Directory of Open Access Journals


The Directory of Open Access Journals is a website that hosts a community-curated list of open access journals, maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access. The project defines open access journals as scientific and scholarly journals making all their content available for free, without delay or user-registration requirement, and meeting high quality standards, notably by exercising peer review or editorial quality control. DOAJ uses the Budapest Open Access Initiative's definition of open access to define required rights given to users, for the journal to be included, as the rights to "read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose". The mission of DOAJ is to "increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals".
In 2015, DOAJ launched a reapplication process based on updated and expanded inclusion criteria. At the end of the process, close to 5,000 journals, out of the 11,600 indexed in May 2016, had been removed from their database, in majority for failure to reapply. This substantial cleanup notwithstanding, the number of journals included in DOAJ has continued to grow, to reach 14,299 as of 03 March 2020.

History

The Open Society Institute funded various open access related projects after the Budapest Open Access Initiative; the Directory was one of those projects. The idea for the DOAJ came out of discussions at the first Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication in 2002. Lund University became the organization to set up and maintain the DOAJ. It continued to do so until January 2013, when Infrastructure Services for Open Access took over.
The Infrastructure Services for Open Access C.I.C. was founded in 2012 in the UK as a community interest company by open access advocates Caroline Sutton and Alma Swan. It runs the DOAJ and, until 2017, the Open Citations Corpus.