volunteer

WANTED Turkish and Farsi/Persian speakers: a call for volunteer DOAJ Associate Editors

DOAJ has a network of 130 skilled volunteers who spend a few hours a week processing new journal applications for us. Would you like to join us? We are now recruiting volunteers who understand Farsi and/or Turkish. (You do not have to be a native speaker.) You must also be proficient in written and spoken English.

As a DOAJ Associate Editor you will be expected to do a few hours of voluntary, unpaid work a week. You will be provided with training materials to help you carry out your duties. The work you do will directly contribute to the quality, reputation and prominence of open access, scholarly publishing across the world.

Requirements of the Role
In your role as DOAJ Associate Editor, you will be guided and supervised by an Editor and a Managing Editor.

Successful candidates will:

  • have a good knowledge about Open Access (OA);
  • be passionate about OA;
  • have a good knowledge about OA developments in scholarly publishing;
  • have a working understanding of OA publishing practices.

 

In your work you must:

  • be confident working online and have stable access to the internet;
  • support and promote DOAJ and its goals, and be a DOAJ advocate;
  • maintain confidentiality around information to which you have access in the DOAJ database and DOAJ Google Drive, particularly applications you review;
  • assist in evaluating journals suggested to DOAJ in your specialist language;
  • adhere to the recommendations around keeping personal data secure and confidential, as laid out by the DOAJ privacy policy.

Please note that if you are associated in any way with a journal in DOAJ, you may not be selected due to a conflict of interest.

If you wish to apply please complete and submit this form.

At this time, applications are only open to those with the requested languages skills. All other applications will be rejected. We will advertise further volunteering opportunities on this blog so please follow us here or on Twitter. @doajplus

Thank you for considering volunteering for DOAJ!

DOAJ Mission
DOAJ’s mission is to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language. DOAJ will work with editors, publishers and journal owners to help them understand the value of best practice publishing and standards and apply those to their own operations. DOAJ is committed to being 100% independent and maintaining all of its services and metadata as free to use or reuse for everyone.

Open Access Week 2015 and the DOAJ Volunteer Loyalty Program

What are you doing for Open Access Week 2015 (OAW 2015)? Perhaps you are holding a workshop at your university or giving a presentation in your library? OAW 2015 is the EIGHTH OAW and DOAJ stand firmly behind it.

To honour this year’s OAW, DOAJ is launching a volunteer loyalty program. You may have read about our wonderful volunteers that give a few hours of their time every week to review new journal applications. Our volunteers do fantastic work and are a talented and dedicated bunch. We decided that we should honour the fantastic work that they do with a series of rewards.

We will be awarding a certificate of loyalty and achievement* to volunteers for every 50 applications reviewed and completed. The more applications a volunteer reviews, the more certificates they get. We’re designing the certificate just now but I’ll post an example here as soon as I have one. [UPDATE 15th October: here are the certificates plus the link to the volunteers page!]

Editor's certificate

Sample image of editor’s certificate awarded for a year’s service to DOAJ.

Associate Editor's certificate

Sample image of associate editor’s certificate awarded for 25 applications completed.

We will also be listing all our working volunteers on our site.

We’re exploring the option of awarding Mozilla Open Badges so that a DOAJ volunteer can officially declare their work for DOAJ. we will host an annual virtual volunteer meeting to bring our volunteers together and give them the opportunity to network, exchange ideas or ask questions. Watch this space!

*Credit to Felipe G. Nievinski, one of our volunteers, for the original idea. Thanks Felipe!

Get involved and volunteer for DOAJ

We are always looking for ‪‎volunteers‬ to help us review the applications for journals wishing to be indexed in ‪‎DOAJ‬. We have well over 100 people, from all over the world, helping us already. It’s a growing and exciting network to be part of and the work being done directly contributes to the quality of peer-review, open access publishing. Are you interested in joining us?

How much work is it?
We ask our volunteers to give us 4 or 5 hours of their time per week but you are left to manage your own schedule.

Who should volunteer?
Anyone who has knowledge and enthusiasm for academic journals, scholarly publishing, ‪‎open access‬, electronic publishing, librarianship, digital preservation. We particularly welcome ‪librarians‬, information studies professionals and students, PhD students, researchers and people affiliated with research institutions. The important thing is that you understand some of the mechanics, principles and politics behind open access and scholarly publishing.

We are always looking for people who have an excellent grasp of English as a first, second or third language.

If you can speak the following languages, with English, we would love to hear from you:

‪‎Arabic (العربية)
Bulgarian‬ (български)
‪Chinese‬ (中文)
‪Czech‬ (česky)
‪Farsi‬ (فارسی)
‪French‬ (français)
German (deutsch)
‪Hungarian‬ (magyar)
‪Indonesian‬ (Indonesia)
‪Macedonian‬ (македонски)
‪Polish‬ (Polski)
‪Portuguese‬ (Português)
Romanian (român)
‪Russian‬ (Русский)
‪Serbo‬-Croatian
‪Slovak‬ (slovenský)
‪Slovenian‬ (slovensko)
‪Spanish‬ (Español)
‪Turkish‬ (Türkçe)

How do I apply?
If you have any questions, contact me here or email feedback@doaj.org

DOAJ Editor and Associate Editor network goes live

Our new network to support our crowdsourcing project has gone live which means that our volunteers of Editors and Associate Editors can now start work! This is an exciting and extremely important step for DOAJ.

Although there are no visible changes to the site itself, behind the scenes we have implemented a whole new piece of functionality to support a large number of people all working on the journals and new applications. Certainly, publishers will start to see the benefits as turnaround times from submission of application to decision decrease. Remember: as well as the ~100 new applications we receive every month, almost 99% of all the journals in DOAJ need to reapply to ensure they meet the new criteria!

We will start with three pilot teams: Chinese, English and Spanish. To help them find their way around the new system, we will create a series of training videos and some written documentation. Links to those documents will be emailed to each volunteer.

As ever, if you have any question or would like to know more, drop me a line.

Crowdsourcing librarian power

DOAJ recently attended, and gave a plenary session at, the 35th conference for the International Association of Scientific and Technological University Libraries. The presentation gave conference delegates an update on progress with the new application form and details of the our network of volunteers: the DOAJ Associate Editors and Editors. I’d like to share a little more of that information with you.

Today ~99% of all the journals currently indexed in DOAJ will have to reapply to remain in the directory. This is necessary because the bar for inclusion has been considerably raised in response to the fast-paced development of open access over the last 11 years. The application form has been extended from 6 to 56 questions, with the the form focussing on 3 main areas:

  1. Quality
  2. Technical quality (publishing practices)
  3. Openness

Reassessing 9770 journals on 50 new points of information is a huge amount of work that needs to be done methodically, effectively and routinely. Crowdsourcing this work is an ideal solution.

We put out a call for volunteers in January 2014. We had an overwhelming response with volunteers offering their help and expertise from all over the world. (Applications are closed for now.) The majority of the volunteers come from the academic library community which is very useful for DOAJ since we want to have groups of volunteers based around language and specialty. We will organise our volunteers into a network of  1 editor looking after a group of associate editors, with each group reporting to the existing DOAJ Managing Editors.

This way of working is completely new to DOAJ and so we will start with a pilot scheme to ensure we do this right and correctly. We have set up 3 pilot groups: Chinese, Spanish and English. We will start the pilot later this month. Our technical partner, Cottage Labs, has built a journal review and approval structure to support the editors in their work.

If you applied to be a DOAJ Associate Editor and have not heard from us please be patient while run the pilot. And of course, thank you for volunteering!