DOAJ (DIRECTORY OF OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS)

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is an indexing service that provides access to
high quality, peer reviewed, open access journals. DOAJ is completely free of charge and all
the data it holds is freely accessible. An important point about DOAJ is that it is independent.
It is funded either by donations from its sponsors and funders. This enables DOAJ to provide
all of its services free of charge. This includes it being a free service to those publishers that
want to be indexed in DOAJ. Importantly, from an author’s point of view, all the data is
freely accessible, so you are able to find out if a given journal is indexed by DOAJ. In the
context of looking at DOAJ, it is important to know about the open access model of
publishing. Essentially, it is a model where the authors, their institutions, funding bodies or
other stakeholders pay the publication costs, rather than operating an subscription model, or
one where you are required to buy, or even rent, an individual article. The video above
provides a good introduction to open access publishing, as well as the history and the
objectives of DOAJ. You might also want to look at one of our previous articles on Open
Access publishing, in the context of predatory publishing. There are a couple of surprising
facts in the video, at least there were surprising to us. One (at about 4 mins) is that DOAJ
receives about 500 applications a month from journals who wish to be indexed. About 40%
of these journals will be ultimately be included in the DOAJ database.

Criteria to be indexed in DOAJ

It is useful to be aware important of the criteria to enable to be a journal to indexed in DOAJ

as we need to be assured that a journal that is listed on the DOAJ web site is a credible
journal and unlikely to be predatory.

DOAJ provides a “Publishing best practice and basic standards for inclusion“. which is
comprehensive and will be of interest to those that are keen to get their journal indexed by
DOAJ. It is interesting to see that there are some basic requirements that DOAJ insist on
before a journal is indexed. These include:

1. All content must be available immediately, without any embargo.

2. Each journal must have its own home page, which is pointed to by one URL. Having
a URL that points to a collection of journals is not acceptable.
3. Basic information such as aims and scope, editorial board, instructions to authors,
plagiarism policy etc. must be hosted on the journal’s web pages and not stored on
another web site.
4. Every article must have its own URL.
5. A journal must have at least one ISSN.
6. The journal’s home page must be easy to navigate and be clear and concise.
7. The editorial board web pages must be up to date. It should be possible to contact the
editorial board members and their names and affiliations should be given.
8. Detailed and comprehensive guidelines to authors must be provided.
9. Articles must go through peer review and the exact type of review must be clearly
stated on the web site.
10. The journal must clearly display any charges for an author(s). If there are no charges,
this should be clearly stated.
11. The open access policy of the journal should be clearly stated.