[Insight-developers] OPEN ACCESS : Milestone : 2000 Journals now in the DOAJ directory

[Luis Ibanez]

THE DIRECTORY OF OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS REACHES AN IMPORTANT MILESTONE

               NOW THERE ARE 2000 JOURNALS IN THE DOAJ

Lund, Sweden – As of today the Directory of Open Access Journals

                     (DOAJ, http://www.doaj.org)

contains 2000 open access journals, i.e. quality controlled scientific
and scholarly electronic journals that are freely available on the web.

The goal of the Directory of Open Access Journals is still to increase
the visibility and accessibility of open access scholarly journals, and
thereby promote their increased usage and impact. The directory aims to
comprehensively cover all open access scholarly journals that use an
appropriate quality control system. Journals in all languages and
subject areas will be included in the DOAJ. The selection criteria have
been updated based on feedback from users to be more understandable (
http://www.doaj.org/articles/about#criteria).

The database records are freely available for reuse in library
catalogues and other services and can be harvested by using the OAI-PMH
( http://www.openarchives.org/), and thereby increase the visibility of
the open access journals.

We are very happy to see that the usage of the DOAJ is constantly
increasing on all parameters. Every month visitors from more than 150
countries are using the service, hundreds of libraries all over the
world have included the DOAJ titles in their catalogues and other
services, and commercial aggregators are as well benefiting of the service.

New titles are added frequently and to ensure that the holding
information is correct you have to update your records regularly. We
also have to remove titles from DOAJ if they no longer lives up to the
selection criteria e.g. during the last 6 months of 2005 50 titles where
removed.

We are working with publishers of hybrid journals (subscription based
journals where authors /institutions for a publication charge can
publish articles in open access) in order to include even these articles
in the DOAJ. It is our intention to be able to inform about this in the
near future.

Feedback form the community tells us that the DOAJ is an important
service. In order to be able to maintain and further develop the service
we have decided to launch a Donation Programme that makes it possible
for all users/institutions to contribute to the continued maintenance
and development of DOAJ. If you/your institution would consider
contributing please go to http://www.doaj.org/articles/donation for
further information.

DOAJ is or has been supported by the Information Program of the Open
Society Institute ( http://www.osi.hu/infoprogram/), along with SPARC
(The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), (
http://www.arl.org/sparc) SPARC Europe, ( http://www.sparceurope.org/),
BIBSAM, the Royal Library of Sweden (http://www.kb.se) and Axiell (
http://www.axiell.se/)

If you know of a journal that should be included in the directory, use
this form to report it to the directory: http://www.doaj.org//suggest.
Information about how to obtain DOAJ records for use in a library
catalogue or other service you will find at:
http://www.doaj.org/articles/questions#metadata.

Thank you for your interest and support!

Lotte Jorgensen
Lars Björnshauge

Regards,
Lotte

Lotte Jorgensen
Lund University Libraries, Head Office
P.O.Box 134, SE-221 00 LUND, Sweden
Visiting address Tornavägen 9B, Lund
Tel: 046-222 34 31
Fax: 046-222 36 82
E-mail: lotte.jorgensen at lub.lu.se