[GOAL] Future plans for the DOAJ

[Lars Bjørnshauge]

The purpose of this communication is to inform about recent changes and
future plans for the development of the Directory of Open Access Journals
(DOAJ).

As communicated here (www.is4oa.org/News.html) Lund University has
facilitated a handover of the responsibility for operating and developing
DOAJ to Infrastructure Services for Open Access C.I.C.  (IS4OA).

IS4OA has been founded by Dr. Alma Swan (convener of EOS , co-founder and
co-owner of Key Perspectives Ltd  and Director SPARC Europe ) and Dr.
Caroline Sutton (founder Co-Action Publishing  and president of OASPA ).

Below we will briefly outline the current plans for improvement and
development of the DOAJ.

*Governance and engaging with the community*

First, we want to engage the community in the governance and in the
development and operations of the DOAJ.

Our company, IS4OA, is set up as a not-for-profit charitable company
limited by guarantee under UK law.

Governance of the DOAJ will be through an Advisory Board comprised of key
individuals from the open access community. The Advisory Board will provide
advice and feedback on the development of the DOAJ. We will as well invite
the broader community to contribute input on priorities and directions.

Our intention is to develop the DOAJ into a significantly improved service
by introducing more functionality and extending the coverage of journals
around the world.  Included in this will be the task of working more
closely with publishers to improve the quality of the information we can
deliver about the journals listed.

The new organisation has engaged Lars Bjørnshauge to manage DOAJ. Lars
founded the DOAJ during his service as Director of Libraries at Lund
University. Agreements regarding hosting, technical operation and
development as well as staff recruitment are in progress.

*Reengineering the editorial work by crowd sourcing*

We intend to change the way the editorial process operates. So far,
editorial work (reviewing and approving journals) has been centralised;
that is, all editorial tasks have been performed by staff located and
employed at Lund University. In recent years, a de-centralised model for
DOAJ has  also been introduced involving agreements with regional/national
collaborators (consortia, etc.) where one or more staff carry out the
initial reviewing of journals from that country or in that language. This
arrangement is already in operation for journals published in France,
Turkey and Greece.

This model will be extended to further countries and regions.  By means of
the concept of the “DOAJ associate librarian” the editorial work (inclusion
and filtering) and translation of the DOAJ-website into additional
languages will essentially be based on a community model (crowd sourced).
In this way, the workload at the central hub will decrease and will develop
more in the direction of management of the community.

*Improved criteria for inclusion in the DOAJ*

In communication with the community we will develop improved criteria for
inclusion in the DOAJ, for instance by aligning criteria with OASPA’s code
of conduct (http://oaspa.org/membership/code-of-conduct/) and the Open
Access Spectrum (http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/howopenisit_open-review.pdf).


And we will indeed address the issue of publishers not living up to
reasonable standards both in terms of content and of business behavior.

*Improvement and development plan*

We have followed debates closely and will carry out further community and
user consultations to determine what enhancements and improvements should
be made to the DOAJ so that it better serves the needs of the whole
community (funders, sponsors, supporters, publishers, authors and other
users).

Already the information we have gathered has been used to outline an
improvement plan. We will engage more systematically with the community as
we move forward in order to solicit input to future improvements.

Improvements will be in the following areas:

• Improvements in the quality of the records for each journal entry (by
working with and assisting publishers)
• Metadata improvements (journal level and article level)
• Improvements in the search interface, harvesting functionality and system
• Robust long term archiving solution
• Altmetrics

The takeover will take place gradually during January 2013.

We hope you will welcome this new development and will continue to support
DOAJ in 2013 and beyond. We look forward to working with you all in
delivering a service committed to continual improvement over the years to
come.

You can follow the developments on www.doaj.org & www.is4oa.org and on
twitter: @DOAJplus

Kind regards

Lars Bjørnshauge
Managing Director

Alma Swan    Caroline Sutton
Director    Director
For further information contact
Lars Bjørnshauge
lars at arl.org - +4553510603
-- 
Lars Bjørnshauge

SPARC’s Director of European Library Relations - www.sparceurope.org

mobile phone: +45 53 51 06 03

Skype: lbj-lub0603 - twitter: elbjoern0603

e-mail: lars at arl.org
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