This morning the DOAJ reached the major milestone of listing 2,000 OA journals. From today's press release:
As of today the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) contains 2000 open access journals, i.e. quality controlled scientific and scholarly electronic journals that are freely available on the web. The goal of the Directory of Open Access Journals is still to increase the visibility and accessibility of open access scholarly journals, and thereby promote their increased usage and impact. The directory aims to comprehensively cover all open access scholarly journals that use an appropriate quality control system. Journals in all languages and subject areas will be included in the DOAJ. The selection criteria have been updated based on feedback from users to be more understandable.
The database records are freely available for reuse in library catalogues and other services and can be harvested by using the OAI-PMH, and thereby increase the visibility of the open access journals....New titles are added frequently and to ensure that the holding information is correct you have to update your records regularly. We also have to remove titles from DOAJ if they no longer lives up to the selection criteria e.g. during the last 6 months of 2005 50 titles where removed. We are working with publishers of hybrid journals (subscription based journals where authors /institutions for a publication charge can publish articles in open access) in order to include even these articles in the DOAJ. It is our intention to be able to inform about this in the near future.
Feedback form the community tells us that the DOAJ is an important service. In order to be able to maintain and further develop the service we have decided to launch a Donation Programme that makes it possible for all users/institutions to contribute to the continued maintenance and development of DOAJ....DOAJ is or has been supported by the Information Program of the Open Society Institute, along with SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), SPARC Europe, BIBSAM, the Royal Library of Sweden and Axiell.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/13/2006 10:47:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
