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

Thu Aug 22 17:41:45 BST 2019

As usual, my comments in blue.

Jean-Claude Guédon

On 2019-08-22 11:27 a.m., Heather Morrison wrote:

[snip]

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/

Funders and universities should use both Green and Gold avenues to OA (as recommended in BOAI), and not exclusively Green as Heather suggests.

Regarding the handling of journals that have stopped publications, I believe that, in the past, DOAJ has discussed the possibility of maintaining such publications visible in a special category. Once again, the issue is resources, and not DOAJ. If librarians and information science specialist decided to organise a kind of professional crowd-sourcing in coordination with DOAJ, I am sure some really interesting results would ensue, and it would go further than criticisms. Suggesting positive solutions appears more positive to me (and perhaps a few others as well) than simply conjuring up yet another negative scenario. The realities of the world do not always fit the perfection of ideas...

  1.  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.

All lists will be incomplete, contested, criticised. WoS and Scopus suffer from the same problem. In the particular case of the International Journal of Communication, it would be interesting to know why this journal is not on DOAJ, or was de-listed from DOAJ. In her message, Heather does not explain the situation of this particular journal, and neither does she in her blog (https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/08/13/no-fee-inclusive-journals-and-disappointment-with-doaj/comment-page-1/). Does she know? Has DOAJ commented on this particular case? Here again, we are presented with a negative landscape, and no means to understand what is behind. And when one of her reader asks her (Aug. 13th and 14th) why this is the case, all she answers is: "... if you would like to pursue this question, you need to ask DOAJ and/or the journals. I do not speak for them." Asking DOAJ why is not the same as "speaking for them" and the answer, to say the least, appears a bit disingenuous to me. If you know, Heather, then say it. If you do not know, then try to find out. That is what an "information specialist" is supposed to do, is it not?
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<mailto:Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca>

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

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