Tom Olijhoek 1 , * , Dominic Mitchell 1 , Lars Bjørnshauge 1
16 November 2015
Information & Library science, Communication networks, Databases, Human-computer-interaction, Metadata, Open access publishing, BOAI definitions, Questionable publishers, DOAJ criteria, DOAJ SEAL, Licensing and copyright, DOAJ API, Creative Commons, Best publishing practice
This article gives an overview of the history and current status of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). After a brief historical overview, DOAJ policies regarding open access, intellectual property rights and questionable publishers are explained in detail. The larger part of this article is a much requested explanation on how DOAJ uses its new set of criteria for the evaluation of open access journals and the rationale behind choosing the seven extra criteria that qualify for the DOAJ Seal. A final section is devoted to the extended possibilities that DOAJ will be offering shortly to scholars and publishers for searching the database and for uploading metadata. The result is a renewed DOAJ that offers a more robust platform, a more stable database and enhanced services to allow the upload and collection of metadata.
This work has been published open access under Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0 , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Conditions, terms of use and publishing policy can be found at www.scienceopen.com .