metadata

NEW: continuations, improved tables of contents, feedback on a journal, APC granularity, and more…

Very soon, we will be releasing new functionality on DOAJ that will improve the detail in the journal record, increase DOAJ’s accuracy even more and will encourage greater input from the community. We have also abandoned our policy to remove journals that have ceased publication.

Continuations

Ever since we migrated to our new platform, we have been trying to find a slot in our development schedule to correctly display journal continuations on our site. It was important for us to get this correct, both in terms of the metadata and the display, so that users could easily understand how one, or several, journals transformed into a journal with a new title and ISSN. This new development will allow us to correctly display a journal’s timeline as it goes through name and ISSN changes.

Send us feedback on a journal

A decreasing amount of the data in DOAJ is old and DOAJ is always grateful to receive updates from users who get in touch to alert us to broken URLs or a change of title. With this in mind, and to make feeding back as simple as possible, we will add a ‘Tell us about this journal’ button to every journal entry in DOAJ. We hope this will encourage greater input from our users and lead to more updates to journal entries. This development is perfectly aligned with DOAJ being curated by the community and really facilitates an up-to-date resource.

Greater granularity for APC information

We know. The APC information on DOAJ was misleading. It lumps together 2 distinct groups of journals into one big ‘No’ group. We have broken that group out into: No, where we have up-to-date information from journals that they DO NOT charge APCs; and No information. ‘No information’ is the group of journals which has submitted a reapplication to us and we have yet to review it. The number of ‘No information’ journals will diminish in size as we work our way through the reapplications. I wrote about this inaccuracy previously.

Retaining the records – journals that have ceased publication

As long as they fulfil some basic criteria, we will no longer remove journals that cease publishing and we will even add back into DOAJ journals that were removed only because they stopped publishing. This change of policy could potentially add hundreds of articles back into DOAJ along with tens of archived journals.

Access from China

We have had several complaints from users in China that they were unable to use DOAJ. We realised that this is because the site uses Google javascript services and Google is banned in some parts of China, or by some institutions. We have now migrated most services off Google-related services (apart from Analytics) and are confident that the user experience for users in China will be vastly improved. This is perfectly times as we embark on a year-long project to increase awareness of open access in China.

Oh, and watch this space… In early June, we’ll be adding ~175 000 PLoS articles to DOAJ… More on that later.

 

DOAJ to remove approximately 3300 journals

UPDATE (11th May): the list of removed journals is here on the 3rd tab.

Today DOAJ will remove approximately 3300 journals for failure to submit a valid reapplication before the communicated deadline; a deadline which was extended twice to allow more time for reapplications. This batch removal is another step in DOAJ’s two year long project to increase the value and accuracy of the information provided in it.

Here are some details about the reapplication project from its launch in January 2015 to today:

  • The reapplication process is a necessary step towards ensuring that all journals in DOAJ (of which there were about 10000) met the higher criteria for indexing that DOAJ launched in March 2014. The criteria were produced as a response to the maturing open access arena, the greater demands made on open access publishing by questionable journals and publishers, and to retain DOAJ’s relevancy and importance in open access publishing.
  • Some journals have been in DOAJ since 2003 and have never refreshed their information with us.
  • As of today over 5000 journals have already submitted their reapplication to us and we are busy assessing those. Many reapplications have been accepted back into DOAJ.
  • The contact for every journal to be removed from DOAJ was emailed at least 4 times, informing them of our intention to remove their journals if they failed to submit a reapplication by the agreed deadline.
  • We send email via Mailchimp and took all the necessary precautions to ensure that our emails didn’t end up in Spam, get trapped in institutional firewalls, or failed to deliver for other reasons. We used the Mailchimp authentication options to “verify” that our emails were from a genuine source.
  • The first email, announcing the reapplication project and inviting people to reapply, was sent out in January 2015 and went to publishers with 11 or more journals in DOAJ. The second email went out to publishers with 10 or less journals in DOAJ in June 2015.
  • Reminders were sent out regularly, once a month as well as announcing the deadline to our largest communities: via this blog, Twitter and Facebook.
  • To ensure that our emails ended up with the correct contact, we spent a considerable amount of time tidying up our contacts database: we updated at least 1000 records.

Removed journals are welcome to submit a new application to DOAJ at any time. They will be placed in the queue along with other applications. We will add a third tab to our spreadsheet ‘DOAJ: journals added and removed‘ that will list all of the journals removed.

When a journal is removed from DOAJ, any article metadata will also become unavailable. This is standard functionality. We are confident that the majority of the journals removed have never supplied article metadata to us, or have done once but haven’t sent us anything for at least 2 years.

If you use DOAJ as a data source and would like to do your own analysis of the journals indexed,  download our journals CSV (https://doaj.org/csv) today before 11am BST, 12pm CEST. A copy of that spreadsheet is also available here.

New article on DOAJ available at ScienceOpen

We have just published an article in the open access journal ScienceOpen Research, giving an overview of the history and current status of the DOAJ. Please read and share the article! We would welcome your participation in the post-publication peer review of this article and/or any comments.

Criteria for open access and publishing
Authors: Tom Olijhoek, Dominic Mitchell and Lars Bjornshauge
DOI: 10.14293/S2199-1006.1.SOR-EDU.AMHUHV.v1

After a brief historical overview, DOAJ policies regarding open access, intellectual property rights and questionable publishers are explained in detail. The larger part of the article is a much requested explanation on how DOAJ uses its new set of criteria for the evaluation of open access journals and the rationale behind choosing the seven extra criteria that qualify for the DOAJ Seal. A final section is devoted to the extended possibilities that DOAJ offers to scholars and publishers for searching the database and for uploading metadata.

The Gold Open Access Landscape 2011-2014

At DOAJ we are used to working with big sets of data. We have over 10000 journal records, over 8000 reapplication records, over 5000 user accounts, and more than 2 million pieces of article metadata. Making a change to that data is no small feat and sometimes it requires a great deal of manual editing. We receive regular notification when teams of individuals have used that data to do a study on open access publishing globally or locally, or in presentations, at open access events or in policy papers. This makes us happy because we know that DOAJ is the foremost trusted listing of open access journals and, since all the data in it is re-usable according to the terms of our CC BY-SA license, we believe it should be used and re-used as much as possible! Until recently we had never heard of a single person taking it upon themselves to go through every record in DOAJ and then use that data to write a book about the landscape of gold open access publishing.

Never until Walt Crawford that is. You might recognise Walt’s name either from his blog ‘Walt at Random‘ or from his regular ‘ejournal on the intersections of libraries, policy, technology and media’: ‘Cites & Insights‘. Walt is a regular commentator on open access issues and his blog has been active since 2005. In September 2015, Walt published the PDF version of his book ‘The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014‘ on Lulu and I think you should buy it! Why? Well for one, you benefit from DOAJ and DOAJ has directly benefited from the creation process of the book: we were able to update many journal records as a direct result of Walt’s work. We were able to undertake a clean-up project because of Walt’s research—the size of which we had never been able to do before from just one source. We were able to identify and remove over 200 journals from DOAJ which, over time, had changed from the quality, open access journals that they were when they were first accepted into the Directory.

Walt has published a very good post on his blog about why you should purchase his book so I’ll not reiterate those reasons here. However, if you have ever used DOAJ data in your work, or if you consult the DOAJ regularly, or if you believe that it is important that DOAJ remains central to open access publishing, or if you want to show support for the open access movement then I urge you to purchase a copy of Walt’s work.

Deduplication of article metadata

Housekeeping! We’re doing some important data cleanup work, improving the accuracy of our data, making it more reliable and relevant for you, our users:

DOAJ is working on cleaning up article-level metadata as we remain committed to maintaining a high-quality directory. We have recently developed tools to assist with the automated pruning of spurious records. As a result you may see the number of articles in DOAJ go up (new articles continue to be accepted) and down (as spurious records are deleted). We already have processes and checks in place to ensure that no new spurious records will enter the catalogue.

Let me know if you have any questions!

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!