By Leena Shah Managing Editor & Ambassador, DOAJ Focus Group on Ethics, Research Integrity and Open Scholarship Organized by Taylor & Francis New Delhi, 13th April 2018

1. Directory of Open Access Journals
[DOAJ] – An introduction and more
____________________________
By Leena Shah
Managing Editor & Ambassador, DOAJ
Focus Group on Ethics, Research Integrity and Open Scholarship
Organized by Taylor & Francis
New Delhi, 13th April 2018

2. Outline
• Who we are and what are we doing?
• How do we work?
• What makes the DOAJ index credible &
trustworthy? Criteria ?
• How do we identify questionable publishers?
• Relevance in today’s context - Using DOAJ
index of OA journals in UGC Approved list of
journals

3. What are we doing?

4. DOAJ Mission
• 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.

5. DOAJ – more than a list of journals!
• A global list of peer-reviewed Open Access journals –
• all subjects and languages
– journals undergo evaluation based on a set of criteria
– 11,170 Journals (April 2018)
• An aggregation of article level metadata
– Publishers upload article metadata into DOAJ
– 73% of the journals do so
– Currently 3,010,037 articles
• All DOAJ services and data are free for all to use,
download and re-use

6. Who we are?

7. DOAJ Core Team
• Managing Director
• Operations Manager
• Project and Communications Manager
• Editor-in-Chief
• Senior Managing Editor
• 6 Managing Editors
• We are based in Sweden, United Kingdom, the
Netherlands, Italy, Spain, India, N Africa & Denmark
– And…

8. Volunteers and Ambassadors
• 50+ Voluntary Editors/Associate Editors working in editorial groups
• 20 Ambassadors recruited to
– Promote DOAJ
– Handle applications of journals to be listed in DOAJ
– Promote best publishing practice and
– Help identifying and spotting questionable and unethical
publishers
• Ambassadors are based in
– China, India, Russia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Algeria, South
Africa and Mexico, Indonesia & S Korea – covering Asia, Middle
East, Africa and Latin America

9. How do we work?

10. How do we work?
• Journals apply via the application form
http://doaj.org/application/new
• The application form consists of 54 questions
and is available in 13 languages
• Applications are initially triaged
• We receive over 450 applications every month
• So far DOAJ has not actively solicited
applications

11. Application Form
We ask about :
• The editorial board
• The peer review process
• Archiving/preservation
• Plagiarism
• Openness
– Licensing and copyright
– Re-use rights
• Charges
… and much, much more

12. Three-tier Evaluation Process
• Associate Editors: reviewing applications, communicate with
publishers,
• recommend inclusion/rejection
• Editors: allocating applications to Associate Editors, recommend
• inclusion/rejection
• Managing Editors: allocate applications to Editors & decide on
• inclusion/rejection
Managing
Editor

13. https://doaj.org/publishers

14. What makes the DOAJ index
credible & trustworthy? Criteria ?

15. Editorial Process – Quality & Transparency
• The journal must have an editor or an editorial
board, all members must be easily identified
• Specification of the review process
– Editorial/ Peer/ Blind /Double blind / Open
Peer Review
• Statements about aims & scope clearly visible
• Instructions to authors shall be available and
easily located
• Screening for plagiarism?
• Time from submission to publication

16. Openness

17. Reuse/remix - Licensing

18. Copyright & Permissions

19. Charges

20. General criteria
• Full (“gold”) OA – not hybrid
• Full text must be available without embargo
• One unique URL per article
• Journal website may have information in more
than one language. However, all the information
should be the same in all languages
• Journal must have at least 5 articles published in
the last calendar year
• Aim & scope, Author Instructions clearly provided

21. Principles of Transparency and Best Practices in
Scholarly Communication
COPE, OASPA, WAME & DOAJ have
collaborated to identify principles of
transparency and best practice.
https://doaj.org/bestpractice
The principles are largely derived from the
criteria developed by the Directory of Open
Access Journals

22. How does DOAJ spot Questionable
Publishers/Journals?

23. •Low publishing quality
Journal name, website, peer review, publisher,
ownership, volume of articles, advertisements,
prominent soliciting for editors, ambiguous
company address, many journals and few articles
• Low scientific quality
focus, format, self-citations, plagiarism
• Malpractice
false claims, hidden costs, spamming authors,
wrong information
Detecting Questionable journals

24. • Inappropriate marketing practices e.g. Spam emails
• Journal titles with “International”, “American” or
“European”
• Very broad scope, multidisciplinary
• Fake impact factors
• Advertise very quick publishing
• Advertise a relative low publication fee
• No or little quality control of articles
• Low-standard peer review process or even don’t
have peer review at all
Detecting Questionable journals (contd.)

25. • Publishers deemed questionable will not be
able to re-apply for listing for up to three years
• An appeal procedure is in place
• Transparent:
We have a publicly available list of journals
added and removed
Questionable journals – Our Response

26. Questionable Journals – Indian Context
• DOAJ is keen to support UGC*, India in its
efforts to stop the proliferation of
questionable journals in India
• In early Mar 2018, DOAJ sent a letter to UGC
with the recommendation to include OA
journals listed in DOAJ into the UGC-
approved list of journals. We look forward to
a positive response..
* University Grants Commission, New Delhi India.

27. Addn stuff abt DOAJ
DOAJ listed in Top 10 platforms for listing Creative Commons work
https://stateof.creativecommons.org/#data
OASPA TO REQUIRE DOAJ LISTING FOR SINGLE-JOURNAL PUBLISHERS
https://blog.doaj.org/2018/08/07/news-oaspa-to-require-doaj-listing-for-single-
journal-publishers/
DOAJ is supported by more than 500 libraries and academic institutions around
the world.
https://doaj.org/members

28. Reference
https://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/interview.doaj/

29. Thanks to
All the Library Consortia, Universities and Publishers and our Sponsors for the
financial support to DOAJ!

30. Thank you for your attention!
leena@doaj.org