some applications without contacting the publisher about this. Since 2018, we have sent emails out for all rejected applications.

One of the most common reasons that an application is rejected is because we do not hear back from the applicant. There can be technical issues at play here: we suspect that sometimes our system-generated alerts, informing the applicant of the progress of their application, don’t reach their recipient. This is often due to particularly sensitive institutional firewalls, messages ending up in Spam folders, or email addresses no longer being valid. But it is also true that long delays in responding to DOAJ’s queries, or in making requested changes, can mean that an application is rejected.