DOAJ and Crossref renew partnership to strengthen scholarly metadata
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Crossref have renewed their partnership with a new set of objectives aimed at improving scholarly metadata quality and expanding support for journals in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
The renewed collaboration reflects both organisations’ commitment to building sustainable and equitable scholarly infrastructure, with a focus on strengthening interoperability and improving the discoverability of open access research.
DOAJ and Crossref have worked together since 2021 to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research through online technologies, as well as regional and international networks, partners and communities. According to the organisations, this collaboration has helped build local institutional capacity and sustainability across the global scholarly communication ecosystem.
The continued partnership also reflects the close relationship between the two infrastructures: currently almost 90% of DOAJ journals are represented in Crossref.
Under the renewed collaboration, the organisations will focus on two main areas. DOAJ will enhance the ingestion, processing, storage and display of article-level metadata within its systems. Planned improvements include author affiliations and persistent identifiers, open references, and expanded metadata harvesting
These enhancements are expected to benefit both direct users of DOAJ and the wider discovery, aggregation and research analytics services that rely on its metadata.
The partnership will also support the continued development of DOAJ’s Ambassador programme – a global network of representatives primarily based in low- and middle-income countries.
Ambassadors help journal editors understand and apply good practices in open access publishing, while also organising workshops, webinars and local events. They also collaborate with regional partners and policymakers and raise awareness of DOAJ and publishing standards within local scholarly communities.
As part of the renewed collaboration, Crossref will support ambassador travel and the organisation of workshops and events.
“We value our longstanding collaboration with Crossref,” said Joanna Ball, Managing Director at DOAJ. “As fellow open scholarly infrastructures, we share a commitment to strengthening the systems that support trusted, global research discovery. This new partnership enables DOAJ to move forward with important work around interoperability. Improving how infrastructures connect and exchange information is a priority for us, and this support helps ensure we can continue to serve the community in line with the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure – with openness, collaboration, and long-term sustainability at the centre.”
Ginny Hendricks, Chief Program Officer at Crossref, said: “The collaborations with DOAJ so far only reaffirmed our shared goal to help make the global scholarly communications system more equitable wherever we can. Our joint projects aim to seek out and devise support for resource-constrained journals in multiple ways. DOAJ’s work is essential in helping journals to adopt good practice, while Crossref offers an open infrastructure to ensure all journals can be included and discoverable in the global scholarly record.”