[GOAL] DOAJ is what it is: acknowledging contributions and highlighting limitations

[Heather Morrison]

DOAJ has been a valuable service to the open access movement over the years, in tracking and linking to a select set of open access journals and providing metadata that is helpful for researchers like me and to include DOAJ content in library services.

Like any service or initiative, DOAJ has its limitations. Based on recent discussions, I gather that there is no interest in discussing the limitations, brainstorming potential solutions, or exploring underlying assumptions and whether the current approach is optimal. This discussion is at an impasse. DOAJ is what it is, and this is within the rights of the people who make DOAJ decisions.

To conclude my portion of this discussion, I would like to highlight two limitations of DOAJ that to me represent important problems for the future of scholarly communication with no current solution:


  1.  As a list of suitable OA journals for authors to publish in, DOAJ presents some risk to the author as a journal in DOAJ at the time the author decides on a submission venue may be removed from DOAJ at a later date. This could be a problem for the author if they wish to prove that they publish OA, for example to fulfill an open access mandate, or to establish their credibility as an OA author. Taking into account funder and institutional requirements for OA, this can have a negative financial (loss of grants) and promotional impact on the researcher. One solution is for funders and universities to exclusively use green OA policies (as I always recommend). Recently, I wrote about 33 SpringerOpen journals (13% of their titles) that have ceased publication; 31 of the journals are no longer listed either on SpringerOpen or DOAJ. I submit that this is a disservice to authors who published in these journals. https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/07/22/springer-open-ceased-now-hybrid-oa-identification-challenges/

  2.  As a list to direct authors to content, DOAJ's exclusions are problematic for searchers. DOAJ has rejected one of the top fully open access journals in my field (The International Journal of Communication) and several smaller fully open access journals that I consider essential content. As a researcher, this diminishes the usefulness of DOAJ for me. As a professor, I would hesitate to refer students to a list that rejects this content. It is nice to know which journals are fully open access, active, and meet the DOAJ criteria, but this is not sufficient for research purposes.

best,


Dr. Heather Morrison

Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa

Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa

Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project

sustainingknowledgecommons.org

Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca

https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706
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