About DOAJ
Aims & Scope Advisory Board Constitution DOAJ Team Partnerships
The Directory of Open Access Journals was launched in 2003 at Lund University, Sweden, with 300 open access journals and today contains more than 10000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities.
DOAJ is a membership organisation and membership is available in 3 main categories: Publisher, Ordinary Member and Sponsor. A DOAJ Membership is a clear statement of intent and proves a commitment to quality, peer-reviewed open access. DOAJ is co-author to the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (Principles) and DOAJ members are expected to follow these principles as a condition of membership. DOAJ reserves the right to reject applications for membership, or revoke membership if a member or sponsor is found to contravene the Principles. Read more about membership here.
DOAJ is a white list of open access journals and aims to be the starting point for all information searches for quality, peer reviewed open access material. To assist libraries and indexers keep their lists up-to-date, we make public a list of journals that have been accepted into or removed from DOAJ but we will not discuss the details of an application with anyone apart from the applicant. Neither will we discuss individual publishers or applications with members of the public unless we believe that, by doing so, we will be making a positive contribution to the open access community.
DOAJ publishes Information for Publishers on this site to help Publishers to adhere to the Principles and to assist them in completing an application. DOAJ also publishes a list of FAQs relevant to all members of the publishing community, particularly libraries and authors. All information on this site is available to both members and non-members.
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.
Constitution
DOAJ is a not-for-profit organisation managed by Infrastructure Services for Open Access C.I.C. (Community Interest Company) based in the United Kingdom. DOAJ relies entirely on the voluntary donations of its members and on sponsorship monies received. Currently, neither DOAJ or IS4OA receives grants or funding from any other source.
DOAJ has an Advisory Board, the members of which carry out their duties voluntarily.
DOAJ uses the services of approximately 100 voluntary editorial staff who review applications. Volunteers are bound by a Code of Conduct and an Agreement that they must sign and return to DOAJ before they can carry out their duties. At least two references are requested from everyone who volunteers and all volunteers are bound by the Code of Conduct to declare any conflicts of interest to the Managing Editors.
The DOAJ Team
Judith Barnsby - Publication Specialist
Judith has over 20 years experience in the scholarly publishing industry, working for a range of non-profit society
publishers and service providers. She has a keen interest in publishing standards and protocols, and has served on the
board of CLOCKSS and as chair of the PALS (publisher and library solutions) working group in the UK.
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.
Sonja Brage - Managing 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 specialises in applications for journals in the Slavonic languages.
Alejandra Manco Vega - Publication Specialist
Alejandra has a Bachelor's degree in Information Science and is currently pursuing a Master's degree in digital media
and society. She is responsible for the review of applications and reapplications for journals wishing to be indexed
in DOAJ.
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 as an account and project manager at HighWire Press - Stanford University (USA). He is responsible for
collaboration with DOAJ's publishers, for DOAJ's technical development, social media presence and its blog, the
DOAJ News Service.
Tom Olijhoek - Editor-in-Chief
Tom has a PhD in molecular microbiology and has spent several years in Africa doing research on malaria, sleeping
sickness and meningococcal epidemics. He has been actively advocating open access and open science since 2012 when
he joined the Open Knowledge community. At around the same time he became a member of the DOAJ advisory board. His
current research interests are development of quality systems for the assessment of scholarly journals and articles,
and research in the area of soil microbiology in relation to soil health and human health.
Rikard Zeylon - Managing Editor
Rikard has a Bachelor of Arts degree with a Major in Cultural Sciences and a specialization in publishing.
Advisory Board
Community/Consortia
Kevin Stranack, PKP (Public Knowledge Project), Canada/U.S.A.
Caren Milloy, JISC, United Kingdom
Jean-Francois Lutz, Couperin, France
Jan-Erik Frantsvåg, University of Tromsø, Norway
Cameron Neylon, Bath, U.K.
David Prosser, RLUK (Research Libraries UK), United Kingdom
Iryna Kuchma, EIFL (Electronic Information For Libraries), Italy
Falk Reckling, FWF (Austrian Science Fund) and coordinator of Open Access Network Austria (OANA), Austria
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
Arianna Becerril-García, Redalyc, Mexico
Susan Murray, AJOL (African Journals Online), South Africa
Partnerships
DOAJ partners with a broad range of organisations. The nature of the partnership varies and includes contracts for work, collaborations, or access to information resources that assist with our application review process.
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