Lund University Launches Directory of Open Access Journals

[Kerri Allen <kerri@arl.org>]

For Immediate Release May 12, 2003

For more information, contact:

Lars Bj�rnshauge, lars.bjornshauge@lub.lu.se
Sara Kjellberg, sara.kjellberg@lub.lu.se
http://www.lub.lu.se/index.html.en

LUND UNIVERSITY LAUNCHES DIRECTORY OF OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS

Lund, Sweden - Lund University Libraries today launches the Directory
of Open Access Journals (DOAJ, http://www.doaj.org), supported by the
Information Program of the Open Society Institute
(http://www.osi.hu/infoprogram/), along with SPARC (The Scholarly
Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition,
(http://www.arl.org/sparc). The directory contains information about
350 open access journals, i.e. quality controlled scientific and
scholarly electronic journals that are freely available on the web.
The service will continue to grow as new journals are identified.

The goal of the Directory of Open Access Journals is to increase the
visibility and accessibility of open access scholarly journals,
thereby promoting their increased usage and impact. The directory
aims to comprehensively cover all open access scholarly journals that
use an appropriate quality control system. Journals in all languages
and subject areas will be included in the DOAJ.

The database records will be freely available for reuse in other
services and can be harvested by using the OAI-PMH
(http://www.openarchives.org/), thus further increasing the
visibility of the journals. The further development of DOAJ will
continue with version 2, which will offer the enhanced feature of
allowing the journals to be searched at the article level, and is
expected to be available in late fall 2003.

"For the researcher DOAJ will mean simplified access to relevant
information said Lars Bj�rnshauge, Director, Lund University
Libraries. The directory will give open-access journals a simple
method to register their existence, and a means to dramatically
enhance their visibility. Moreover, by enabling searches of all
journals in the database at the article level, the next stage of DOAJ
development will save research time and increase readership of
articles."

If you know a journal that should be included in the directory, use
this form to report it to the directory: http://www.doaj.org/suggest.
Information about how to obtain DOAJ records for use in a library
catalog or other service you will find at:
http://www.doaj.org/articles/questions/#metadata.
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Kerri Allen
Communications Manager
SPARC -- The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition
21 Dupont Circle, Ste. 800, Washington, DC  20036 USA
T: 202 296 2296 x121 * F: 202 872 0884 * E: kerri@arl.org
http://www.arl.org/sparc    http://www.sparceurope.org
http://www.arl.org/sparc/DI
http://www.createchange.org