metadata

Regarding a Delta Think blog post analysing the DOAJ

Delta Think logo

In its series Open Access News & Views, Delta Think recently published an analysis of the DOAJ. We very much enjoyed the piece and found it to be one of the most well-informed articles written about us. We would like to add to the discussion by commenting on a few of the issues raised in the article.

Comparing apples with oranges

The main problem, when you compare ROAD, Web of Science (WoS), Scopus and DOAJ, is that all of these services have different definitions and criteria as to what constitutes a valid journal entry in their databases.

In general, one can say that DOAJ’s criteria are the strictest and therefore DOAJ is not an index of all open access (OA) journals but an index of gold standard, quality, peer-reviewed OA journals. So therefore not all OA journals meet our criteria.

Being indexed in DOAJ acts like a badge of quality. A quality stamp based on the business operations of a journal and its reliability, how closely that journal adheres to best practices and which standards it uses. Scopus and WoS are not in the business of measuring any of those. (We would take this opportunity to point out that DOAJ holds many more journals which aren’t in Scopus.)

The Scopus selection process is explained here: https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scopus/how-scopus-works/content/content-policy-and-selection

Regarding WoS you can find more information here: https://www.clarivate.com/products/web-of-science/open-access

ROAD criteria are perhaps the most relaxed: open access to all content; no moving wall or embargo; no hybrid journals; mainly research papers; the audience is mainly researchers and scholars.

We hope that together, we can achieve more transparency on inclusion criteria and we think that this would be welcomed by the community. DOAJ has an excellent working partnership with ISSN (who run the ROAD database); we are in communication with Scopus regularly; and we would welcome the opportunity to work more with Clarivate, who produce Web of Science.

We know that all these services take DOAJ metadata, either directly via OAI-PMH, our journal CSV file or our data dumps, or indirectly by using data feeds from third parties. What we have yet to establish, in the case of Scopus and ROAD, is how often they take the data from us–we believe for Scopus this could be as seldom as every six months–and how they then filter it.

Another point worth highlighting is that, to date, DOAJ has relied on publishers applying to be assessed and indexed and we have done very little soliciting of journals. However throughout 2019/2020 we will start approaching relevant OA journals not currently indexed and working with them to help them submit a quality application. This initiative is part of a funding drive for this year.

Regarding the implementation of Plan S

DOAJ expects to be involved in the implementation of Plan S and this will lead to additional criteria for journals to become Plan S compliant. In any case, we expect that Plan S will make it even more relevant for journals to be assessed and listed in DOAJ.

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 hour? 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.

Walt Crawford updates his analysis of DOAJ data

Walt Crawford is prolific! As if his first tranche of mega-analysis wasn’t enough work for him, he has released an update to The Gold Open Access Landscape 2011-2014, which I wrote about previously, that includes an initial analysis of the journals that were removed from DOAJ at the shut-down of the Reapplication project.* He completed the update in May 2016: this post is long overdue.

Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015, sponsored by SPARC, ‘provides an empirical basis for evaluating Open Access sustainability models‘. The rest of the study is based entirely on DOAJ, refining and updating the previous work. To give you a taster of what was achieved, Walt visited the web site of every journal indexed in DOAJ, even doing a second pass at those sites who hadn’t posted any content the first time around. In the age of analysing large metadata sets programmatically, with computers, this is a huge feat and one that I admire greatly.

What did Walt’s analysis reveal? Well, you can buy the paperback, a snip at only $6, directly from Walt and you can download the PDF free of charge too.

What did DOAJ learn from Walt’s analysis? We hadn’t realised quite how heavily Japan had been hit by the removal: 73% of the Japanese journals indexed in DOAJ were wiped from the Directory. We have since determined that most of those are on J-STAGE and have started a targeted campaign to get as many of those journals to submit new applications as possible. Singapore, Bangladesh and Nepal were also heavily hit. We also learned that journals published by universities and colleges suffered heavy losses. We are looking into this area with our DOAJ Ambassadors to see if we can find out why these losses were so great.

I can thoroughly recommend Walt’s work, not only for the obvious reason that he focusses so greatly on the [great!] DOAJ data but because, to my knowledge, no-one else is doing this type of analysis with such granularity.

As I write, I see that Walt has released an analysis of Open Access by Country 2011 to 2015, the 3rd part of his Gold Open Access Journals trilogy. As always, you can purchase the paperback or download the PDF for free.

Now, get reading!

*The final figure was 2851 journals removed and not 3300 as we had originally anticipated. The discrepancy was because we included, in the original count, journals that had already been removed from DOAJ and therefore had a reapplication pending but which would never be submitted.

The Redalyc JATS project strides towards standardisation.

Every now and then we hear news that is music to our ears and this time its news from Redalyc who have recently announced their project to transition their journals to the JATS XML format. The decision to make the transition was taken last year and on August 29th Redalyc will be launching their new online tool (Marcalyc) for XML JATS markup. From the press release:

‘Redalyc has undertaken a transition to the adoption of XML-JATS which provides a standardized format for describing and exchanging structured data. Redalyc’s strategy is based on empowering editors by providing tools and knowledge to make XML tagging a sustainable process. Redalyc is launching a new online tool (Marcalyc) for XML JATS markup—compatible with the JATS4R recommendation—as a free service for the Open Access journals indexed by Redalyc, a tool which is not designed to be used by technical experts or programmers.

Once having XML files, Redalyc will provide enriched file formats like ePUB and intelligent readers resulting in greater visibility and accessibility for Open Access research in Latin America, lowering costs for journals and leveraging the power of new technologies.’*

Redalyc are also launching an XML JATS reader which will improve the reader experience for the user, with powerful features like responsiveness, reference linking, search inside, image gallery, section navigation and automatic conversion to ePUB, PDF and HTML, all based in JATS4R specification. They have also provided a free online certification course (https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/9160206569091767555), the last of which runs today, in which they have trained editors in the adoption of JATS.

Arianna Becerril, Director of Technology and Innovation at Redalyc and DOAJ Advisory Board member, said: “We believe the adoption of JATS in Redalyc will help the Open Access science produced in Latin America achieve a greater international visibility, increasing the possibilities for that content to be discovered, read and cited. And also, this new feature will help journals to reach higher standards like the DOAJ criteria in the case of machine readability. [Today] we’re feeding article metadata for almost 100 journals into DOAJ with links to the full-text PDF. Now we’ll be providing links not only to the PDF file but also ePUB, the smart reader and HTML for the journals with XML markup.”

Well done Redalyc! This will surely play an important role in the continued growth of academic publishing from Latin America.

*much more information about this excellent project is available in Spanish at https://xmljatsredalyc.org/

A lot goes a long way: data quality improvement at DOAJ

Since 2012, DOAJ has been on a path of data quality improvement. DOAJ metadata is used all over the world and all over the Web. Improving and fixing the quality of our metadata can be painstaking work but the effort goes a long way as changes propagate across the Web via search engines, aggregator databases, library portals and other databases.

Along these lines, the largest publisher (in terms of the number of journals) in DOAJ recently added missing abstracts to over 100,000 articles and fixed broken special characters in approximately 2000 more. This was a huge effort on their part and DOAJ is grateful for the work that has gone into this project. It is an achievement that will be welcomed by DOAJ metadata consumers.

To date, Hindawi has 161,334 articles loaded to DOAJ and until recently was the largest contributor of metadata to our index. That title was taken from them recently when DOAJ ingested the entire PLOS archive from Europe PMC.

DOAJ. Now with added PLOS.

Finally, after saying: “It’s coming” for almost a year, DOAJ has added the entire PLOS catalogue to its database. A total of 182,500 articles were added and the harvester is set to go out and collect new articles at 5.30am every morning. The harvester collects the metadata from Europe PMC.

This is a milestone for DOAJ: not only because it has been eager to get the PLOS article metadata for a long time; but also because the harvester can be re-tuned to go and search for other large bodies of content from other publishers on E-PMC. Eventually, with some extra development, we’ll be able to point the harvester at any body of content.

If you think your publisher would benefit from this approach, do please get in touch! Thanks to our technical partners, Cottage Labs, for their help in reaching this milestone.