open access

Guest post: Overview of the African Open Access Landscape, with a Focus on Scholarly Publishing

Photo of Ina Smith, DOAJ Ambassador for Southern AfricaThis is a guest post by Ina Smith, our Ambassador for Southern Africa.

Ina managed the pilot  for the African Open Science Platform project from October 2016 until October 2019. She holds a Master’s Degree from the University of Pretoria (South Africa) in Computer-Integrated Education, a Higher Education Teaching Diploma, and two degrees (BBibl and BBibl Honors) in Library and Information Science. She is Planning Manager at the Academy of Science of South Africa, and has vast experience of Open Access in general, Open Science, scholarly research activities, repositories, and Open Access journal management and publishing. Ina is the DOAJ ambassador in the region of Southern Africa.

This article reports on selected findings from the pilot African Open Science Platform landscape study, conducted by the Academy of Science of South Africa, on request of the SA Department of Science and Technology, and funded by the National Research Foundation. Direction was provided by CODATA (International Science Council).

1. Introduction

The Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) – during October 2016 until October 2019, conducted a landscape study (Academy of Science of South Africa, 2019) of what is happening on the continent in terms of Open Science and progress made regarding Open Access. This formed part of the pilot African Open Science Platform, in preparation of building an actual platform addressing the collaborative needs experienced by scientists in addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Awareness regarding Open Access is evident through the

Main findings on the status of Open Access scholarly journals on the continent, as well as factors contributing to the current status, are shared below.

2. Low commitment towards science, policy, incentives and infrastructure by African governments

It is estimated that Africa produces only around 0.74% of global scientific knowledge. Low levels of political willingness among African countries to make funding available towards advancing science, is at the core of this low level of contribution. From the landscape study, only 35 out of 54 African Union member countries (Academy of Science of South Africa, 2019) demonstrate some level of commitment to science through its investment in research and development (R&D), academies of science, ministries of science and technology, policies, recognition of research, and participation in the Science Granting Councils Initiative (SGCI). Only two African countries (Kenya and South Africa) at this stage contribute 0.8% of its GDP (Gross Domestic Product) to R&D (Research and Development), which is the closest to the AU’s (African Union’s) suggested 1%. Countries such as Lesotho and Madagascar ranked as 0%, while the R&D expenditure for 24 African countries is unknown (Academy of Science of South Africa, 2019).

2.1 Policies lacking and not harmonised

National Open Access policies are positioned within a broader regulatory framework, together with policies for intellectual property rights (IPR), research ethics policies, policies for STI, funding policies, HE policies and ICT policies.

According to the UNECA 2018 Sustainable Development Report, there are low levels of organisation and funding of many science systems in Africa. Although there are efforts towards aligning IP, ICT and Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) policies on the continent with one another and with international policies, African governments still have a long way to go. Apart from developing the relevant policies, policies need to be aligned towards regulatory convergence, the environment required to implement the policies needs to be conducive, and accountability needs to be built into all policies.

The African Observatory of Science and Technology Indicators (AOSTI) were established in 2011 by the African Union to help African countries to build capacity for STI policy activities and initiatives. The AOSTI report on the Assessment of Scientific Production in the African Union, 2005–2010 recommended “creating open and free access publication outlets for Africa, with improved review committees” (African Union African Observatory of Science Technology and Innovation, 2014) and highlighted the challenge of high article fee requirements for publishing in citation-indexed journals and the high subscription prices to commercially available databases.

Policy is a process, and depends on the government of the day. Furthermore, Open Access policies registered in ROARMAP are at institutional level only, and not at national level. Ethiopia is the only African country this far with an Open Access policy on national level, announced and released during October 2019, paving the way for other African countries to hopefully follow suit.  For Open Access policies to be adopted and integrated as part of national Science, Technology and Innovation policies, far more advocacy and awareness initiatives are required across the African continent.

2.2 Insufficient e-Infrastructure

Science globally has become fully dependent on stable ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) infrastructure, which includes connectivity/bandwidth, high performance computing facilities and data services. And so have scholarly journals. Open Access scholarly journals can forget to exist if a stable ICT infrastructure does not exist. Especially where Internet shutdowns (or Internet censorship) is common. From the landscape study, 20 African governments applied some form of Internet censorship 45 times since 2001, of which 36 times the shutdowns related to anti-government related protests.

Academic and research intensive institutions in Africa rely heavily on NRENs (National Research and Educational Networks), which are endorsed by their respective governments and benefit from tax waivers or exemptions, free operator licenses or even Universal Service Funds, e.g. in Uganda and Zambia.

The concern however, is that selected African governments (with the exception of a few countries such as South Africa, Mozambique, Ethiopia and others) have low awareness of how the Internet works, how much ICT (and the 4th Industrial Revolution) have affected research, and the added value an NREN – through being connected to fellow NRENs – can bring to higher education and research in addressing the respective needs, which is far more complex than simply providing connectivity (Foley, 2016).  A main threat to NRENs in selected African countries is commercial public ISPs influencing governments, sometimes creating the impression that NRENs offer nothing more than what commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer. Galagan and Looijen (2015) confirm that each of the NRENs and Regional RENs have their own political, financial and other challenges. The main challenge is the unaffordability of telecoms’ pricing in many markets across the continent. Private industry Internet service providers (ISPs) have monopolies in many African countries (especially in Central and West Africa), closing down access to cable landing stations, which keep Internet connectivity very expensive in these countries within a closed market and not allowing other competitors to enter the market. This makes collaboration and participation with other NRENs, collaboration and sharing among researchers, and the publishing of Open Access journals, almost impossible in those countries.

Of the 36 African countries with NRENs1, 17 NRENs are connected to the global Research and Education Network, while 19 are not yet connected (Academy of Science of South Africa, 2019).

In addition to Internet censorship and the threat commercial ISPs bring, power outages on the continent interrupting Internet service delivery is a further challenge, resulting in interrupting the flow of science. Africa has enormous infrastructure gaps, including broadband infrastructure, and access to broadband services, where they exist, is also very expensive (Economic Commission for Africa, 2017). Moreover, personal connectivity costs remain extremely high in most African countries (Alliance for Affordable Internet, 2017). Issues of connectivity are further complicated by ageing and unreliable power infrastructure and frequent power outages.

2.3 Skills shortage

In addition to a general lack of awareness of Open Access – especially at government level, there is also very low awareness around the availability of open source scholarly publishing platforms such as PKP Open Journal Systems (OJS) and other tools in support of the research and scholarly publishing process. Publishing high quality journals aligned with best practice criteria further needs upskilling, something for which there is a huge demand. Through ASSAf, DOAJ, EIFL, AJOL and efforts of many others, training has been conducted. More resources are however required to not only equip editors, but also reviewers, copy editors, proof-readers and authors with the necessary skills to deliver on high quality trusted Open Access scholarly journals and articles. Open Access online courses and virtual training are possible solutions to address the skills gap, but only if a stable infrastructure and connectivity can be guaranteed.

2.4 Incentivisation is non-existent

Publication-focused metrics are heavily used within African academia as a means of evaluation. This is often only one of very few – if not the only – criteria determining promotion. An unhealthy obsession with publishing in high impact factor journals often result in research conducted to address local problems, ending up in subscription-based journals unaffordable for the very audience it was intended for.

Funding to conduct research remains a challenge. African researchers mostly fund their own research, and there are few incentives for them to make their research and accompanying data sets openly accessible. Funding and peer recognition, along with an enabling ICT enabled research environment conducive for research, are regarded as possible major incentives.

3. Status of scholarly journals published in Africa

There is an increase in the North-South divide; publications not listed on international citation indexes are proven to suffer lower visibility, citation, and effect; and these research results make little or no contribution to the existing body of global knowledge. Furthermore, few African researchers form part of editorial boards of international journals. In some instances, African journals are published by publishers in Europe and North America, resulting in those not being regarded as African journals.

African scholarly journals are often not online available, and leadership on managing journals in a trusted way not available. Through an Ambassador initiative of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), slow progress is being made. More and more, scholarly journals are making the transition to using PKP Open Journal Systems, an Open Source journal workflow solution, to publish journals online.  African Journals Online (AJOL) another initiative, has been working on assisting journals to make the transition from print to online journals. According to DOAJ, 19 African countries representing 196 of the 13 773 journals are currently listed on this index that provides access to high-quality, Open Access, peer-reviewed journals. Until recently, 200+ journals published by Hindawi appeared under Egypt, which would have brought the number of African journals listed in DOAJ to 400+. These journals are now being classified as UK publications due to Hindawi’s move to London.

A notable development towards an Open Science publishing approach is the AAS Open Research mega-journal. Using the F1000 publishing platform, AAS Open Research implements open peer review and requires that data underpinning the research findings should be open by default.

The Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) SA hosted by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) covers a selected collection of peer-reviewed South African scholarly journals, and forms an integral part of the SciELO Brazil project. Journals are considered for inclusion in SciELO SA when they have received a favourable evaluation after being peer-reviewed. This peer-review is coordinated by ASSAf, and occurs in cycles of 5 years. SciELO SA focuses on strengthening the scholarly journal evaluation and accreditation systems in South Africa.

Scienceafrique.org – an initiative by Florence Piron and project SOHA – addresses the need to have a platform to publish scholarly journals and share science in the francophone region. It currently hosts 5 French journals2. The main objective of this platform is to give African researchers (including Haiti) the opportunity to freely and openly share their research and text in their local language, to build quality African science, visible and accessible to all, from the perspective of cognitive justice and serving the common good.

Another important player in advancing equitable scientific partnership with developing Francophone countries in Africa and elsewhere is the French National Research Institute for Development (IRD). Being a French public research institution, “the IRD defends an original model of equitable scientific partnership with the countries of the South and an interdisciplinary and citizen science committed to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals”. The planned IRD “Open science in the South: challenges and perspectives for a new dynamic” symposium (23 – 25 October 2019) “will offer an opportunity to discuss the challenges of open science in developing countries and to present national, international and local incentive policies as well as practical case studies to initiate trends towards open science. It will focus in particular on research in French-speaking countries in the Global South.”

Open Science and Open Access in Arabic countries such as Algeria, are driven by the DGRSDT (General Directorate of Scientific Research and Technological Development). The vast majority of the total of 359 Algerian scholarly journals are only available in print, with 21 available as Open Access and registered in the DOAJ. The DGRSDT strategy includes:

  • training editors in managing and publishing scholarly journals;
  • promote sharing and collaboration among Algerian editors, and
  • promote global collaboration in advancing Open Access.

The aim is for all Algerian journals to make the transition from print to online, and to adhere to the DOAJ criteria for possible inclusion. An Algerian journal portal by the name Webreview has been launched by the Research Centre on Scientific and Technical Information (CERIST) for the science community to publish journals – whether open or restricted access. On institutional level, and similar to South African universities publishing their own journals (e.g. SUNJournals at Stellenbosch University3), many Algerian universities prefer to host and publish their own journals. An example from Algeria is the Université de Béjaïa4 (Belhamel, 2016).

Only one (1) African country thus far is participating in Plan S5 (i.e. the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), Zambia6), while none subscribes to AmeliCA yet.

In response to the portentous need of access to scholarly content by the African research community, an additional SPARC Chapter, SPARC Africa7, has been established and was launched at the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) Academic and Research Libraries (ARL) Satellite meeting on the 14th August 2015. The Chapter’s primary concerns this far has been to capacitate Africans in academic and research sectors to champion free access to scientific knowledge as a means to alleviate Africa’s lack of access to scholarly content. It further concerns access to Northern output which has the risk of continuing a neo-colonial agenda (Mboa, 2019). The SPARC Africa Open Access Symposium 2019 (4 – 6 December 2019) will be “challenging the open access movement and its advocates with their social justice principles to usher in equity and equal opportunity and to open the doors for full participation of new African voices in the scholarly communication landscape.”

4. Conclusion

For Africa to address its many challenges through Open Access, policies need to be developed, research sharing should be incentivised, provision should be made for skills development, and proper infrastructure and affordable and stable connectivity should be readily available.

A future federated African Open Science Platform (AOSP) in which policies, skills, incentives and infrastructure needs are addressed will not only encourage more collaboration among researchers in addressing the SDGs, but it will also benefit the many stakeholders identified as part of the research process. But only if there is commitment from African governments.

References

  1. Prof Meoli Kashorda, personal email communication on 13 May 2019
  2. https://www.revues.scienceafrique.org/catalog/
  3. https://www.journals.ac.za/
  4. http://www.univ-bejaia.dz/revues
  5. https://www.coalition-s.org/
  6. https://www.coalition-s.org/coalition-s-welcomes-its-first-african-member-and-receives-strong-support-from-the-african-academy-of-sciences/
  7. http://aims.fao.org/activity/blog/sparc-africa-capacitating-africa-towards-access-open-scholarship

Bibliography

Academy of Science of South Africa. (2019). African Open Science Platform – Landscape
Study. Unpublished.

African Union African Observatory of Science Technology and Innovation. (2014). Assessment of Scientific Production in the African Union, 2005–2010. url: http://aosti.org/index.php/component/content/article/88-reports/133-the-state-of-scientific-production-in-the-african-union?Itemid=437

Alliance for Affordable Internet. (2017). Affordability Report. Washington DC. url: https://a4ai.org/

Belhamel, K. (2016). Open Access Journals Strategy in Algeria. url: https://blog.doaj.org/2016/10/06/open-access-journals-strategy-in-algeria/

Economic Commission for Africa. (2017). Towards Improved Access to Broadband in Africa. Addis Ababa. url: https://www.uneca.org/sites/default/files/PublicationFiles/towards_improved_access_to_broadband_inafrica.pdf

Foley, M. (2016). The Role and Status of National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) in Africa. url:  http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/233231488314835003/pdf/113114-NRENSinAfrica-SABER-ICTno05.pdf

Galagan, D. and Looijen, M. (2015). National Research and Education Networks: Analysis of Management Issues. url: http://www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/inet/99/proceedings/3h/3h_1.htm

Mboa Nkoudou, T. H. (2019). Epistemic alienation in African Scholarly communication: Open access as a Pharmakon. Old Traditions and New Technologies: The Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Open Scholarly Communication. Edited by Eve, M., Gray, J. Cambridge, MIT Press (in Press). url:  https://eve.gd/2019/06/07/old-traditions-and-new-technologies/

The 10 Principles of Plan S

The welcome announcement last week from Marc Schiltz‘s Science Europe about cOAlition S and the publication of The 10 Principles of Plan S was well received at DOAJ Headquarters. The key principle of Plan S is:

“After 1 January 2020 scientific publications on the results from research funded by public grants provided by national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be published in compliant Open Access Journals or on compliant Open Access Platforms.”

The document continues to outline important factors surrounding the desired model of open access and this model sometimes follows closely DOAJ’s preferred model for open access:

  1. Authors will retain copyright.
  2. Content will be published under an open license which fulfils the requirements defined by the Berlin Declaration.
  3. All scientists should be able to publish Open Access even if they have limited means.
  4. Publications fees should be standardised or capped.
  5. The hybrid model of publishing is not compliant with the principles.

DOAJ is pleased to see these principles so in line with the DOAJ criteria.

Lars Bjørnshauge, DOAJ Founder and Managing Director, said: ‘While we should remember that these principles only cover Europe and focus on science and that they may not be applicable on all continents or to the humanities, they will hopefully have a positive impact. Their announcement is timely and they are a welcome move in the right direction. DOAJ is proud to support their implementation.’

Silver Sponsor Hindawi Answers our Questions on Open Access Publishing and DOAJ

Paul Tavner, Head of Institutional Outreach at Hindawi, answers our questions.

Artboard 1– Your organisation has been supporting DOAJ for some years now. Why is it important for Hindawi to support DOAJ?

DOAJ is a crucial tool for authors when assessing open access journals. Its use is taught by librarians around the world as part of Open Access 101. Hindawi strongly believes in supporting the development of tools that the community can rely on to make informed decisions about their publishing activities.

Importantly, DOAJ was designed as an ‘open first’ service – unlike legacy systems that are gradually retrofitted to support open practices. Developing and supporting new services dedicated to serving the open movement – such as DOAJ –  is a key priority for us.

– What benefits does being indexed in DOAJ bring to your journals?

The way that people think about and assess journals is changing. Prestige will always be an important factor when considering publishing venues, but open access – and open science more widely – adds new considerations to this decision-making process.

In a world of evolving practices and priorities, DOAJ encourages authors to think carefully about the most fundamentally important qualities a journal offers. A journal listed in DOAJ provides reassurance to authors that essential standards are met and that they can expect a certain level of service when submitting.

The fact that many librarians train authors to use DOAJ as a discoverability platform – as well as a tool for assessing journals – also means that more authors are finding and submitting to Hindawi’s journals for the first time via DOAJ.

– What is Hindawi doing to support that development? Do you have any exciting projects underway?

Hindawi’s current priorities are around the development of a truly open infrastructure for scholarly publishing. Although we’re actively developing our own solutions in-house, we strongly believe that collaborative community-led projects are where real progress will be made in this space. We’re therefore contributing significantly to initiatives including Crossref, the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) and the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation (CoKo).

Our CEO, Paul Peters, wrote a detailed blog post on this subject at the end of last year, which you can read here.

– What are your personal views on the future of Open Access publishing?

The Open Access genie is out of the bottle. It’s no longer a questions of ‘if’ Open Access will become the dominant paradigm, it’s just a question of ‘when’. As more and more digital natives become practicing researchers and take over from predecessors, the mental contortions needed to justify the old-fashioned practices of legacy business models become increasingly difficult to sustain.

That said, OA has a lot of problems that need to be resolved. APCs are a clever solution in many ways, but much more needs to be done to explore how they can be more rationally deployed. We need to do more to support researchers in countries with poorer access to funding. OA also has a huge problem with jargon – specifically around the varieties (gold, green etc.).

– What do you think that the scholarly community could do to better support the continued development of the Open Access movement in the near future?

My main wish is that as many people as possible could critically assess what they think they know about open access. Conflations of gold OA with APCs; slurs about ‘pay to publish’; general suspicion about publishing operations from non-Western countries. These are all examples of dogmatic prejudice that could all be addressed with a little simple research.

We all have a responsibility to ask questions about why things are done in a particular way. Challenging convention is key to improving our systems and processes. This applies just as much to publishers as it does to researchers and librarians. Every person who challenges the status quo helps to encourage change and development.

– Much has been said recently about whether open access is succeeding or failing, particularly in terms of the original vision laid out by the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002. Do you think that open access has fallen short of this vision, or has it surpassed expectations?

More people have greater access to scholarly content than ever before in human history. We’re succeeding by some metrics, but lagging behind by others.

The BOAI has had a huge impact on the landscape of the scholarly communications, but it was the result of a specific set of challenges and opportunities at a particular point in time. Rather than concentrating on its vision then, we should be looking more at the challenges and opportunities available to us now.

Russian scientific journals in the era of open access to knowledge: problems of adaptation

Our DOAJ Ambassador Dr. Natalia Gennadievna Popova has recently published a paper (in Russian) “Russian scientific journals in the era of open access to knowledge: problems of adaptation” or Российский научный журнал в эпоху открытого доступа к знаниям: проблемы адаптации. We are sharing this work with the wider DOAJ community, as we know that there is still lots to do in Russia in the open access arena (as our Ambassadors’ programme has shown) and this is covered in the paper.

Here is the paper’s abstract in English:

The advancement of open access to scientific knowledge has become a determining strategy in the sphere of scientific communication. Open access implies, along with a free access to full-text information online, the creation of a legal basis for the results of research to be used fairly by all interested bodies. The Directory of Open Access Journals, DOAJ, as well as other similar institutions, carries the mission of providing and guaranteeing the quality of open access. Russian journals are increasingly become part of this project, which is considered to be a positive trend. Currently, about 163 Russian titles are listed in DOAJ. However, some journals face difficulties in bringing their publication standards in compliance with the DOAJ quality criteria, which has become a reason for suspending 15 Russian titles from this esteemed international database. This article investigates the process of open access advancement in Russia, in particular, the implementation of international quality standards in the sphere of Russian scientific periodicals. Main DOAJ acceptance criteria are analyzed, as well as those problems that Russian titles experience adapting to them.

Read the full-text (in Russian).

New DOAJ Ambassadors in the Republic of Korea

Following our training sessions last month in Seoul we are very pleased to announce that we have appointed three new Ambassadors and an honorary Ambassador in Korea. We have also created a group of seven voluntary associate editors who will help DOAJ with applications coming from Southeast Asia. From 1st December 2017, the Ambassadors will start working on promoting DOAJ’s practices and standards, and Best Practices in Open Access publishing.

We are increasing our work and visibility as Open Access implementation spreads in many regions in Asia.

The three new Korean Ambassadors are:

Hea Lim Rhee

Hea is a senior researcher at Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), and also the managing editor of KISTI’s

Journal of Information Science Thea-lim-rhee.jpgheory and Practice (JISTaPJISTaP), the first English journal on computer science in Korea. 

Hea received her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh and her Master of Science in Information from the University of Michigan, where she specialized in archives and records management. Conflict of Interest document

 

Hyun Jung Yi

Hyun Jung Yi holds a PhD in Library and Information Science from Chung-Ang University, Korea. She is a librarian at Hanyang University Guri Hospital, Korea. 20171114_134053

Currently, she also serves as a member of the Scholarly Committee at the Korean Medical Library Association and as a vice chair of the Committee of Information Management at the Korean Council of Science Editors. Her interests include observing trends in the scholarly publishing market, disseminating open access journals, and enhancing the publishing environment for researchers.

Conflict of Interest document

Youngim Jung

Youngim holds a PhD from Pusan National University in Computer Science and Engineering.

She is now a Senior Researcher at Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information developing and managing scholarly publishing systems for supporting domestic societies. Previously, she worked for KESLI, the national library consortium in South Korea and contributed herself to establish Korea DOI Center. Youngim Jung.jpg

She is a committee member of KCSE (Korean Council of Science Editors) and CASE (Council of Asian Science Editors). She has authored publications and communications in the field of Scientometrics, Library Systems and Natural Language Processing. Conflict of Interest document.

 

Sun Huh (honorary Ambassador)

sun_20151210.jpg

Sun is a medical doctor and holds a PhD from Seoul National University in parasitology. He has been a Professor of Parasitology, College of Medicine, Hallym University, Korea since 1988. He has worked voluntarily as a board member of Korean Association of Medical Journal Editors (1996-2011), Korean Council of Science Editors (2011-present), and Council of Asian Science Editors (2014-present).

He has been an editor of Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions since 2005. His goal with DOAJ is to pursue the registration of all open access journals from Korea to DOAJ. Conflict of Interest document.

 

The new Ambassadors will work alongside the existing DOAJ Ambassadors from other territories and the DOAJ Team in Europe.

It’s soon upon us: the Ninth Open Access Week

It’s soon upon us! The ninth Open Access Week. This year, the theme is Open in Action, about taking ‘concrete steps to make … work more openly available and encourag[ing] others to do the same’. The theme corresponds nicely with our IDRC-funded Ambassador project where we have Ambassadors working around the world to promote the values of open access and the DOAJ.

On Facebook, over the coming days, I’ll be listing the details all the DOAJ-associated activities that are being held across the globe. I’ve started with a list of links to some of the DOAJ Team’s profiles on the Open Access Week web site. Here’s the post:

https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FDirectoryofOpenAccessJournals%2Fposts%2F1295485780463658&width=500

Need a flyer or a poster?

What are you doing for open access week? Let us know. If you need any DOAJ promotional material for your event, we have an A5 flyer for printing out, an A4 information sheet (more suitable for a North American audience), and we have a flyer and a poster in French, and the same in Chinese. Don’t forget that we have a collection of presentations on Slideshare, too, which are a great resource for “clipping” (saving a slide), downloading etc. If you need something else, get in touch!

The Open Access Week web site itself also has a great Resources section, where you can download logos, handouts and posters.

Policy updates: open access statement and user registration

Open Access Statement

Until recently, DOAJ has insisted that journals state very clearly on their web site a full and detailed open access statement, preferably one that follows closely the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition.

From 8th September, DOAJ will accept a short open access statement—even as short as ‘This journal is open access.’—but ONLY in combination with a Creative Commons licensing statement, or equivalent licensing statement, on the same page and, preferably, in the same paragraph. As always, this statement must be on the journal web site and not held on a different site. If the licensing statement is not on the same page as the open access statement then the extended open access statement complying with BOAI definition will be required.

User Registration

From August 2016, DOAJ no longer accepts journals that require users to register to view the full text. This change was put into effect immediately. As DOAJ reviews journals that are already in DOAJ, as part of their regular update work, they will remove those journals that require registration and notify the publishers.

If you have questions, send email to feedback@doaj.org

The DOAJ Ambassadors’ biographies

As promised in my post presenting the 15 Ambassadors , here are their biographies.

Kamel Belhamel, Region: North Africa

kamelKamel holds a PhD from the University of Setif (Algeria) in Chemical Process Engineering. He is now Professor of Chemistry at University of Bejaia,  Director of the Laboratory of Organic Materials and Editor in chief of DOAJ-indexed Algerian Journal of Natural Products (ISSN: 2353-0391). He is the author of several publications and communications in the field of Chemical Process Engineering, Natural Products, Nanoparticles and Metal Alloys. Kamel has long, international experience in the management of Research Projects (Projects DAAD German, French Framework Programme CMEP…) and Coordinator of two Algerian Research projects CNEPRU, PNR …). Kamel is the DOAJ ambassador in region of North Africa.

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

 

Xin Bi, Region: China

xinbiXin holds a PhD degree in Psychology from Soochow University in China and also a Master’s Degree in Information Systems from Liverpool University in UK. He is the University Librarian in Xi’an Jiaotong – Liverpool University in Suzhou and in this capacity he is working with a wide network including librarians, publishers, professionals in China and overseas to better facilitate the scholarly communication and knowledge dissemination. He is one of three DOAJ ambassadors in China. Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

 

Vrushali Dandawate, Region: India

vrushaliVrushali is Head Librarian at AISSMS College of Engineering College Pune, Maharashtra, India. She completed her Master’s from the University of Pune and has completed a Library Automation and Networking course from IGNOU Open University. She was selected for “International training program on Management of Electronics Information and Digital Library Lib@Web 2013” that ran from October 2013 – December 2013 at University of Antwerp, Belgium. In 2014, she received a grant from VLIR-OUS to attend “VLIR-UOS workshop ‘Training Information Literacy with Southern Partners’, coordinated by the University College Leuven-Limburg (UCLL). She is winner of ALCTS Online Course Grant for Library Professionals from Developing Countries for course Fundamentals Of Collection Development and Management (FCDM) March 2014. She is one of three DOAJ ambassadors in India.

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

Sridhar Gutam, Region: India

sridharSridhar holds a PhD in Plant Physiology from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute and is part of the Agricultural Research Service of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). Currently, he is working as Senior Scientist at ICAR Research Complex for the Eastern Region. Apart from his studies related to plant physiology and phenology of horticultural crops, he is passionate for Open Access, Open Data and Open Education. He founded a community of practice, ‘Open Access India’ and is advocating the opening-up of agricultural research information and data. He is one of three DOAJ ambassadors in India.

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

Mahmoud Khalifa, Region: Middle East & Persian Gulf

mahmoudMahmoud is the founder & CEO of Cybrarians, the Arabic Portal for Librarianship and Information. He is an Associate at IFLA International Leaders Programme, 2016 and since 2013 is a board member of the Egyptian Library Association. Also in 2013 he was the winner of the Scientific Research Academy’s prize in informatics. He holds a PhD in Information Science from Cairo University. He is an accredited trainer for the IFLA BSLA Program (Building Strong Library Association), as well as a Fellow at Jay Jordan IFLA/OCLC Early Career Development Fellowship Program. He is the editorial manager of Cybrarians Journal, the first electronic Arabic journal on librarianship & Information science. He is the DOAJ ambassador for the region of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

Ivonne Lujano, Region: Latin America

ivonneIvonne has a Master’s in Social Sciences with an emphasis in Education at FLACSO-Argentina and holds a B.A. in Education from the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México (UAEMex), where she currently works as lecturer. She is specialized in scientific Open Access publishing processes and has experience in the evaluation of scholarly publishing practices. She has worked with institutions and organizations at a national and regional level in the training of students, teachers and researchers on issues regarding scientific publishing in Open Access. Ivonne is the DOAJ ambassador for the region of Latin America.

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

Solomon Mekonnen, Region: East Africa

solomonSolomon is Academic Staff, with rank of Lecturer, at the Addis Ababa University (AAU).  Apart from his role at AAU, he is also a Co-Founder of Code4Ethiopia which advocates for open data. In addition, Solomon coordinates nationally an Open Access Programme for the international network Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL). He is a local organizer in Ethiopia for an international network called Open Knowledge International. Solomon was a project manager for Ethiopian Journals online. He is also a PHD candidate at the University of South Africa. Solomon is the DOAJ ambassador for the region of East Africa.

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

Leena Shah, Region: India

leenaLeena Shah holds a Master’s Degree in Information Studies from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore and a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering. After living and working for nearly two decades in Singapore she relocated to Bangalore, India, in May 2016 and is keen on promoting Open Access in this region. She was previously employed as an Earth Sciences Librarian at NTU where she gained experience in teaching and promoting open access, institutional repositories and scholarly communication in general to researchers and students. Leena is one of three DOAJ ambassadors for India.

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

Cenyu Shen, Region: China

cenyuCenyu has a Master degree in Computer Science from University of Helsinki and she is currently a PhD candidate in Information Systems Science at Hanken School of Economics in Finland. She has spent several years on Open Access research with a particular focus on studying questionable and non-English language OA publishers or journals. Her latest research interest expands to the identification and development of infrastructure services and support practices to promote open access movement in Chinese region. Cenyu is one of three DOAJ ambassadors for China.

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

 

Ina Smith, Region: Southern Africa

inaIna holds a Master’s Degree from the University of Pretoria (South Africa) in Computer-Integrated Education, a Higher Education Teaching Diploma, and two degrees (BBibl and BBibl Honors) in Library and Information Science. She is Planning Manager at the Academy of Science of South Africa, and has vast experience of Open Access in general, scholarly research activities, repositories, and Open Access journal management and publishing. Ina is the DOAJ ambassador in the region of Southern Africa.

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

Pascal Soubeiga, Region: West Africa

pascalPascal is from Burkina Faso, West Africa. He has a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science from the library school of University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar, Senegal, and is preparing a dissertation for a Master’s degree in communication. He has worked for the past 11 years as a librarian for the World Health Organization in Burkina Faso, as well as teaching in three library and information colleges there. He has solid experience in information retrieval, user training, and institutional repositories. Pascal is the DOAJ ambassador  for West Africa.

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

Yanhong Zhai, Region: China

yanhongYanhong holds a Master’s degree in Botany from Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences. From August 2012 to April 2015, she worked for MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, an Open Access publisher), managing the journal Environments and supporting International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. In the past year, she worked at Elsevier, managing special issues for journals in the field of multimedia and computer science. She is one of three DOAJ ambassadors in China.

Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)

The biographies of our fantastic team of volunteer Ambassadors for Russia will be posted here shortly.

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.

Presenting the DOAJ Ambassadors

Further to our announcement of the start of our IDRC-funded project focussing on the improvement of open access journals in the global south, I am delighted to present to you the list of 15 DOAJ Ambassadors. These Ambassadors will be working on behalf of DOAJ until April 2017 and will be operating in 11 regions or sub-regions across the globe. DOAJ is very lucky to have such a great list of names: people who have a wide-ranging set of skills and will bring huge amounts of experience to the DOAJ organisation.

After two members of DOAJ were invited recently to present at the NEICON/ASEP conference in Russia, we are very lucky to be able to extend the program’s work to the Russian Federation.  Three volunteers, led by Olga Kirillova, have also joined the list of DOAJ Ambassadors, extending the work of the program outlined to IDRC but on a self-funded basis. This is a hugely beneficial development for open access and DOAJ.

The final list of DOAJ Ambassadors are:

Region Name Based in
Southern Africa Ina Smith South Africa
East Africa Solomon Mekonnen Ethiopia
West Africa Pascal Soubeiga Burkina Faso
North Africa Kamel Belhamel Algeria
China Yanhong Zhai China
China Cenyu Shen Finland
China Xin Bi China
Middle East & Persian Gulf Mahmoud Khalifa Egypt
East India Sridhar Gutam India
West India Vrushali Dandawate India
South India Leena Shah India
Latin America Ivonne Lujano Mexico
Russian Federation Olga Kirillova Russia
Russian Federation (West) Maxim Mitrofanov Russia
Russian Federation (East) Natalia Popova Russia

Welcome to all of you!

The biographies for the DOAJ Ambassadors are posted here.

The majority of the Ambassadors will be converging on the island of Crete, in the beautiful village of Vamos, for an intensive 4-day training retreat starting next week. The outcome of that meeting will be an initial 2-month action plan for each Ambassador to implement as soon as s/he is back on home turf. That plan will then inform the actions for the rest of the year. It is really exciting that developments will start to take shape so soon after the retreat.

Each region will present its own challenges to the Ambassadors and to DOAJ but there will be exciting milestones to reach. For example, can DOAJ gain an online presence in China via the huge social media networks there? Will we see an increase in quality journal applications from India, a country sadly linked to questionable publishing practices and author spamming? Will we see an increase in the number of applications from East and West Africa, two regions of the continent that are sadly under-represented in DOAJ today? In Latin America, where a relatively large number of journals are already indexed in DOAJ, will we be able to increase the number of journals from the smaller countries like Bolivia, Ecuador or Guatemala?

In all of the regions, language can be a barrier. Almost all of the DOAJ site is in English and we haven’t yet found a good-enough piece of software that will translate the most important parts of the site for us. We will be addressing that as part of the IDRC project but having our Ambassadors on the ground will be hugely influential in increasing awareness of the site and our criteria.

DOAJ will be reporting on the progress of our Ambassador program regularly and I hope to be able to share some exciting statistics with you soon.