Finnish Serials Group seminar, Helsinki 6.10.2009 Lars Björnshauge, Director of Libraries

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Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the Collection, Current

Projects and Plans - Supporting Open Access Journals

Finnish Serials Group seminar, Helsinki 6.10.2009

Lars Björnshauge,Director of Libraries

Lund University, Sweden

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The early history of DOAJ

– Initiated during the first Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication in Lund/Copenhagen October 2002

– Initially funded by Open Society Institute and co-funded by SPARC

– Project started January 2003– Service launched 12th of May 2003 with

300+ journals

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Number of journals listed in the DOAJ

• May 2003: 300• May 2004: 1097• May 2005: 1601• May 2006: 2230• May 2007: 2700• May 2008: 3315• October 2009: 4361

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Steady growth!

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Initial purpose of the DOAJ:

• Developing & maintaining a list of Open Access journals to facilitate – Libraries & Aggregators to integrate OA-

journals in their catalouges and services – OA-publishers to increase the visibility

of their journals – End-users to find OA-articles– Authors to find a journal to publish in OA

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It´s all about visibility and dissemination

• We wanted to contribute to a process whereincreased visibility of Open Access journalscould generate increased readership, which in turn could generate increased citations and other valuable usage of the research published, which means increased impact, increased usage...

etc etc

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DOAJ – the basics

• A collection of open access journals that comply to specific criteria:

• No embargo!• Quality control measures,

– the journal must exercise peer-review or editorial quality control

– scholarly articles as primary content– researchers as primary target group

• Extensive usage rights

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The selection criteria

• Open Access – our definition:

Open access journals = journals that have a business model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access.

Extensive usage rights: The BOAI definition of "open access" = the right of "users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of these articles"

These are mandatory criteria for inclusion in DOAJ

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More than a list of OA-journals

• Services provided:– Search service on journal title level for end-

users– Creating and constantly extending an index of

metadata on OA-articles• Federated search through a simple interface• +300.000 articles from 1650 journals – 38% of the

journals and slowly increasing

– Metadata harvesting:- Heavily used by libraries, library consortia,

commercial aggregators (subscription agent & OpenUrl service providers) and search engines

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The DOAJ back office – collection development:

• Candidates for inclusion:– Monitoring lists etc– Suggestions from the community - +150

per month• Collecting information for evaluation

against the criteria• Evaluating – decision – inclusion• Continiously monitoring for compliance –

weeding uncompliant journals

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Usage of the DOAJ services

• Direct usage from the DOAJ-site:– Every month visits from 160+ countries– Redirected request constantly above 1

million– Distinct host served constantly above

100.000– Visits from OAI-harvesters substantial

• However the indirect usage most important– Harvesting from the DOAJ-site

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Global visibility and dissemination of records

• Integrated in OPAC´s in many, many libraries• Several service providers are linking to DOAJ• Integrated in the services of aggregators (Serial

Solutions, Ullrichs, EBSCO, OVID etc.)• And OpenURL-providers (Exlibris, EBSCO etc.)

• Feedback from publishers indicates that DOAJ is among the top 5 referral sites.

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DOAJ –services based on a managed collection unique in its composition

• Scope/coverage – all scientific subjects• Geographical spread – 100 countries• Language spread – 50 languages• Publisher spread – as of May 2009:

– 20 Publishers with 10+ Journals– 50 Publishers with 5+ Journals– 1800 Publishers with 1 Journal!– 2200 Publishers in total

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Journals in DOAJ per continent

North America28%

South America18%Africa

1%

Europe40%

Asia10%

Oceania3%

North America South America Africa Europe Asia Oceania

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Service for authors

• Where can I publish if I want to publish in Open Access?– Golden Open Access

• Open Access Journals– Publication Charges?

– Hybrid Open Access• Publication charges?

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Improving the quality of OA-journals

• The evaluation process in itself!• Provision of metadata• The SPARC-Europé certification - SPARC

Europe Seal for Open Access Journals• Long Term Preservation of Open Access

Journals

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L U N D U N I V E R S I T YCooperation with SPARC Europe:Certification programme for Open Access Journals

• SPARC Europe Seal for Open Access Journals:– Explicit re-use policies (CC-BY licence)

• Allow storage of full-text• Allow data- and/or text-mining

– Ability to provide XML-metadata on article level

• 415 journals qualified for the Seal• In total 633 journals have a CC-license

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Long Term Archiving

Cooperation with the Royal Library of the Netherlands (KB) concerning

provision of full-text of DOAJ-journals for long term archiving

Launched April 2009Funded by the Swedish Library Association35 journals archived, 200 to be archived

shortly

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Funding!

• Primary funding resources:

• Sponsors• Membership• Projects (development of the service)

• Managed the transition from project to service and in operation since 6 years!

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Current Membership

• 12 Individuals

• 82 Libraries, Universities & Research Centers from 21 countries

• 13 Library Consortia & Associations

• 3 Aggregators and other Service Providers

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What next?

• Business as usual plus:• DOAJ Info Site + Improved usage statistics• Continuation of the SPARC Europe Seal

project and the Long Term Archiving project

• Advisory Board• Publisher Focus Groups/Surveys• Journal hosting?• Funding!?

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Cooperation with ISTIC (CHINA)

• MoU with The Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC):– DOAJ metadata will be disseminated

through ISTIC services– Parties will facilitate inclusion of Chinese

OA-journals, incl. production of article metadata

– Promotion of OA Journals within China– Translation of the DOAJ site into Chinese– Reviewing and adding Chinese OA-

journals into DOAJ

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Cooperation with eIFL

• eIFL – Electronic Information for Libraries – www.eifl.net

• eIFL.net supports wide availability of electronic resources in transitional and developing countries. Core activities: negotiating affordable subscriptions,, supporting national library consortia,open access publishing, open source software for libraries and the creation of institutional repositories of local content.

• Initial discussions of cooperation– Regional work: reviewing and adding journals

into DOAJ

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Supporting Open Access Journals

• Open Access to research is simply a good cause!

• Libraries should support what they value!• Libraries should support Open Access

journals• How can they do that?

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How libraries can support open access journals?

• Advocate an Open Access policy within the university/research institution

• Providing services for scholarly journals within the university/research institution – hosting journals

• Providing funds for publication charges –making it easier for researchers to publish in open access journals

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How libraries can support open access journals?

• Sign institutional membership agreements with open access publishers– PLoS– BioMedCentral– Hindawi– BioLine

• Become a member of DOAJ!

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Credits to the wonderful DOAJ-team:

Anna-Lena Johansson, Sonja Brage, Stina Hallin & Salam Baker

Shanawa!

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And by the way:We still need support!

Join as a member organisationhttp://www.doaj.org/doaj?

func=membership