LPC’s Strategic Affiliates Program connects our community with peer membership communities working in libraries, publishing, and scholarly communications. LPC’s leadership has regular touch base calls with each of our affiliates and occasionally invites their leadership to group discussions on topics of broad interest. This work helps us to support the ‘community of communities,’ to align our work and to avoid duplication of effort. However, it is largely invisible to LPC’s membership. To recognize our affiliates’ contributions to our community, and to connect our members to resources and opportunities in peer communities, we are publishing a series of Affiliate Spotlights on the blog in 2024.
About
Name: Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Website: https://doaj.org/
X (Twitter): @doajplus
Strategic affiliate since: 2017
DOAJ is a unique and extensive index of over 20,000 diverse open access journals from around the world. Our mission is to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals.
DOAJ is a vital part of the open access infrastructure. We are a global community, with team members, ambassadors and volunteers based in 45 countries around the world, speaking 36 languages. Our criteria have become a gold standard for open access publishing.
DOAJ is committed to being 100% independent and maintaining all of its primary services and metadata as free for everyone.
Resources
We asked our affiliates to identify some of their resources that may be of interest to the LPC community.
Beyond being a widely used and integrated resource itself, DOAJ has collaborated with a number of industry partners to provide several other tools and resources. The Open Access Journals Toolkit (OA Journals Toolkit) was launched in 2023, and is a self-guided online resource for anyone managing or supporting an open access journal. This resource is created and managed by DOAJ and OASPA, and has since its launch been translated to French, with an Arabic translation due to be released soon. If you have questions that cannot be answered by this resource, you can try Publishers Learning and Community Exchange (PLACE), an online forum for publishers and those involved in publishing, managed by Crossref, COPE, OASPA and DOAJ. Both these resources are completely free, and developed to help the community with best practice in publishing.
JASPER is a project developed to help diamond open access journals with limited resources to preserve their content for the long term. This project enables journals that are indexed in DOAJ and meet set criteria to get free help with archiving and preservation.
In addition to these resources to help journals with best practice, DOAJ is also a co-founder of Think.Check.Submit, a resource for researchers to identify trusted journals and publishers for their work. Think.Check.Submit is an international cross-sector initiative that aims to educate researchers, promote integrity, and build trust in credible research and publications.
To keep up to date with the latest information on DOAJ and affiliated projects, visit the DOAJ blog.
Collaborations
DOAJ and LPC worked together on a task force in 2017-18 to evaluate the needs of LPC members in relation to DOAJ indexing, mentor members thorough the application process, and recommend ongoing support. The task force facilitated a workshop at the 2018 Forum and produced a How-To Guide for Library Publishers, which was last updated in 2021.
LPC also maintains an official DOAJ Liaison (currently Emma Molls) to serve as a first point of contact for LPC members navigating the DOAJ application process, but the DOAJ team is also happy to work with LPC members to assist with their DOAJ applications. Several LPC members have volunteered as DOAJ editors to help to review journal applications.