editorial

COVID-19: turnaround times may be affected

As with most organisations, COVID-19 is having an effect on DOAJ. Although we are an organisation without physical offices (virtual, already remote-working and Cloud-based), our team members and volunteers are all affected in real ways.

This means that we may take longer than usual to process applications. Many applications are processed in under 3 months but this may increase over the coming weeks. We ask you to be patient.

If you are a publisher waiting to hear from us about an application, the standard rules still apply:

  • do not email for a status update if you submitted your application less than 3 months ago.
  • before you contact us, check that emails from us aren’t in your spam folder. (Remember that our volunteers will email from their own email addresses and not DOAJ ones.)
  • always contact us using the Contact Us form and include the journal title and ISSN(s).

On behalf of everyone at DOAJ and all our volunteers, I’d like to thank you for your understanding but, more importantly, take great care of yourselves in these times of uncertainty.

Dom Mitchell
DOAJ Operations Manager

CLOSED: Looking for ten experts for our Editorial Sub-committee

Applications are now closed.

DOAJ is looking for volunteers for a new editorial sub-committee. The sub-committee will provide advice to the DOAJ Editorial Team, Board and Council on editorial matters.

The sub-committee will meet for one virtual meeting every quarter, probably of about 1-2 hours.

If you are interested, please send an email to our Editor-in-Chief, Tom (tom@doaj.org), which includes:

  • which of the field(s) below you can offer expertise in;
  • details of any previous editorial experience that you have; and
  • the names of two people who can confirm your experience.

DOAJ is looking for ten experts in the following fields:

  • medicine
  • life sciences
  • physical sciences
  • social sciences
  • humanities
  • the arts
  • statistics
  • publishing/research ethics

The aim of the sub-committee is to provide advice on editorial issues uncovered during the review of an application or a journal which is already in DOAJ. These are often issues raised by the DOAJ Editorial Team and which require specialist input. For example:

  • editorial process, workflow, publishing procedures
  • content quality
  • publishing technologies and best practice
  • publication ethics
  • legal and copyright issues

The sub-committee operates in an advisory capacity. Advice may be sought on DOAJ’s own editorial policy, or we may call upon the sub-committee to provide objective advice on appeals or complaints brought to DOAJ, often from publishers who have had an application rejected or a journal removed.

Candidates should have direct experience in academic publishing, as publishers, editors,
reviewers or librarians. If you know of anyone in your network who you think would be suited to this position, please share this post with them and ask them to contact us.

When selecting members for the sub-committee, DOAJ will ensure that diversity is maintained, particularly diversity in language and subject. DOAJ is an adopting organisation of the C4DISC Joint Statement of Principles.

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.

A progress report from DOAJ

Since we opened our new application form on 19th March 2014, 187 new journals have been accepted into the DOAJ. All 187 journals meet the new and extended DOAJ criteria, as required by the new application form. 13 applications have been rejected outright and a further 127 applications are pending further information or clarification from the publisher. In the same period, the number of journals removed from DOAJ, because they failed to meet DOAJ criteria, is 9. This is on top of the 92 journals that were removed in the first quarter of 2014.

Even though the DOAJ application form grew from 6 to 56 questions, the simple fact that we now request more information from a publisher upfront means that our editorial team is able to assess a journal’s honesty, transparency and value more effectively than before. With the Associate Editors and Editors coming on board, we will be well prepared for the existing ~9700 journals already in DOAJ when they begin the reapplication process.

We currently estimate that the reapplication process will begin in earnest in the 3rd quarter of this year.  We will email every publisher to let them know when they may reapply. By the end of 2014, we hope to have a large number of journals reapplied and re-accepted into DOAJ.

[Updated 18th August 2014]