DOAJ — Directory of Open Access Journals
Overview
DOAJ is a community-curated, freely accessible index of vetted open-access scholarly journals, covering all disciplines and languages. It is the reference list used to verify that a journal is a legitimate open-access venue rather than a predatory or low-quality one, which makes it the discovery and trust layer for open-access publishing in the same way that registries like re3data and FAIRsharing serve open data. Launched in 2003 at Lund University and now maintained by the non-profit Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA), it indexes over 21,000 peer-reviewed open-access journals, each admitted only after meeting published inclusion criteria. Open-access publishing is a core requirement of most open-science policies, and DOAJ is the infrastructure that lets funders, institutions, and researchers act on that requirement by identifying which journals comply.
Vetting and the DOAJ Seal
Inclusion in DOAJ requires a journal to meet criteria covering peer review, editorial transparency, licensing, copyright retention, and disclosure of any article-processing charges. The DOAJ Seal is a higher mark awarded to journals meeting seven best-practice criteria for open-access publishing, including the use of persistent identifiers, machine-readable licensing, and deposit in a long-term digital preservation archive. Around ten percent of indexed journals hold the Seal. DOAJ is a co-author of the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, alongside COPE, OASPA, and WAME, and applies those principles as a condition of membership.
Role in open-access compliance
Funder open-access mandates rely on DOAJ as the authoritative source of compliant venues. The cOAlition S Journal Checker Tool draws on DOAJ data to tell researchers whether a given journal satisfies their funder’s Plan S requirements. DOAJ metadata is harvested by discovery infrastructure including OpenAIRE, integrating vetted open-access journal content into the wider European open-science discovery layer.
Connections
- relatedTo: cOAlition S (the Plan S Journal Checker Tool uses DOAJ data to verify journal compliance)
- relatedTo: OpenAIRE (OpenAIRE harvests DOAJ metadata into the European open-access discovery layer)
- relatedTo: DORA (DOAJ vetting supports assessment based on journal practice and openness rather than Impact Factor)
Resources
- https://doaj.org
- https://doaj.org/apply/guide/ (inclusion criteria)
- https://doaj.org/apply/seal/ (DOAJ Seal criteria)
- https://doaj.org/apply/transparency/ (Principles of Transparency and Best Practice)