1 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the Collection, Current Projects and Plans - Supporting Open Access Journals Finnish Serials Group seminar, Helsinki Lars Björnshauge, Director of Libraries Lund University, Sweden

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3 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

4 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y 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

5 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y Steady growth!

6 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y 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

7 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y It´s all about visibility and dissemination We wanted to contribute to a process where increased visibility of Open Access journals could 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

8 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y 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

9 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y 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

10 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y 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 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

11 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y The DOAJ back office – collection development: Candidates for inclusion: – Monitoring lists etc – Suggestions from the community per month Collecting information for evaluation against the criteria Evaluating – decision – inclusion Continiously monitoring for compliance – weeding uncompliant journals

12 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y 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 – Visits from OAI-harvesters substantial However the indirect usage most important – Harvesting from the DOAJ-site

13 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y 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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15 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y 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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17 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y 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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22 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y 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

23 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y Cooperation 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

24 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y 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 2009 Funded by the Swedish Library Association 35 journals archived, 200 to be archived shortly

25 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y Funding! Primary funding resources: Sponsors Membership Projects (development of the service) Managed the transition from project to service and in operation since 6 years!

26 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y 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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28 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y 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!?

29 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y 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

30 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y Cooperation with eIFL eIFL – Electronic Information for Libraries – 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

31 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y 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?

32 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y 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

33 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y 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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35 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y Credits to the wonderful DOAJ-team: Anna-Lena Johansson, Sonja Brage, Stina Hallin & Salam Baker Shanawa!

36 L U N D U N I V E R S I T Y And by the way: We still need support! Join as a member organisation