database

VACANCY: DOAJ Database Assistant

doaj logoDOAJ is looking for a person to join its dynamic team as Database Assistant.

The role is a part-time role, working remotely. The number of hours required is 25 hours per week. 

The role is responsible for maintaining the accuracy and recency of the DOAJ database, and ensuring a steady flow of work reaches the DOAJ Team. The role is split into two main parts: processing new applications and update requests, and reviewing existing journal metadata for accuracy and recency.

The DOAJ is a virtual organisation with members of the DOAJ Team working across the world, primarily in Europe. Applicants for the Database Assistant role must be located in Europe due to the nature of the work. Applicants must be available for work and meetings at some point daily during the hours of 9 am and 5 pm UTC, Monday to Friday;

The tasks associated with this role are:

  • Processing newly submitted applications and update requests on a daily basis;
  • Ensuring that DOAJ’s volunteer editor groups have applications assigned to them;
  • For accuracy and recency:
    • Regularly reviewing lists of journals or subsets of journal data;
    • Adding missing information to the database;
    • Making corrections to the metadata when needed;
    • Communicating with journal contacts;
    • Flagging problematic records.

In order to carry out his/her duties, the Database Assistant should have the following experience or skills:

  • be extremely detail orientated; be able to work methodically and quickly and still pay attention to detail.
  • have relevant study or work experience, for example: database administration, previous DOAJ work, librarianship, journal publishing, information studies.
  • Be fluent in English, both orally and written;

The following experience or skills would be beneficial but are not obligatory:

  • Speak more than one language;
  • Some previous experience with large sets of data is advantageous, particularly processing data in spreadsheets;
  • Familiarity with global open access, its drivers and recent developments;
  • Ability to use project management tools such as Slack, GitHub, Google Apps for Business
  • Publisher relations.

The deadline for applications is Wednesday 22nd January 2020, 5 pm UTC.

To Apply/Questions
Applicants should email a copy of their CV which highlights relevant experience and a SHORT covering letter to Dom Mitchell, Operations Manager: dom@doaj.org. Any questions should also be emailed to Dom.

DOAJ is an adopting organisation of the C4DISC Joint Statement of Principles. Adopting the Joint Statement of Principles is a show of support for improving diversity and inclusion in scholarly communications.

About DOAJ

DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ is entirely independent and all its services are free of charge including being indexed in DOAJ.

The DOAJ was launched in 2003 with 300 open access journals. Today, the independent database contains 14,000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities.

DOAJ is co-author to the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.

Full DOAJ data dump now available

“We’re going to a hackathon and would love to work with DOAJ’s data! Do you have a dump of all DOAJ data?”

“Er, no. Sorry. I mean, we could get it for you but it will take a while. You could probably get it yourself if you know how to extract the JSON… When do you need it for?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Oh.”

We’ve had this conversation a few times. Or had requests from eager individuals and organisations who want to use the rich offerings of the DOAJ metadata. They’ve told us of the wonderful things they could do with the data (slicing, reporting, analysing, apps, databases, software…) and we’ve never been able to help them in good time. But now, we can….

Introducing, full data dumps of ALL the metadata in DOAJ, both journals and articles: https://doaj.org/public-data-dump

So what? Well, let me suggest to you why these are a good thing:

  • For the journal metadata, the CSV is really the only easy-to-use format. The journal data dump provides another way to do this.
  • The data dumps are updated weekly, so can keep you up-to-date on a reasonably short delay. (There is no change feed, just a full dump.)
  • When you want all of the DOAJ data for any reason, you can just take it!
  • Deep paging on the search API is no longer permitted – search is for search, not harvesting. The data dump allows you to harvest.
  • Whenever you want a subset of the DOAJ data, you can just download the data dump, then filter it locally for your needs. For example, if you are a publisher and you want to see all of your metadata in DOAJ, that is all in this data dump, and you can then filter by ISSN
  • You can use it to enhance any local data in your own system or database: you may have basic article metadata in your system, and you want to extend it with DOAJ metadata.
  • If you want to aggregate publications data from multiple sources, this is one way of quickly getting that information from DOAJ (versus using OAI-PMH).
  • These data dumps are more metadata rich than OAI-PMH
  • You may want to use the data for analysis or data mining or other forms of research, or hackathons.
  • The data dumps are also useful as a test dataset.

So there you have it. Despite a rather awkward name, data dumps are A Good Thing.

We’d love to know what you think, so do please leave a comment here or send us feedback: feedback@doaj.org

Parts of DOAJ metadata in my catalogue/discovery service/A-Z List have changed, are out-of-date or are missing completely. Why?

It’s time to update your index and/or ask your discovery service provider to do so!

We have received  several messages via our Feedback account from library catalogue administrators, their readers, and researchers asking why all of a sudden so many of the articles indexed from DOAJ are now missing? Within library catalogues, users are perhaps seeing a 404 message. On DOAJ itself, users are noticing that the article content included in DOAJ is much changed and reduced. Why is this?

Hopefully it is old news to you now that DOAJ has been undertaking its Reapplication project. Over the last 6 months, the DOAJ Team has made a final, huge push to process all the reapplications. This project is so very nearly complete: out of the 6359 reapplications submitted to us, only a handful are still to be re-checked. 2072 of the reapplications did not pass our new standards. This means that the range of journals in DOAJ has changed considerably; very quickly over a relatively short period of time.

Aggregators / Service Providers / Library Catalogue administrators: we strongly advise you to re-index / update / download again the DOAJ article metadata offering—via OAI-PMH, or our API—so that your catalogues have the most up-to-date version of our index. The DOAJ index changes weekly so it might be time to revisit how often you come to us for updates and increase that frequency. Learn more about how to interact with DOAJ.

If you are using the search or browse features at DOAJ, then be aware that some of the journals you are used to seeing in the Directory may no longer be there.

If you have any questions about the effect of the reapplication project on DOAJ, about indexing DOAJ via our API or OAI-PMH services, or even how to search and browse, then please leave a comment here or send email to feedback@doaj.org.

Updates to DOAJ will be switched off while we upgrade the site

Earlier this month I wrote about the twelve developments that we were working on. These are now ready to be released to the live site this week and we will be making the upgrade between Tuesday (21st April) evening and Wednesday (22nd April) morning British Summer Time (GMT+1). During this time, we will switch off all parts of the site that allow new data to be submitted to us:

  • the application form
  • the form for adding article metadata
  • the XML upload page for uploading article metadata
  • the CSV upload page for submitting bulk reapplications
  • the reapplication form

All other aspects of the site will continue to function as normal. We expect a full service to be reinstated by Wednesday 12 noon BST. I will post further updates here.