DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals

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About DOAJ FAQ Open Access info

What is DOAJ?

Directory of Open Access Journals is a service that provides access to quality controlled Open Access Journals. The Directory aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use an appropriate quality control system, and it will not be limited to particular languages or subject areas. The aim of the Directory is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals thereby promoting their increased usage and impact.

How do we define Open Access, Research Journal, quality control?

Open Access Journal:

We define open access journals as journals that use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. From the BOAI definition [1] of "open access" we take the right of users to "read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles" as mandatory for a journal to be included in the directory.

[1] http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess

Quality Control:

The journal must exercise peer-review or editorial quality control to be included.

Research Journal:

Journals that report primary results of research or overviews of research results to a scholarly community.

Periodical:

A serial appearing or intended to appear indefinitely at regular intervals, generally more frequently than annually, each issue of which is numbered or dated consecutively and normally contains separate articles, stories, or other writings.

What are the selection criteria for this service?

Coverage:

Subject: all scientific and scholarly subjects are covered
Types of resource: scientific and scholarly periodicals that publish research or review papers in full text.
Acceptable sources: academic, government, commercial, non-profit private sources are all acceptable.
Level: the target group for included journals should be primarily researchers.
Content: a substantive part of the journal should consist of research papers. All content should be available in full text.
All languages

Access:

All content freely available.
Registration: Free user registration online is acceptable.
Open Access without delay (e.g. no embargo period).

Quality:

Quality control: for a journal to be included it should exercise quality control on submitted papers through an editor, editorial board and/or a peer-review system.

Periodical:

The journal should have an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number, for information see http://www.issn.org).

What is the procedure for getting a journal into DOAJ?

Suggestion

We receive a suggestion to include a journal, either from editors or from the public. We check:

Has the journal got a valid ISSN number?
Is there any information regarding editorial board?
Are the articles available in full text?
Is there any information regarding Open Access policy on the web site?
Does the journal execute editorial review and/or peer review?
Finally, we check that there is a contact email address, and that it is active.

When all these things are in place, we send a registration form to the editor.

Verification

Once we receive the filled in form, we check the journal more thoroughly based on the information provided in the registration form.

Is it Open Access according to the BOAI definition? By this we mean the journal article’s “free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.”
Does the journal charge authors for publishing? If so, is there any information regarding this on the web site?
Is there information on the web site regarding the journal´s peer-review process, or the editorial review process?
Is there an embargo (delay)? The printed version could be accessible before the online version, or the current issue could be subject to subscription while earlier issues are Open Access.
From which year are the full text articles available?
Who is the publisher?
Country, language(s), key words

Registration

The journal is then registered in DOAJ and classified by the DOAJ staff according to Library of Congress´classification schema. The journal is immediately searchable and visible in DOAJ upon registration.

Metadata and archiving

As a final point, we suggest to the editor that he/she provides us with article metadata, in XML format. DOAJ is OAI compliant, and once the article is available in DOAJ, it becomes automatically OAI harvestable.

What is OAI, Open Archives Initiative?

OAI, Open Archives Initiative, supplies a common framework to web communities that allows them to gain access to content in a standard manner by means of metadata harvesting.

How can I support/sponsor DOAJ?

Please go to our Support DOAJ page for further information.

How do I search in DOAJ and what information about a journal, or article, can I find in the directory?

The records in DOAJ contain the following fields:

Journal Title
The title of the journal.

ISSN
The ISSN number of the journal.

EISSN
The EISSN of the journal (in case the journal has one).

Subject
The topic of the journal.

Publisher
The entity responsible for the publishing of the journal.

Country
Country of publication.

Language
Language(s) of the full text articles.

Keywords
Keywords of the topic of the journal.

Start Year
When the journal became electronically available as open access in full text.

End Year (only if it is continued by a new journal)
When the journal ceased to exist.

Use "Find journals" to search for journals included in DOAJ. The system will search through all fields in the record, except subject and year.

Use "Search articles" to search for articles in the journals having DOAJ CONTENT.

You can choose to make your search in any of the following fields:

All fields
Title
Journal title
ISSN
Author
Keywords
Abstract

If you write more than one word in your search query it will be treated as a phrase. You also have the possibility to use the Boolean operators and, or, not.

Can I find information about which countries have journals included in DOAJ?

Yes, based on year this is presented in two lists, showing:

which journals have been included during a specific year and when (the date)
the total number of journals included so far from a specific country

Go to the presentation

Are there other ways to Open Access?

Yes, read more about Self-Archiving and Open Archives in the Southampton Self-Archiving FAQ.

Why is the subject area I'm looking for not covered?

Because we have not found any journals in that area yet. Suggestions are welcome, please use our form to suggest a journal for inclusion in DOAJ.

Is there an RSS feature in DOAJ?

Yes, in the left area you will find: - Journals added last 7 days - Journals added last 7 days

How can I get journal metadata from DOAJ?

The DOAJ service supports the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH). Thus, any other service can obtain records from DOAJ for inclusion in their collection. OAI is well established, and easy to use. The base URL is: http://0-www.doaj.org.librus.hccs.edu/oai . You can add most OAI verbs and other commands directly on that. A few examples:

Verb: Identify
http://0-www.doaj.org.librus.hccs.edu/oai?verb=Identify

Verb: ListMetadataFormats
http://0-www.doaj.org.librus.hccs.edu/oai?verb=ListMetadataFormats

Verb: ListRecords&from=2004-01-01&metadataPrefix=oai_dc
http://0-www.doaj.org.librus.hccs.edu/oai?verb=ListRecords&from=2004-03-01&metadataPrefix=oai_dc

From these URLs you'll get both an idea of what OAI is, and much of our metadata. See also our example.

You have also the possibility to download the list of records in DOAJ in a comma separated format. Then you can import the file to Excel or some other software to use the records further. Do as follows:

Download the file from /doaj?func=csv to your own computer
Open e.g. Excel
Go to the menu Data -> Get External Data -> Import Text File
From there you can choose how you want the spread sheet to look like e.g., delimited-> Comma -> General

How do I get article level metadata from DOAJ?

The article level metadata can be harvested using OAI protocol.
The base URL is: http://0-www.doaj.org.librus.hccs.edu/oai.article
Use OAI verbs and other command options directly on that.
Example:

Verb: ListRecords&from=2004-07-01&metadataPrefix=oai_dc
http://0-www.doaj.org.librus.hccs.edu/oai.article?verb=ListRecords&from=2004-07-15&metadataPrefix=oai_dc

Do you have any restrictions for the use of your metadata?

The data in DOAJ is licensed to you under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. The essence of copy of this license is explained on the creative commons web site. (You may also be interested in the fine print.)

Note that everything that is free comes with no guarantee. So, mind you, if you ever stumble over an Open Access Journal cataloged by us, and break your leg, then don't blame us!

Why can't I find my journal in DOAJ?

Maybe we have not found out about the journal, please use our form to suggest a journal for inclusion in DOAJ. Or the journal unfortunately doesn't match our selection criteria eg. the articles have to be freely available from the publishing date. See selection criteria

As a publisher, how do I upload articles into DOAJ?

When a journal has been added to DOAJ a log in and password is sent to the journal owner. Go to “For publishers” at the DOAJ site and login. You have two options to upload the article metadata, either article by article or file by file. The files must conform with DOAJ XML Schema specification, read more about it here.

How do I get the SPARC Europe Seal for Open Access Journals?

How to be approved:

Step 1:

Choose the Creative Commons License CC-BY license.

In order to qualify for the SPARC Europe Seal you must apply the CC-BY license, which is the most user friendly license, allowing among other things for long-term preservation and text- and data mining.

How to choose the CC-BY license:

Go to the Creative Commons (CC) web site (http://creativecommons.org/about/license) and copy the CC-BY Icon - you might as well consult this: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Before_Licensing .

Put the CC-BY icon on the homepage of your journal(s) and preferably on each article in your journal.

Go to the DOAJ web site (http://www.doaj.org), login to "For journal owners", click on "license info" and choose CC-license for your journal(s).

The CC icon will be shown automatically in DOAJ.

Step 2:

Your journal(s) shall continuously provide DOAJ with metadata for all of your content.

How do I know which CC license to choose?

You can find information on the different types of licenses at the Creative Commons web site:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

and there is even a page to help you choose the correct license for your content:

http://creativecommons.org/choose/

Both are available in 24 different languages.

How can I find information about author fees?

You can see information regarding author fees here.

General information

For users

For libraries

For publishers

For authors