As the title says, the Directory of Open Access Publishers (DOAJ) has released new criteria for special issues.
You can see the full DOAJ statement here and we have archived the page here.
This is likely to have a will have a dramatic impact on some publishers.
We share a few of our comments/thoughts from when we read the statement
- It would be good to see, in any special issue, of which the journal and/or publisher is a member of DOAJ, the Editor-in-Chief making a statement that it has abided by the DOAJ guidelines.
- It is good to see that the number of papers authored by the guest editors is limited to 25%. We would have preferred an ever stronger statement, such as,
“A guest editor cannot be an author on more than one paper in any special issue AND the paper must include a declaration that the paper was handled by another editor who does not have a conflict of interest (e.g. works at the same instutition and has not co-authored with that editor in the previous five years).”
- The last statement, that is:
“DOAJ will not accept a journal if all content in the last year/volume is published as special issues.“
… seems a little weak, assuming that we are reading it correctly. Our reading is, if a journal publishes JUST ONE regular paper in the previous year, that is okay? So, if 1,000 articles are published in special issues, and just a few (let’s say 10) are published in regular issues, then DOAJ would not have a problem with that?
Would it not be better to have some percentage of papers published an a calendar year must be published in regular issues? And, in our mind that percentage should be reasonably small, say 5%.
However, despite these concerns, this initiative is welcomed.
Finally, this article was originally posted as a tweet. We hope that we have removed the (many, sorry) typo’s that were in that tweet.
