The DOAJ Team

Lars Bjørnshauge - Managing Director
Lars was Director of Libraries at Lund University from 2001 to 2011 and founded the DOAJ in 2003. He became Managing Editor of DOAJ in January 2013. He has vast experience in: change management; the re-engineering of academic libraries; the development of information services for research & higher education. He has been a strong advocat of open access and for providing services to the open access movement (open access to research publications). He is co-founder of OpenDOAR and the Directory of Open Access Books. Since 2011, he is the Director of SPARC Europe.

Rikard Brage - Editor
Rikard has a Bachelor of Arts degree with a Major in Cultural Sciences and a specialization in publishing.

Sonja Brage - Editor
Sonja Brage is a former Information Librarian from Lund University Library. She has a B.A. in English, Bulgarian and Russian from Lund University. She is now reviewing journals, primarily in the Slavonic languages and in Italian.

Lotte Jørgensen - Managing Editor
Lotte has during the last 19 years worked as librarian, information consultant, project coordinator and consortia administrator. The positions has been held at The Technical University of Denmark, Swets, Lund University Libraries and The Danish Agency for Culture. Lotte was the DOAJ project coordinator 2004-2008.The common denominator through all positions has been academic journals and scientific publishing.

Dominic Mitchell - Community Manager
Dom has worked extensively with the publisher and librarian communities both as a publisher, with the BMJ Publishing Group (UK), and at HighWire Press - Stanford University (USA) where he was an account and project manager. Dom is responsible for collaboration with DOAJ's publishers.

Salam Baker Shanawa - IT Development Manager
Salam, Director of SemperTool, was in charge of the development and maintenance of DOAJ from 2004-2011. Salam has a vast knowledge of academic libraries and a long experience in creating and integrating digital library products and systems. SemperTool offers a range of reliable and cost-effective software solutions for digital libraries, and serves more than 100 universities in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. SemperTool is also developing and maintaining the Directory of Open Access Books.

 

Advisory Board

Community/Consortia

Kevin Stranack, PKP (Public Knowledge Project), Canada/U.S.A.
Tom Olijhoek, OKNF (Open Knowledge Foundation), The Netherlands
Caren Milloy, JISC, United Kingdom
Jean-Francois Lutz, Couperin, France
Jan-Erik Frantsvåg, University of Tromsø, Norway
David Prosser, RLUK (Research Libraries UK), United Kingdom
Iryna Kuchma, EIFL (Electronic Information For Libraries), Italy
Stuart Shieber, Office for Scholarly Communication, Harvard University, U.S.A.

Publishers/Aggregators

Leslie Chan, Bioline International, Canada
Martin Rasmussen, Copernicus Publications, Germany
Paul Peters, Hindawi Publishing Corporation, Egypt
Cameron Neylon, PLOS, U.S.A.
Bettina Goerner, Springer, Germany
Arianna Becerril-García, Redalyc, Mexico
Susan Murray, AJOL (African Journals Online), South Africa

 

Aims & Scope

The aim of the DOAJ is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals, thereby promoting their increased usage and impact. The DOAJ aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content. In short, the DOAJ aims to be THE one stop shop for users of open access journals.

 

Definitions

Open Access Journal: We define open access journals as journals that use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. From the BOAI definition [1] of "open access", we support the rights of users to "read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles" as mandatory for a journal to be included in the directory.

[1] http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess

Quality Control: The journal must exercise peer-review or editorial quality control to be included.

Research Journal: Journals that report primary results of research or overviews of research results to a scholarly community.

Periodical: A serial appearing, or intending to appear, indefinitely at regular intervals and generally more frequently than annually, each issue of which is numbered or dated consecutively and normally contains separate articles, stories, or other writings.

 

Selection Criteria

Coverage:
Access:
Quality: For a journal to be included it should exercise quality control on submitted papers through an editor, editorial board and/or a peer-review system.

Periodical: The journal should have an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number, for information see http://www.issn.org). Online journals should have an eISSN.

 

Metadata information

Resources will be catalogued on journal title level. To make article level content searchable in the system, journal owners are encouraged to supply us with article metadata when a journal has been added into the directory. If you are a journal owner and have not received this information, please contact us.

 

Project Background

The proliferation of freely accessible online journals, the development of subject specific pre- and e-print archives and collections of learning objects provides a very valuable supplement of scientific knowledge to the existing types of published scientific information (books, journals, databases etc.). However these valuable collections are difficult to overview and integrate in the library and information services provided by libraries for their user constituency.

At the First Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication in Lund/Copenhagen (http://www.lub.lu.se/ncsc2002) the idea of creating a comprehensive directory of Open Access Journals was discussed. The conclusion was that it would be a valuable service for the global research and education community. Open Society Institute (OSI) supported the initial project work.

Available technologies make it possible to collect and organize these resources in a way that allow libraries worldwide to integrate these resources in existing services thus offering added value both for the service providers of these resources and for the global research and education community.

 

Participant in the Europeana Libraries Project

DOAJ participated in the Europeana Libraries project 2010-2012. DOAJ is included in the portal which was launched in Tartu, Estonia on June 27, 2012. Offering free online access to high quality full text content, plus excellent search tools, the portal enables researchers to find, use and re-use a vast range of materials with ease. The content of DOAJ will be even more visible and disseminated through this portal.

A promotional video for the website can also be viewed on their YouTube channel.