Press release: 2500 JOURNALS IN DOAJ

[J�rgensen Lotte <Lotte.Jorgensen@LUB.LU.SE>]

For Immediate Release December 15, 2006

For more information, contact:

Lars Bjornshauge, lars.bjornshauge@lub.lu.se
Lotte Jorgensen lotte.jorgensen@lub.lu.se 
http://www.lub.lu.se/index.html.en

THE DIRECTORY OF OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS REACHES AN IMPORTANT 
MILESTONE - NOW THERE ARE 2500 JOURNALS IN THE DOAJ

Lund, Sweden - As of today the Directory of Open Access Journals 
(DOAJ, http://www.doaj.org) contains 2500 open access journals, 
i.e. quality controlled scientific and scholarly electronic 
journals that are freely available on the web.

The goal of the Directory of Open Access Journals is still to 
increase the visibility and accessibility of open access 
scholarly journals, and thereby promote 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 selection criteria have been updated 
based on feedback from users to be more understandable 
(http://www.doaj.org/articles/about#criteria).

The database records are freely available for reuse in library 
catalogues and other services and can be harvested by using the 
OAI-PMH (http://www.openarchives.org/), and thereby increase the 
visibility of the open access journals.

We are very happy to see that the usage of the DOAJ is constantly 
increasing on all parameters. Every month visitors from more than 
160 countries are using the service, hundreds of libraries all 
over the world have included the DOAJ titles in their catalogues 
and other services, and commercial aggregators are as well 
benefiting of the service.

New titles are added frequently and to ensure that the holding 
information is correct you have to update your records regularly. 
We also have to remove titles from DOAJ if they no longer lives 
up to the selection criteria e.g. during 2006 65 titles has been 
removed.

In October we launched the "For Authors Service" in the DOAJ. The 
service is a look up service for authors who wants to publish 
their research as open access.

As of today researchers can find information about the "pure" OA 
journals from DOAJ and about the "hybrid" journals that for a fee 
allow the authors to publish their research as OA in an otherwise 
subscription based journal. We are very pleased to see that the 
usage of this new service is also increasing.

For a closer look at the new service go to http://www.doaj.org and
choose "For authors" in the menu.

DOAJ is or has been 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) SPARC Europe, 
(http://www.sparceurope.org/), BIBSAM, the Royal Library of 
Sweden (http://www.kb.se <http://www.kb.se/> ) and Axiell 
(http://www.axiell.se/).

If you know of a journal that should be included in the 
directory, use this form to report it to the directory: 
http://www.doaj.org//suggest <http://www.doaj.org/suggest> .

Information about how to obtain DOAJ records for use in a library 
catalogue or other service you will find at: 
http://www.doaj.org/articles/questions#metadata.

Thank you for your interest and support!

Lotte Jorgensen
Lars Bjornshauge

Regards,

Lotte Jorgensen
Lund University Libraries, Head Office
P.O.Box 134, SE-221 00 LUND, Sweden
Visiting address Tornavagen 9B, Lund
Tel: 046-222 34 31
Fax: 046-222 36 82
E-mail: lotte.jorgensen@lub.lu.se