journal metadata

Provisional ISSNs versus confirmed ISSNs

At DOAJ, we insist that the ISSN for your journal is fully registered and confirmed at the time you submit an application to us. DOAJ does not allow provisional ISSNs. Applications which contain provisional ISSNs are rejected without review.

According to the ISSN International Centre in Paris, a provisional ISSN is assigned to a journal by the local national ISSN centre. An application for an ISSN can be submitted up to three months before the journal is launched.

The national ISSN centre is then responsible for sending the details of the new ISSN to the International Centre. The International Centre then registers the ISSN in their database as which point the ISSN has the status registered but not yet confirmed, that is to say, “provisional”.

A provisional ISSN becomes fully confirmed when the publisher informs their national ISSN centre that the resource has published two issues that contain at least five articles. (Each national centre has the right to adapt this and add restrictions to this requirement.)* The national centre then sends additional information to the International Centre to complete the basic record. Only then, will the record appear in the ISSN Portal as confirmed.

It is important that, before you submit your application to DOAJ, you check the ISSN Portal, and make sure that the ISSN(s) for your journal(s) is confirmed and that the title(s) match what you have on your site and in your application form.

*Corrected to add detail – thanks to Ammad Zafar for contacting us.

Our application form is changing

The current application form is now 6 years’ old. It is very long. It needs an upgrade in terms of functionality and its content needs a review. A new form will go live in Q2 2020.

The editorial team and our UX designer have carefully reviewed each question using the following criteria:

  1. Is the question needed to determine a journal’s inclusion in DOAJ?
  2. Does the question text ask exactly what we mean to ask?
  3. Does the question’s functionality allow for the correct answers to be collected?
  4. Is the question redundant after the functional upgrade?
  5. Can the question text be reduced, simplified, made clearer in the context of the new UI?

The editorial team then considered if other questions needed to be added to the form. We will be adding three new questions, (none of which are part of the Basic Criteria for inclusion):

  • the country of the society/institution;
  • whether the journal allows for ORCID integration; and
  • whether the journals’ references adhere to the I4OC standards.

At this point, I’d like to underline two Very Important Things:

  1. Our form is changing, not our criteria. Some of the questions labelled for removal are outdated; for some of them, we check the information anyway so don’t need to ask for it on the form.
  2. Any additional changes that may be required for Plan S certification have no bearing on this work.

Once the new form goes live, journals will be encouraged to update their information with us as soon as possible.

From the form as it is today, the questions that are suggested for removal are:

Question number Question text
8 Platform, Host or Aggregator
9* Name of contact for this journal
10* Contact’s email address
11* Confirm contact’s email address
19 Amount (submission charges)
20 Currency (submission charges)
21 How many research and review articles did the journal publish in the last calendar year?
22 Enter the URL where this information can be found
27 Does the journal allow software/spiders to automatically crawl the journal content (also known as text mining)?
29 Does the journal provide, or intend to provide, article-level metadata to DOAJ?
30 Does the journal provide article download statistics?
31 Enter the URL where this information can be found
32 What was the first calendar year in which a complete volume of the journal provided online Open Access content to the Full Text of all articles? (Full Text may be provided as PDFs. Does not apply for new journals.)
33 Please indicate which formats of the full text are available
54** Will the journal allow the author(s) to retain publishing rights without restrictions?
55 Enter the URL where this information can be found
56* Your name (Applicant)
57* Your email address (Applicant)
58* Confirm your email address (Applicant)

*All applicants will need to sign in or register before they can submit an application, therefore these 6 questions become redundant.

**This question is being merged with the one before it and re-worded to: ‘Does the author(s) or their institution retain both full, unrestricted copyright and publishing rights?’

Once the new form goes live, the specific answers for those questions being removed will no longer be available to download.

We welcome the community’s feedback on these changes and look forward to discussing them with you.

We’ve added 2 new columns to the journal CSV.

In a series of enhancements to article metadata, we have released the third today.*

If you are familiar with DOAJ metadata then you probably already know that you can download a CSV file which contains the journal-level metadata for all the journals in DOAJ. It is updated every 30 minutes and is probably one of the most popular metadata services we have. It is certainly the best way to get an overview of all the journals in DOAJ.

Today, we’ve released a new version of that file which adds two new columns to it: the number of article records added to a journal in DOAJ and the date that the last article was added. (Columns BF and BG respectively)

The columns were added for two reasons:

  1. To give greater transparency to the information which we display on our homepage whcountere we state that 77% of the journals in DOAJ have article content loaded to them. This is slightly misleading because a journal which uploaded only 5 articles to us in 2013 is counted in that 77%. It is more interesting to know how recent the articles are from a particular title and how much content they have uploaded to us. While this information has always been available by selecting a journal ISSN and using the ‘articles’ filter in Search, we’ve never been able to show all the information in one place.I think that this development will be welcomed by all our users, especially publishers, librarians and those doing research on open access publishing developments.
  2. To allow us to review those journals which have been awarded the DOAJ Seal and remove that Seal from those which are not supplying article metadata to us. Supplying article metadata is one of the 7 Seal criteria and we haven’t yet been able to check, in an efficient manner, which journals are sticking to their promise. [In the application form, we ask if journals “intend” to supply metadata to us.] It’s going to take deeper analysis to get the final figure but I can see very quickly that 25 journals are going to lose their Seal.

I’d love to know what you think about this development so, as usual, do leave a comment or a question, or email me directly: dom@doaj.org.

P.S. The other development which I will post about soon is the removal of duplicated articles from the DOAJ database. More on that when I have it.

*The first and second developments are described in this blog post from February.

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

Are you using an up-to-date version of DOAJ metadata? Apparently not.

Did you know that DOAJ’s metadata refreshes every 30 minutes? Given how many changes we, the DOAJ Team, make to the database on a weekly basis plus all the article metadata which is continuously being uploaded to us, the hourly update is absolutely necessary. DOAJ is seeing more use of its API than ever before (2018 total: 266,255,000 hits; 2017 total: 187,212,674) and most of that is by publishers uploading articles.

DOAJ metadata is EVERYWHERE. It is incorporated into all the major discovery services, other online databases and many library catalogues.

You might remember this post of mine from 2017, where I explained that third parties using our data may not have a recent copy of it. We know for a fact that some systems downstream of our data only update the copy every 6 months and, sadly, we get many emails from end users asking why they can’t find an article.

So if you are a researcher, reading this and wondering what happened to that article in DOAJ which is listed in your library catalogue or discovery service, contact your librarians and ask them to update their metadata. If you’re a librarian then do please reach out to sources responsible for your metadata and get them to update their DOAJ metadata.

If you have any questions about this or need some help in getting a more recent copy of our metadata then do leave a comment here or contact us at feedback@doaj.org.

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!