The Directory of Open Access Journals is delighted to announce new selection criteria and hereby announces that these new criteria are open for public comment until July 15th.
The DOAJ-team has developed the criteria and our Advisory Board has provided valuable input and comments.
With the growth in the number of research funders, institutional open access policies and mandates, all stakeholders involved – researchers (as authors and readers), research managers, staff managing publication funds, librarians, universities and research funders – need a trusted and reliable information resource that identifies good quality open access journals and filters out disreputable publishers. Equally, the former have a vested interest in not being associated with the latter.
We have tried to construct objective criteria that can facilitate compliance verification easily. In order to be listed in the DOAJ, a journal must meet the following criteria:
- Journal will be asked to provide basic information (title, ISSN, etc.), contact information, and information about journal policies
- Journal is registered with SHERPA/RoMEO
- Journal has an editorial board with clearly identifiable members (including affiliation information)
- Journal publishes a minimum of five articles per year (does not apply for new journals)
- Allows use and reuse at leastat the following levels (as specified in the Open Access Spectrum, http://www.plos.org/about/open-access/howopenisit/ ):
- Full text, metadata, and citations of articles can be crawled and accessed with permission (Machine Readability Level 4)
- Provides free readership rights to all articles immediately upon publication (Reader Rights Level 1)
- Reuse is subject to certain restrictions; no remixing (Reuse Rights Level 3)
- Allow authors to retain copyright in their article with no restrictions (Copyrights Level 1)
- Author can post the final, peer-reviewed manuscript version (postprint) to any repository or website (Author Posting Rights Level 2)
You may review the complete list of criteria here.
Future submissions for inclusion in to DOAJ must include the complete set of information provided by the publisher. This information will be publicly available in the Directory. The journals currently listed in the DOAJ will have to go through a re-evaluation process based on the new criteria. This work will take place over the next 12 months or so.
