JCT

cOAlition S chooses DOAJ’s technical partner, Cottage Labs, to deliver their Journal Checker Tool

PRESS RELEASE

As announced today, cOAlition S has awarded the tender for the Plan S journal checker tool (JCT) to Cottage Labs LLP, DOAJ’s existing technical partner. Cottage Labs became DOAJ’s technical partner back in 2013. 

The announcement is welcomed by DOAJ. Lars Bjørnshauge, Managing Director and Founder of DOAJ, said: “Working with Cottage Labs on this project means that DOAJ can focus on what it does best: reviewing applications from journals and making sure those continue to move through the system, without us having to spend huge amounts of time explaining how we work, what we do, and why. Cottage Labs already know how we work, understanding the editorial processes and realising the full extent of what we do.” 

The JCT will be a tool built for measuring how a journal meets different requirements under the three different Plan S compliance routes: Gold open access, Green open access, and transformative journals. For Gold open access, being indexed in DOAJ is the baseline criteria. DOAJ already indexes the vast majority of the journals used by cOAlition S-funded authors and already collects information about the two criteria contained in the first iteration of the JCT:

  1. The journal allows the use of a CC BY license on its articles
  2. Copyright is retained by the author

Richard Jones, a founder of Cottage Labs and technical lead for DOAJ, said: “Plan S is a key step forward for the Open Access movement, and DOAJ is central to that.  Our extensive knowledge of DOAJ makes us ideally placed to deliver a high-quality Journal Checker Tool for cOAlition S, and we’re very excited to be a part of it.“

Work on the JCT is expected to commence immediately as cOAlition S are expecting the first iteration of the tool to be publicly available by November. 

For more information:

A statement regarding the JCT tender for Plan S

In the recent tender document published by cOAlition S for the development of a Journal Checker Tool (JCT), it is stated very clearly that DOAJ is the preferred source of data for the gold open access journal compliance route. DOAJ already collects and publishes the 3 pieces of metadata which must be included in the first iteration of the JCT. 

DOAJ has decided that it will not officially partner with any provider bidding for the tender and neither will it submit a joint bid with a provider. Instead, the DOAJ team is focusing on the changes needed to the platform so that it is ready for future iterations of the JCT. Providers submitting a tender to cOAlition S should be aware that these changes have costs and these will need to be covered. 

DOAJ will gladly work with all parties submitting a tender and provide them with a breakdown of those costs, as is stated as required on page 6 of the tender document.