DOAJ announces new selection criteria

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) has announced new and more stringent selection criteria, which are open for public comment until 15 July.

The new criteria, developed by the DOAJ team with input and comments from its Advisory Board, are intended to facilitate compliance verification easily,' according to a blog post on the topic by Lars Bjørnshauge, managing director, DOAJ.

In order to be listed in the directory, a journal will be asked to provide basic information such as title and ISSN, contact information, and information about journal policies. It needs to be registered with SHERPA/RoMEO and have an editorial board with clearly identifiable members (including affiliation information). The journal must publish a minimum of five articles per year, although this criteria does not apply for new journals.

Journals in the directory must also allow use and reuse at least at the following levels:

• Full text, metadata, and citations of articles can be crawled and accessed with permission (Machine Readability Level 4)
• Provides free readership rights to all articles immediately upon publication (Reader Rights Level 1)
• Reuse is subject to certain restrictions; no remixing (Reuse Rights Level 3)
• Allow authors to retain copyright in their article with no restrictions (Copyrights Level 1)
• Author can post the final, peer-reviewed manuscript version (postprint) to any repository or website (Author Posting Rights Level 2)

In addition, future submissions to DOAJ must include the complete set of information provided by the publisher and this will be publicly available in the directory. The journals currently listed in the DOAJ will have to go through a re-evaluation process based on the new criteria.

DOAJ is also launching the DOAJ Seal of Approval for Open Access Journals (the DOAJ Seal) to encourage a high practice standard. In addition to the general criteria required for inclusion in the directory, the DOAJ Seal will signify that a journal: provides machine readable copyright information to help search engines identify open works; provides DOIs at the article level; provides metadata to DOAJ at the article level; has a digital archiving/preservation arrangement in place; and allows a range of use and reuse as specified in the Open Access Spectrum, http://www.plos.org/about/open-access/howopenisit.

'We are confident that the new criteria will positively contribute to the transparency of open access. Since open access journals are a relatively new phenomenon, and one that is continuously changing, we will probably have to revise the criteria to keep them current and up to date,' said Bjørnshauge. 'Your comments on the new criteria are much appreciated and will contribute toward their implementation.'