Press release: DOAJ Membership Program launched

["Anna-Lena Johansson" <Anna-Lena.Johansson@lub.lu.se>]

Help us improve the Directory of Open Access Journals
The Directory of Open Access Journals needs your support

DOAJ Membership Program launched

Since the launch of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) 
in May 2003 the service has grown significantly. As of today 
(February 2007) 2550 journals are listed in the DOAJ, article 
level search service is available for 30% of the journals 
(125.000 articles). On every indicator we can see increased 
usage.

We are very happy to see that hundreds of service providers 
(commercial aggregators, libraries, etc.) are actually harvesting 
metadata from the DOAJ.

Recently we have added an author service that allows researches 
to "look up" where they can publish OA. We are also working on 
inclusion of Open Access articles from Hybrid Journals, linking 
into ISI databases, into Google Scholar etc.

Concurrently we still receive lots of suggestions for new 
journals to be included in the directory while frequently 
checking whether existing journals are living up to the 
standards.

Thanks to funding from Open Society Institute, The Royal Library 
of Sweden, SPARC, SPARC Europe and Axiell we have been able to 
operate, extend and improve the DOAJ over the last 3 years making 
the DOAJ the authoritative listing of peer-reviewed scholarly 
open access journals.

We now need your support for the continuing operation and 
development of the DOAJ. In order to create a sustainable 
financial foundation for the continuing development and operation 
of DOAJ we now launch a membership program allowing individuals, 
universities, research centers, libraries, library organisation, 
library consortia, aggregators and other organisations to 
contribute.

Please refer to the membership page 
<http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=3Dmembership> for information 
about how to become a DOAJ member, membership categories, yearly 
fees & benefits.

For more information about the membership please contact Anna-Lena
Johansson (Anna-Lena.Johansson@lub.lu.se)

Statement from Peter Suber in support of the membership program:

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is used by faculty 
around the world to find peer-reviewed journals where they can 
submit their work, as well as to find journals where they will 
have open access to the peer-reviewed research of colleagues. In 
these ways, the DOAJ enhances the value of open-access literature 
and helps connect authors and readers. Every institution that 
supports open access or researchers who support open access 
should support the DOAJ. I hope you will consider joining its 
membership program.

Kindest regards,
Anna-Lena Johansson , Librarian-DOAJ
Lars Bjornshauge, Director of Libraries, Lund University