DOAJ
Knowledge Exchange report on Open Access dependencies
Knowledge Exchange have today released a report highlighting the dependency on key non-commercial services in OA and the importance of ensuring their sustainability if the OA policies developed by institutions and research funders are to be successfully implemented.
DOAJ and SHERPA are named in the report as the two most important services in the OA community that require support from funders in order to operate sustainably in the long term.
Further information is available at Review of Open Access Policy Dependencies and the full report is available at http://repository.jisc.ac.uk/6269/10/final-KE-Report-V5.1-20JAN2016.pdf.
Get involved and volunteer for DOAJ
We are always looking for volunteers to help us review the applications for journals wishing to be indexed in DOAJ. We have well over 100 people, from all over the world, helping us already. It’s a growing and exciting network to be part of and the work being done directly contributes to the quality of peer-review, open access publishing. Are you interested in joining us?
How much work is it?
We ask our volunteers to give us 4 or 5 hours of their time per week but you are left to manage your own schedule.
Who should volunteer?
Anyone who has knowledge and enthusiasm for academic journals, scholarly publishing, open access, electronic publishing, librarianship, digital preservation. We particularly welcome librarians, information studies professionals and students, PhD students, researchers and people affiliated with research institutions. The important thing is that you understand some of the mechanics, principles and politics behind open access and scholarly publishing.
We are always looking for people who have an excellent grasp of English as a first, second or third language.
If you can speak the following languages, with English, we would love to hear from you:
Arabic (العربية)
Bulgarian (български)
Chinese (中文)
Czech (česky)
Farsi (فارسی)
French (français)
German (deutsch)
Hungarian (magyar)
Indonesian (Indonesia)
Macedonian (македонски)
Polish (Polski)
Portuguese (Português)
Romanian (român)
Russian (Русский)
Serbo-Croatian
Slovak (slovenský)
Slovenian (slovensko)
Spanish (Español)
Turkish (Türkçe)
How do I apply?
If you have any questions, contact me here or email feedback@doaj.org
DOAJ is raising the quality bar for open access: SPARC blog post
DOAJ’s managing director, Lars Bjørnshauge, has been interviewed by SPARC about DOAJ’s enhanced application form and raising the quality bar in open access publishing. The post, published today, highlights how effectively the new form is providing a much-needed filter against questionable, unethical and non-transparent publishing practices. Combined with OASPA’s efforts, the form is an important tool for fighting “the scholarly community’s legitimate concerns over the quality of Open Access journals” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. “The actions that the DOAJ are taking… provide an important new safeguard, and helps raise the quality bar.”
Of course, we are delighted to hear that our efforts over the past two years are bearing fruit. With financial support from the community, via sponsorships and donations, we have worked hard to implement the new form and its comprehensive administration system that our volunteers use to review the applications. We are also helping publishers improve their practices, helping them understand how their operations can be more “professional, ethical, and transparent”.
DOAJ will not be resting on its laurels quite yet though as there is still much left to do. DOAJ is currently inviting 99% of all the journals indexed in it to reapply. It is anticipated that this process take the rest of this year to complete, progress of course depending on how fast publishers return their reapplications to us. The review work requires a large amount of manpower so we are seeking further financial contributions to help us speed up the process and more volunteers who know Turkish, Indonesian, Farsi, Spanish and Portuguese.
If you or your institutions would like to donate, you can do so here: http://doaj.org/supportDoaj. If you know anyone who might like to volunteer a few hours of their time reviewing applications with us, please show them this post.
Onwards!
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.
Some journals say they are indexed in DOAJ but they are not
Some journal web sites state that the journal is indexed DOAJ when it is not. Often, the home page carries the DOAJ logo along with logos from other indexing services. Even though we write to these journals, there is no guarantee that they will remove our logo.
I advise you to ALWAYS check at https://doaj.org that a journal is indexed in DOAJ even if its web site carries the DOAJ logo or says that it is indexed. You can never be too careful and it only takes as long to check as it takes to type the journal name or ISSN into the DOAJ search box and press Return.
If you spot a journal that is carrying the DOAJ logo but is not indexed in DOAJ, I would love to hear from you!
The list of journals has moved to a new location.
[NOTE: this post was edited on 04th January 2018 and the list was migrated to a publicly available spreadsheet.]
Crowdsourcing librarian power
DOAJ recently attended, and gave a plenary session at, the 35th conference for the International Association of Scientific and Technological University Libraries. The presentation gave conference delegates an update on progress with the new application form and details of the our network of volunteers: the DOAJ Associate Editors and Editors. I’d like to share a little more of that information with you.
Today ~99% of all the journals currently indexed in DOAJ will have to reapply to remain in the directory. This is necessary because the bar for inclusion has been considerably raised in response to the fast-paced development of open access over the last 11 years. The application form has been extended from 6 to 56 questions, with the the form focussing on 3 main areas:
- Quality
- Technical quality (publishing practices)
- Openness
Reassessing 9770 journals on 50 new points of information is a huge amount of work that needs to be done methodically, effectively and routinely. Crowdsourcing this work is an ideal solution.
We put out a call for volunteers in January 2014. We had an overwhelming response with volunteers offering their help and expertise from all over the world. (Applications are closed for now.) The majority of the volunteers come from the academic library community which is very useful for DOAJ since we want to have groups of volunteers based around language and specialty. We will organise our volunteers into a network of 1 editor looking after a group of associate editors, with each group reporting to the existing DOAJ Managing Editors.
This way of working is completely new to DOAJ and so we will start with a pilot scheme to ensure we do this right and correctly. We have set up 3 pilot groups: Chinese, Spanish and English. We will start the pilot later this month. Our technical partner, Cottage Labs, has built a journal review and approval structure to support the editors in their work.
If you applied to be a DOAJ Associate Editor and have not heard from us please be patient while run the pilot. And of course, thank you for volunteering!