APCs

NEW: continuations, improved tables of contents, feedback on a journal, APC granularity, and more…

Very soon, we will be releasing new functionality on DOAJ that will improve the detail in the journal record, increase DOAJ’s accuracy even more and will encourage greater input from the community. We have also abandoned our policy to remove journals that have ceased publication.

Continuations

Ever since we migrated to our new platform, we have been trying to find a slot in our development schedule to correctly display journal continuations on our site. It was important for us to get this correct, both in terms of the metadata and the display, so that users could easily understand how one, or several, journals transformed into a journal with a new title and ISSN. This new development will allow us to correctly display a journal’s timeline as it goes through name and ISSN changes.

Send us feedback on a journal

A decreasing amount of the data in DOAJ is old and DOAJ is always grateful to receive updates from users who get in touch to alert us to broken URLs or a change of title. With this in mind, and to make feeding back as simple as possible, we will add a ‘Tell us about this journal’ button to every journal entry in DOAJ. We hope this will encourage greater input from our users and lead to more updates to journal entries. This development is perfectly aligned with DOAJ being curated by the community and really facilitates an up-to-date resource.

Greater granularity for APC information

We know. The APC information on DOAJ was misleading. It lumps together 2 distinct groups of journals into one big ‘No’ group. We have broken that group out into: No, where we have up-to-date information from journals that they DO NOT charge APCs; and No information. ‘No information’ is the group of journals which has submitted a reapplication to us and we have yet to review it. The number of ‘No information’ journals will diminish in size as we work our way through the reapplications. I wrote about this inaccuracy previously.

Retaining the records – journals that have ceased publication

As long as they fulfil some basic criteria, we will no longer remove journals that cease publishing and we will even add back into DOAJ journals that were removed only because they stopped publishing. This change of policy could potentially add hundreds of articles back into DOAJ along with tens of archived journals.

Access from China

We have had several complaints from users in China that they were unable to use DOAJ. We realised that this is because the site uses Google javascript services and Google is banned in some parts of China, or by some institutions. We have now migrated most services off Google-related services (apart from Analytics) and are confident that the user experience for users in China will be vastly improved. This is perfectly times as we embark on a year-long project to increase awareness of open access in China.

Oh, and watch this space… In early June, we’ll be adding ~175 000 PLoS articles to DOAJ… More on that later.

 

A Funding Opportunity for APC-free Open Access Journals and Platforms

This is a guest post by Pablo de Castro, Coordinator for the OpenAIRE FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot.

OpenAIREplus_logoThe FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot, as launched by the EC and OpenAIRE in May 2015, was mainly designed as a tool to fund Open Access publishing fees for publications arising from completed FP7 (7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development) projects. This is its main area of activity and this work is starting to bear fruit, with over 300 funded Open Access publications after a year of operation.

However, most of the journals in the DOAJ charge no APCs to their authors. Moreover, lacking a proper business model, funding opportunities for these journals are scarce beyond governmental and/or institutional funding and specific calls such as the Canadian SSHRC’s.

This is why this pilot has extended its funding scope to also cover APC-free OA journals and platforms through an alternative funding mechanism released on May 3rd. This funding mechanism will allow journals to collect support for the implementation of technical improvements on their publishing workflows. Its features and requirements will be thoroughly discussed at an OpenAIRE webinar on May 12th.

This initiative will specifically offer an opportunity to establish closer links between OpenAIRE and APC-free OA journals and publishers. While fully Open Access publishers like Ubiquity Press and Copernicus are OpenAIRE-compliant, OpenAIRE’s main focus has traditionally been—and will remain—on OA repositories and repository networks. Through this initiative, this will now be extended out to OA journals, allowing a deeper technical harmonization to take place in the APC-free OA publishing landscape.

One of the key technical improvements to be funded will be having the journal’s outputs regularly indexed at article level  in DOAJ. 69% of the OA journals currently listed in DOAJ are indexed at article level, which means there’s room for improvement. OpenAIRE is eager to promote this article-level indexing in DOAJ as a standard that will result in more visibility for the global OA content production.

Another strongly recommended enhancement is the systematic inclusion of the funding and project information in the article-level metadata within the publishing platform. While this is already a requirement for OpenAIRE-compliant repositories (at least for EC-funded projects, i.e. FP7 and Horizon 2020), it is only very rarely happening in APC-free Open Access journals at the time, even when it’s a key aspect of the way the contextual information around a publication is collected and shared. This collection of funding and project information will in fact be key for identifying eligibility for this alternative funding mechanism.

We are very much looking forward then to collecting interesting funding proposals from APC-free Open Access journals and platforms in the next two months. Make sure to register for the May 12th webinar if interested in this funding opportunity!

Our new CSV file is online!

Our new, improved CSV file of journal metadata is now online and ready to be downloaded!

The updated file includes all of the new information that we have been collecting and recently started displaying with our site upgrade such as APC information, whether the journal is part of an archiving program, which type of peer review and more! The old file had 17 columns of information; the new one has 54!

Remember that the amount of information in the CSV will increase as each journal has their reapplication accepted to remain indexed in DOAJ. There are currently 510 journals with the new information completed.

All information in the CSV file is shared with you under the terms of a CC BY-SA license.

As always, let me know if you have feedback or questions!

 

(Updated) Historical APC data from before the April upgrade

UPDATED: 25th May 2016
We have now broken out the APC facet on the web site to show 3 categories:

No information: journals for which we have received a reapplication which has yet to be processed. This is the majority of the journals in DOAJ. As we process these reapplications and accept them, this figure will go down over time. We have the APC information in the Admin system; the records just need to be reviewed. For every reapplication accepted, one will drop from the ‘No information’ total and be added to the Yes or No total. For every reapplication rejected, one will drop from the ‘No information’ total only.

No: these journals have submitted updated APC information to us and DO NOT charge APCs

Yes: these journals have submitted updated APC information to us and DO charge APCs.

The numbers in the text below are now historical but were true as of the site upgrade in April 2015.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

In my post the other day, I promised to provide the APC information from the old site. Here it is as of today (11th May 2015):

APC?   Number of journals

N             6283 (67.6%)
Y             2999 (32.3%)
No info         9 (0.1%)
TOTAL   9291

Today there are 10,508 journals in DOAJ which leaves  1217 journals unaccounted for in the old APC data above. These are all journals that have been accepted into DOAJ under the new criteria. (We have accepted 1217 journals into DOAJ since March 2014.) We know from the new data that 364 of them do have APCs. Therefore 853 journals have NO APCs. Then we can work out the following TOTALS for ALL journals in DOAJ:

APC?   Number of journals

N             7136 (67.9%)
Y             3363 (32%)
No info        9 (0.1%)
TOTAL  10,508

This also means that the APC facet on the new site should display:

APC?   Number of journals

N             853 (8.1%)
Y             364 (3.5%)
No info  9291 (88.4%)
TOTAL  10,508

88.4% of all the journals in DOAJ have yet to reapply.

 

 

 

The new site upgrades are live; it’ll take some time for the data to settle

All of our new site upgrades were successfully rolled out to the site last Wednesday. We’d like to hear what you think of the upgrades!

A few comments about what you will see now on the site:

  • I mentioned that we will need some time for the data to settle. The site displays the new dataset only. That means that the data will grow as publishers resubmit their reapplications and those are accepted back into DOAJ. If you have been monitoring the data closely, there will be a large jump in the figures you are reporting on so you’ll need to account for that in any analysis that you do. Specifically, the number of journals with or without APCs has changed and the totals for the number of articles published per year have also shifted. I shall publish a blog post shortly that contains the last counts of the APC data and articles per year before the site was upgraded. This will serve as a historic record only but it is important that it is available online.
  • Every journal has an extended ‘home page’ on DOAJ that reveals all the new data we’ve been collecting in our new form. There’s all the important bits up at the top, especially the APC information and then, by clicking on the ‘More’ button, you can reveal information about licensing, copyright and best practices that the journal adheres to.
  • We’ve improved the way that tables of contents are displayed so you can now see clearly the volumes, issues and, if a journal has one, a continuation.
  • We’ve tidied up the URLs. For example URLs for journals now look like this http://doaj.org/toc/2175-8042 instead of like this http://doaj.org/toc/0006191878084b8d8bddae52ce72c948. An improvement; I hope you agree!
  • Try our built-in URL shortening service from Bit.ly. It turns this:
    https://doaj.org/search?source={%22query%22%3A{%22filtered%22%3A{%22filter%22%3A{%22bool%22%3A{%22must%22%3A[{%22term%22%3A{%22_type%22%3A%22article%22}}%2C{%22term%22%3A{%22index.license.exact%22%3A%22CC%20BY%22}}%2C{%22term%22%3A{%22index.classification.exact%22%3A%22Health%20Sciences%22}}]}}%2C%22query%22%3A{%22match_all%22%3A{}}}}%2C%22from%22%3A0%2C%22size%22%3A10} into http://bit.ly/1IQ11j3 in two clicks!
  • Finally, we’ve added OpenURL back to the site so for any of you who were using that service to link out to DOAJ, you should find that those links now resolve again.

Thanks for your patience as we settle into the new data structure. It’s going to take some time for things to even out, not least because our site upgrade has revealed the true nature of the data and we have some data clean-up tasks to do.

If you have any specific questions about what you are seeing then do get in touch!

Greater visibility to APCs: amount, currency, URL

There has been a lot of focus in research on author processing charges (APCs) and submission charges, particularly in the last 16 months or so and DOAJ data is often used as a basis of that research.  Heather Morrison’s recent article in Publications and Walt Crawford’s research published in Cites and Insights are two very recent examples.

DOAJ wants to raise the visibility of charges information even further to facilitate future research and to make it easier for authors, researchers and funders to make informed decisions on where to publish. As part of our commitment to raising the level of quality of data in DOAJ, we released yesterday a small but important change to the display of charging information. All journals accepted into DOAJ after March 2014, or back into DOAJ after a successful reapplication, will have the following information displayed against them:

  • Does the journal have APCs or Submission charges?
  • If so, how much and what is the currency of those charges?
  • What is the URL where that information is clearly displayed and stated on the journal web site?
  • If there are no charges, what is the URL where that information is clearly displayed and stated on the journal web site?

During our review of applications we request that ‘no charges’ is stated explicitly on the journal’s site and we will ask publishers to add that information if they have not already done so.

You will find the new information on each journal’s table of contents page; that is to say the long, detailed view of all the information and metadata that we hold for a journal accessible by clicking a journal’s title in search results. Two examples would be here where the journal has no charges, or here where the journal has APCs.

There are further improvements in the pipeline: we will move the information above the [more detail] link on these pages; we will add charge information to all records in search results; we will include amount and currency in our downloadable CSV file; and we will point the Publication Charges facet in search to the new data. These changes are scheduled for completion in April.

Shortcuts to key datasets in DOAJ; suggest others!

In response to feedback from the community, here are some shortcuts to key sets of data in DOAJ. (All results are sorted by the date that the item was added to DOAJ, with the most recently added at the top.)

Journals and article processing charges (APCs)

No APCs http://bit.ly/1nNDwdM

Has charges http://bit.ly/1n4KDDb

No information on APCs provided http://bit.ly/1p7vP67

 

Journals with a CC license

CC BY http://bit.ly/1rjc3q9

CC BY-NC http://bit.ly/UmHlPP

CC BY-NC-ND http://bit.ly/1nahC8C

CC BY-SA http://bit.ly/1p201Na

CC BY-NC-SA http://bit.ly/1tqAhOM

CC BY-ND http://bit.ly/1n4NrjO

Not CC-like http://bit.ly/1k8mEnd (this is for journals who have some sort of license in place that is not equivalent to any of the existing CC licensing options. This may be due to territorial or geographical differences where perhaps CC licenses are not generally recognised.)

Get in touch!

There are probably many others that could be added to this post. Leave a comment (or email us via ‘Contact us’ on the DOAJ site) and let me know which ones you would find useful. I’ll then add them here.

 

A few notes about our legacy data

We regularly receive notification that DOAJ data has been used for analysis; analysis done by publishers, librarians, students, technologists, bloggers and many others. That the data is central to so many studies continues to reinforce the importance of the DOAJ in the open access movement. We are confident that, once our current upgrade is complete, and when all the existing journals have been re-evaluated, DOAJ will provide data of an even higher quality that is incomparable to the “old” DOAJ; that is updated more frequently and of a previously unseen level of granularity. It will be a dataset monitored by a large, international network of Associate Editors and Editors, consistently checking and reviewing.

That the data is so regularly used places a responsibility at DOAJ’s door to ensure that the level of data quality is high. This is a responsibility that we take seriously and so I thought it worth clarifying a few points about the DOAJ data.

 

“This site is undergoing maintenance”

The data in the DOAJ database has been collected over a 10 year period and in those last 10 years, not only has the data been through several migrations and transformations but we have seen the size of DOAJ grow from 300 to just short of 10 000 journals. That rate of growth is increasing year on year. This means that we have a large amount of legacy data.

In 2013, we announced that, in response to the changing nature of open access, we would change significantly the inclusion criteria for journals to be listed in the DOAJ, developing our back-end systems accordingly to match the dramatic increase in the resulting workload.  The Community was involved as we sought opinion on the changes we should make. The changes needed amounted to a huge piece of development which required certain activities to be put on hold. Additionally, DOAJ migrated platform in December 2013 so the routine activities of adding journals, removing journals and adding article metadata had to be placed on hold. (Adding new journals was eventually on hold for just over 4 months; removing journals for just under 3.) It wasn’t without a good reason though. DOAJ was migrated to an open source, standards based stable database, hosted by our technical partners Cottage Labs. This also necessitated a substantial clean up of the legacy data.

The result of such a huge project meant that the usual level of data maintenance by our Editorial Team decreased. It didn’t stop – during the first quarter of 2014, 92 journals were earmarked for removal – but for a few months, the public view of DOAJ remained relatively static because the usual weeding and refining was on hold for a few months. There are still areas of the DOAJ data that we know needs to be reviewed and corrected.

Previously, not all information was compulsory

A publisher applying for a journal to be included in the old DOAJ was only required to provide 6 initial pieces of information. Once accepted, the publisher was encouraged to return to the site to provide further information about the journal. One such piece of information was the author processing charge (APC). This is clearly an important piece of information that authors, in particular, like to know up front. Therefore we took the opportunity, when we were designing the new application form, to raise the visibility of this information, require it on application and make it a compulsory question. Naturally, this means that our legacy data has holes in it which need to be filled. All the new journals applying for inclusion after March 19th 2014 have already answered this question. Once we start the re-application process, the ~9700 existing journals in DOAJ will have to answer this question. This process is scheduled to begin in the 3rd quarter of 2014.

All DOAJ data is publisher-provided

While we can force an answer to a question in a web form, we cannot force someone to return to DOAJ and update their information. Of course, information changes over time and often we find that publishers have forgotten to update us. Our system of regular review – our aim is that every journal be reviewed at least once a year – hopes to catch these changes and correct them as quickly as possible. Our new network of Associate Editors will do this more efficiently and pro-actively than ever before but we still encourage the community to get in touch when it spots things that seem to differ. The community can play an important role as our eyes and ears and we encourage that.

 

We first announced the start of our transition period back in October 2013. Since then we have been very open, not only about our progress and development plans but also about the effects that the work would have on the DOAJ itself. Hopefully, with this post I have given you a little more detail as to why there may be inaccuracies in the DOAJ, what we have done to address those and what we will continue to do as our database develops.

We appreciate the patience and support from the community! As always, do please get in touch should you have questions or comments.