About DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)
Advisory Board
Constitution
Council
DOAJ Team
DOAJ Ambassadors
Editorial subcommittee
Mission
Partnerships and Collaborations
Privacy Policy
Disclaimer
The DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) was launched in 2003 at Lund University, Sweden, with 300 open access journals. Today, the independent database contains ca. 12000 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 community-curated 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 specific 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 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.
DOAJ's Mission
DOAJ's mission is to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language. DOAJ will work with editors, publishers and journal owners to help them understand the value of best practice publishing and standards and apply those to their own operations. DOAJ is committed to being 100% independent and maintaining all of its services and metadata as free to use or reuse for everyone.
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. In March 2016, DOAJ received a grant from the IDRC for a specific timed project tackling the improvement of open access journals in the Global South. Neither DOAJ or IS4OA receives grants or funding from any other source.
DOAJ has an Advisory Board and a Council, 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
Clara Armengou - Project and Communications Manager
Clara has several years of experience in the scholarly publishing industry, she worked at Cambridge University Press as an Open Access Project Manager. She also works as a science communication freelancer for the University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, where she leads a project to promote scientific research of excellence in Catalonia and to make science and research accessible to the general public.
Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)
Conflict of Interest Statement (2018)
Judith Barnsby - Senior Managing Editor
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. Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)
Conflict of Interest Statement (2018)
Kamel Belhamel - Managing Editor
Kamel is Full Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Laboratory of Organic Materials at the University of Bejaia-Algeria. He is author/co-author of several scientific papers in International Scientific Journals (ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9099-8040). His scientific activities are focused on Open Access, Open Science and the Chemistry of the Natural Products. He is the DOAJ
Ambassador and Managing Editor for Africa and Middle East countries.
Conflict of Interest Statement (2018)
Lars Bjørnshauge - Managing Director and Founder
Lars was Director of Libraries at Lund University from 2001 to 2011 and founded the DOAJ in 2003. He became Managing
Director 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 advocate 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. Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)Conflict of Interest Statement (2018)
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 and specialises in applications for journals in the Slavonic languages. Conflict of Interest Statement (2016) Conflict of Interest Statement (2018)
Ilaria Fava - Managing Editor
Ilaria is a librarian with several years experience within the Open Access community in her home country of Italy, where she has dealt
with Open Access issues at both a national and international level. She has been involved in EU Open Access Projects, as well as
being a serving technical board member for the Italian Journal of Library and Information Science JLIS.it. Conflict of Interest Statement (2016) Conflict of Interest Statement (2018)
Alejandra Manco Vega - Managing Editor
Alejandra has a Bachelor's degree in Information Science and a Master's degree in Digital Media and she has around eight years of experience in information and knowledge management and also in scholarly communication at national and international level. She is responsible for the review of applications for journals wishing to be indexed at the Directory. Conflict of Interest Statement (2016) Conflict of Interest Statement (2018)
Paula Marjamäki - Database Assistant
Paula is a published researcher and holds a PhD in Biological Sciences from the University of Exeter. She has extensive experience managing and maintaining large databases and has been an advocate for open science for many years.
Dominic Mitchell - Operations 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. In 2019, he was elected to the OASPA Board of Directors. Conflict of Interest Statement (2016)
Conflict of Interest Statement (2018)
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. Conflict of Interest Statement (2016) Conflict of Interest Statement (2018)
Iemima Ploscariu - Managing Editor
Iemima holds a Master of Arts in Comparative History from Central European University, Hungary, and a Master of Letters in Central and East European Studies from the University of St Andrews, Scotland. She is a PhD student and researcher for the Irish Research Council at Dublin City University, Ireland. She volunteered as Editor for DOAJ from 2014 until 2020 when she became Managing Editor.
Leena Shah - Managing Editor
Leena Shah holds a Master’s Degree in Information Studies from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering. She worked as a Science Librarian in Singapore before joining DOAJ. Leena has a keen interest in Scholarly Communication & Open Science. She is responsible for journal applications applying to be in DOAJ from Indonesia, India and the neighbouring regions. Conflict of Interest Statement (2018)
Cenyu Shen - Managing Editor
Cenyu has a Master degree in Computer Science from University of Helsinki and she is currently a PhD candidate and researcher in Information Systems Science at Hanken School of Economics in Finland. She has spent around seven years on Open Access research with a particular focus on gold OA publishing concerning journals and publishers outside the mainstream. She used to be one of three DOAJ ambassadors for China from 2016 to 2017.
Rikard Zeylon - Managing Editor
Rikard has a Bachelor of Arts degree with a Major in Cultural Sciences and a specialization in publishing. Conflict of Interest Statement (2016) Conflict of Interest Statement (2018)
DOAJ Ambassadors
Since 2016 DOAJ has been running an Ambassador program that target regions of the Global South that could benefit from greater awareness of the issues surrounding open access and the importance of best practice and high publishing standards. In 2016 and 2017 DOAJ employed 12 Ambassadors from around the world to do this work for us. Their pictures and biographies are published on the DOAJ blog. New Ambassadors from Indonesia (September 2017) | New Ambassadors from Korea (December 2017)
New DOAJ New Ambassadors for 2020
Advisory Board
The DOAJ Advisory Board was elected by the community. Each board member started in August 2019.
Leslie Chan, University of Toronto, Canada Jan Erik Frantsvåg, The University of Tromsø - The Arctic University of Norway, Norway [COI 2019] Mark Hahnel, Digital Science (Figshare), UK [COI 2019] Rolf Halse, NSD - Norwegian Centre for Research Data, Norway [COI 2019] Emma Molls, University of Minnesota, USA [COI 2019] Anja Oberländer, University of Konstanz, Germany [COI 2019] Solange Maria Dos Santos, SciELO, Brazil [COI 2019] Lisa Schiff, California Digital Library, USA [COI 2019] Steven Vidovic (CHAIR), University of Southampton, UK [COI 2019]
Council
The DOAJ Council was elected by the community. Each Council member started in September 2019.
Shelley Allen, Emerald Publishing, UK [COI 2019] Arianna Becerril García, Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, Redalyc, AmeliCA, Mexico [COI 2020] Perry Collins, University of Florida Libraries, USA [COI 2019] Frederick Fenter, Frontiers, Switzerland [COI 2019] Dora Elvira García-González, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico[COI 2019] Piero Grandesso, University of Bologna, Italy [COI 2019] Christian Knudsen, Royal Danish Library, Denmark [COI 2019] Suzanne Kemperman, OCLC, USA [COI 2019] Gail McMillan, Virginia Tech and University Libraries, USA [COI 2019] Donna McRostie, University of Melbourne, Australia [COI 2019] Rainer Rees-Mertins, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Switzerland [COI 2019] Karen Rowlett, University of Reading, UK [COI 2019] Stephanie Savage, University of British Columbia, Canada [COI 2019] Franck Vazquez, MDPI AG, Switzerland [COI 2019]
Editorial subcommittee
The Editorial Subcommittee was elected by DOAJ and was inaugurated in July 2020.
Carol S. Bond, Caring for Lifelong Health Research Centre, United Kingdom [COI 2020]
Jocelyn Hipona, Far Eastern University, Philippines [COI 2020]
Marc Couture,Canada [COI 2020]
Maude Laplante-Dubé, Université Laval, Canada [COI 2020]
Oliver Mendoza-Cano, Universidad de Colima, México [COI 2020]
Plinio Casarotto, University of Helsinki, Finland [COI 2020]
Rachel Lee, California Digital Library, USA [COI 2020]
Stephanie Hull, Emerald Publishing, UK [COI 2020]
Partnerships and Collaborations
DOAJ partners with a broad range of organisations. The nature of the partnership varies and includes contracts for work, collaborations, initiative signatories or access to information resources that assist with our application review process.
- Cottage Labs LLP
- Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism
- ISSN
- Library Publishing Coalition
- Redalyc
- SciELO
- Think. Check. Submit.
DOAJ is an adopting organisation of the C4DISC Joint Statement of Principles. Adopting the Joint Statement of Principles is a show of support for improving diversity and inclusion in scholarly communications.
We are a member of, and subscribe to the principles of, COPE (Committee on Publication
Ethics)
Privacy Policy
DOAJ's Privacy Information Notice can be found here. This document was created in response to requirements laid out by the GDPR and has exensively followed the advice provided by the UK independent authority set up to uphold information rights in the public interest, the ICO.
Disclaimer
Scholarly journal titles on DOAJ are listed at the request of the journal editor or other person authorized and associated with the journal. Only journals complying with the DOAJ criteria are listed and decisions about listing, rejecting and de-listing are at the discretion of the DOAJ Editorial Team. DOAJ takes no responsibility for the journal, information provided by the journal, or content published in the journal. DOAJ disclaims itself from all liability arising out of any journal title listed, or the use of or inability to use information contained in the journal. DOAJ gives no guarantees or warranty whether express or implied including, but not limited to, the accessiblity, accuracy, reliability, timeliness or content of these pages. We assume no responsibility, and shall not be liable for any breaches of agreement with other publishers/hosts/indices/lists, by listing a journal.
In no event shall DOAJ be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential damages, lost profits, business interruption arising out of or in connection with the use or impossibility to use this service.