metadata

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!

 

We are getting better at ingesting metadata. Until then: give us your metadata!

I just saw a tweet about an article published on PeerJ called ‘For 481 biomedical open access journals, articles are not searchable in the Directory of Open Access Journals nor in conventional biomedical databases‘. The article concludes:

DOAJ is the most complete registry of biomedical OA journals compared with five conventional biomedical databases. However, DOAJ only indexes articles for half of the biomedical journals listed, making it an incomplete source for biomedical research papers in general.

This made me very happy, especially when I read that the authors compare DOAJ with Medline, PubMed Central, EMBASE and SCOPUS to reach their conclusion. Those are some impressive databases to be ranked alongside.

Of course, the authors’ conclusion has a very large BUT in it: DOAJ contains article metadata for only half of the journals it indexes. Why is this and what are we doing about this?

The biggest issue for us is that since our launch in 2003 providing DOAJ with article metadata has been optional. DOAJ never made it compulsory for an indexed journal to upload its metadata. DOAJ encouraged it and made it easier for publishers to provide it but it has never been a criteria for being indexed. One of the reasons for this is that there is such a huge range of publishers in DOAJ and some of them simply don’t have the resources to create and provide metadata so by making this compulsory, a very large amount of small, open access journals would have been excluded.

Another issue is that, like PMC, DOAJ requires XML to be delivered to its own DTD. For journals that are not on the Open Journal System—OJS journals have a plugin that generates DOAJ XML automatically—or for those journals that have a huge content archive, processing and converting existing content into DOAJ XML is no small task. There are cost barriers, there is a lack of understanding around XML and there is a general reluctance, particularly by the larger publishers, to convert content to yet another DTD. DOAJ has toyed with the idea of accepting more XML flavours, the most obvious being JATS, since it is a standard DTD within STM publishing. What about SSH journals, or those journals that produce XML using their own proprietary DTD? As much as DOAJ wants to facilitate article upload, with limited finding there simply isn’t one solution that will work for everyone.

However, there is good news which I highlighted in an earlier post. This year, DOAJ will launch an API and a metadata harvester. Among other things, the API will enable the bulk upload of article metadata. The metadata harvester will seek out article metadata for journals that are indexed in DOAJ.

Until we get those two features on their feet, I would absolutely URGE publishers to give DOAJ their metadata. Those who do so already said that being in DOAJ increases traffic to their sites and increases visibility of content and we know from our Google Analytics that DOAJ is the starting place for many searches for open access content. If you need help in generating XML, then contact me and I will point you to some resources that I have used to troubleshoot XML problems in the past.

Who knows? At some point in the near future Messrs Liljekvist, Andresen, Pommergaard and Rosenberg might be able to publish an update to their paper with the conclusion that: ‘DOAJ is the most complete registry of biomedical OA journals compared with five conventional biomedical databases.’ Full stop. Or even better:

DOAJ is the most complete registry of OA journals.

Onwards!

The new site upgrades are live; it’ll take some time for the data to settle

All of our new site upgrades were successfully rolled out to the site last Wednesday. We’d like to hear what you think of the upgrades!

A few comments about what you will see now on the site:

  • I mentioned that we will need some time for the data to settle. The site displays the new dataset only. That means that the data will grow as publishers resubmit their reapplications and those are accepted back into DOAJ. If you have been monitoring the data closely, there will be a large jump in the figures you are reporting on so you’ll need to account for that in any analysis that you do. Specifically, the number of journals with or without APCs has changed and the totals for the number of articles published per year have also shifted. I shall publish a blog post shortly that contains the last counts of the APC data and articles per year before the site was upgraded. This will serve as a historic record only but it is important that it is available online.
  • Every journal has an extended ‘home page’ on DOAJ that reveals all the new data we’ve been collecting in our new form. There’s all the important bits up at the top, especially the APC information and then, by clicking on the ‘More’ button, you can reveal information about licensing, copyright and best practices that the journal adheres to.
  • We’ve improved the way that tables of contents are displayed so you can now see clearly the volumes, issues and, if a journal has one, a continuation.
  • We’ve tidied up the URLs. For example URLs for journals now look like this http://doaj.org/toc/2175-8042 instead of like this http://doaj.org/toc/0006191878084b8d8bddae52ce72c948. An improvement; I hope you agree!
  • Try our built-in URL shortening service from Bit.ly. It turns this:
    https://doaj.org/search?source={%22query%22%3A{%22filtered%22%3A{%22filter%22%3A{%22bool%22%3A{%22must%22%3A[{%22term%22%3A{%22_type%22%3A%22article%22}}%2C{%22term%22%3A{%22index.license.exact%22%3A%22CC%20BY%22}}%2C{%22term%22%3A{%22index.classification.exact%22%3A%22Health%20Sciences%22}}]}}%2C%22query%22%3A{%22match_all%22%3A{}}}}%2C%22from%22%3A0%2C%22size%22%3A10} into http://bit.ly/1IQ11j3 in two clicks!
  • Finally, we’ve added OpenURL back to the site so for any of you who were using that service to link out to DOAJ, you should find that those links now resolve again.

Thanks for your patience as we settle into the new data structure. It’s going to take some time for things to even out, not least because our site upgrade has revealed the true nature of the data and we have some data clean-up tasks to do.

If you have any specific questions about what you are seeing then do get in touch!

Have you used our RSS Feed?

Have you used our RSS feed? It allows you to keep track of the last 100 journals added to DOAJ. It includes the journal title, the date and time that the journal was added, and a link to the journal’s home page. An item looks like this:

Antropologìčnì Vimìri Fìlosofsʹkih Doslìdženʹ
21 April 2015 19:15
Antropologìčnì Vimìri Fìlosofsʹkih Doslìdženʹ

You can integrate the feed with your browser feed manager, any standalone feed-reader, indeed anything that is capable of consuming RSS feeds. You can even integrate the code directly into your website using an RSS feed converter tool.

Let me know what you have any comments on the feature.

Further development: metadata harvester and API

Here’s some good news for a Thursday.

In May we will be starting our next development projects: a metadata harvester and an API.

For the harvester, we will run a pilot phase collecting the PLoS metadata. Just by gathering PLoS metadata alone, we will very quickly double our existing article count. In 2016, we’ll scale up the harvester to seek out and collect article metadata for as many DOAJ-indexed journals as possible that do not have metadata associated with them.

The API will have two functions. Although we haven’t finalised the details, it is our intention that it will allow publishers to bulk upload their own article metadata without having to manually upload an XML file. For our mega-publishers, such as Redalyc, SciELO, BMC and PLoS, this will ensure their journals are always up-to-date in DOAJ with the latest article content. It will also allow bulk applications by publishers of new journals. Secondly, the API will provide an interface into our database that will allow custom queries of the data and advanced analysis.

These developments take serious funding so if you haven’t yet donated to us then please consider becoming a Publisher Member, a Member or a Sponsor. With the community’s help, we can greatly improve the visibility of quality, peer-reviewed open access content.

I’ll post more details as soon as I know them.