Available in English Commercial No | Website doaj.org Current status Online | |
Alexa rank 58,591 (as of October 2015) | ||
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a website that lists open access journals and is maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA). The project defines open access journals as scientific and scholarly journals that meet high quality standards by exercising peer review or editorial quality control and "use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access." The Budapest Open Access Initiative's definition of open access is used to define required rights given to users, for the journal to be included in the DOAJ, as the rights to "read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles". The aim of DOAJ is to "increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals thereby promoting their increased usage and impact."
As of March 2015, the database contained records for 10,000 journals. An average of four journals were being added each day in 2012.
In May 2016, DOAJ announced that they had removed approximately 3,300 journals from their database to provide better reliability on the content listed on it.
The journals that were removed can reapply as part of an ongoing procedure. As of September 2016, the database now contains 9,216 journals.
History
The Open Society Institute funded various open access related projects after the Budapest Open Access Initiative; the Directory was one of those projects. The idea for the DOAJ came out of discussions at the first Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication in 2002, Lund University became the organization to set up and maintain the DOAJ. It continued to do so until January 2013, when Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA) took over.