What is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)? - Predatory Journals and Conferences

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What is DOAJ?

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is an indexing service that provides access to high quality, peer reviewed, open access journals. DOAJ is completely free of charge and all the data it holds is freely accessible.

An important point about DOAJ is that it is independent. It is funded either by donations from its sponsors and funders. This enables DOAJ to provide all of its services free of charge. This includes it being a free service to those publishers that want to be indexed in DOAJ.

Importantly, from an authors point of view, all the data is freely accessible, so you are able to find out if a given journal is indexed by DOAJ.

What is Open Access?

In the context of looking at DOAJ, it is important to know about the open access model of publishing. Essentially, it is a model where the authors, their institutions, funding bodies or other stakeholders pay the publication costs, rather than operating an subscription model, or one where you are required to buy, or even rent, an individual article.

The video above provides a good introduction to open access publishing, as well as the history and the objectives of DOAJ. You might also want to look at one of our previous articles on Open Access publishing, in the context of predatory publishing.

There are a couple of surprising facts in the video, at least there were surprising to us. One (at about 4 mins) is that DOAJ receives about 500 applications a month from journals who wish to be indexed. About 40% of these journals will be ultimately be included in the DOAJ database.

How many journals and articles are indexed in DOAJ?

At the time of writing (17 Feb 2020), DOAJ indexed 14,298 journals, with 11,331 of those being searchable at the article level.

We updated this article on 16 Sep 2020 and the number of indexed journals had risen to 15,191, with 12,175 of those being searchable at the article level.

The journals indexed by DOAJ come from 134 (up from 133 on 17 Feb 2020) countries and the their database contains 5,262,298 (up from 4,642,499) articles. These counts are updated regularly and DOAJ’s home page will show you the latest statistics.

What are the criteria to be indexed in DOAJ?

It is useful to be aware important of the criteria to enable to be a journal to indexed in DOAJ as we need to be assured that a journal that is listed on the DOAJ web site is a credible journal and unlikely to be predatory.

DOAJ provides a “Publishing best practice and basic standards for inclusion“. which is comprehensive and will be of interest to those that are keen to get their journal indexed by DOAJ. It is interesting to see that there are some basic requirements that DOAJ insist on before a journal is indexed. These include:

All content must be available immediately, without any embargo.
Each journal must have its own home page, which is pointed to by one URL. Having a URL that points to a collection of journals is not acceptable.
Basic information such as aims and scope, editorial board, instructions to authors, plagiarism policy etc. must be hosted on the journal’s web pages and not stored on another web site.
Every article must have its own URL.
A journal must have at least one ISSN.
The journal’s home page must be easy to navigate and be clear and concise.
The editorial board web pages must be up to date. It should be possible to contact the editorial board members and their names and affiliations should be given.
Detailed and comprehensive guidelines to authors must be provided.
Articles must go through peer review and the exact type of review must be clearly stated on the web site.
The journal must clearly display any charges for an author(s). If there are no charges, this should be clearly stated.
The open access policy of the journal should be clearly stated.

We assume that if a journal fails any of these tests then DOAJ will refuse to index it. Of course, if a journal is not indexed at DOAJ, it does not mean that it is predatory (if only life were that simple). The journal may have decided, for various (and good) reasons that it does not wish to apply to DOAJ. It should also be noted that only fully open access journals are indexed in DOAJ. This means that high quality journals that have a traditional publishing route cannot be indexed by DOAJ, even if they have an open access route to publication.

Does DOAJ index predatory journals?

A few years ago there was a suspicion that predatory journals were making into the DOAJ list. This, of course, would be a bad state of affairs as it would totally undermine what DOAJ is trying to do. The first statement on its home page is

“DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.“

The key term is “high quality“. Predatory journals can be called a lot of things but “high quality” is not a term that immediately springs to mind.

The suspicion comes from comments such as “They even now delete DOAJ as one of reputed indexing service“, which appeared in a comment to a post on PeerJ Preprints, which had posted a paper called “Ten myths around open scholarly publishing“.

Professor Alexandre Georges was also critical of DOAJ when he asked if DOAJ was a real whitelist? He questioned their impartiality, as some publishers sponsor DOAJ. There is some discussion on the article written by Georges at this link.

DOAJ responded to these comments with its own blog post, which was titled “MYTH-BUSTING: DOAJ INDEXES ‘PREDATORY’ JOURNALS“, which either addressed the problem (if it existed in the first place), or addressed the perception that there was a problem. Anyhow. DOAJ recognized it and addressed it.

There is also a safety net, which says ” If you do think that a journal in DOAJ is questionable, however, please report that journal to us so that our Questionable Publishing team can review it.” So, if you think that DOAJ has indexed a predatory journal, please let them know. It is in everybody’s interest, except the predatory publishers, that DOAJ is a true whitelist, so that we can all rely on DOAJ as a trusted resource.

Do journals ever misrepresent their affiliation to DOAJ?

Yes, yes and yes again. DOAJ is seen as a measure of quality, in that if you are listed by DOAJ it shows that you are recognized as being a reputable Open Access publisher/journal. It provides a positive signal to the casual browser that the journal is credible. So, it is understandable, if not ethical that journals may try and associate themselves with DOAJ even if they have not been indexed by them.

DOAJ has produced a blog on this topic. Titled “Some journals say they are indexed in DOAJ but they are not“, it does what it says on the tin. It states that some journals say they are indexed by DOAJ, when they are actually not. Usefully, they provide a list of journals that they have tracked down that give the impression that they are affiliated to DOAJ, when they are not.

As an example, we looked at the spreadsheet and chose one of the journals that DOAJ had listed. That is, the European Journal of Logistics, Purchasing and Supply Chain Management (EJLPSCM) which has an ISSN of 2054-0930.

According to the DOAJ spreadsheet this journal misrepresents itself by claiming an affiliation with DOAJ. They do not have this affiliation. The screen shot above (click to expand) shows the home page of this journal. The image at the bottom of this page (the image has been slightly edited to remove information from the middle of the page) suggests that this journal is indexed by DOAJ. However, if we search for this journal on the DOAJ web site, it s not found (see image below).

Conclusions

The Directory of Open Access Journals is a reputable organisation that is designed to provide a service for reputable open access publishers to register their journals. If you can find the journal on the DOAJ web site you can be reasonably certain that the journal is credible. Of course, you may want to check other things such as the quality of the journal, its impact factor etc. before deciding to submit, but seeing the journal indexed by DOAJ is a positive indicator that the journal is not predatory.

However, it is very easy to download the DOAJ logo, place it on a web site and give the impression that the journal is affiliated with DOAJ. So, if you see the DOAJ logo, or there is any suggestion that the journal is recognized by DOAJ you should always check with the DOAJ web site. Do not simply trust that the journal’s home page claims that it is affiliated with DOAJ.