Apply for Directory of Open Access Journals

[mrshirts]

Information is here: https://doaj.org/publishers#applying, application form here: https://doaj.org/application/new#digital_archiving_policy-container

Looks like we will need to have at least one issue published. 5 articles per year is minimum, so we should be OK.

Specific points we may need to improve on (I think the rest are already satisfied)

All the necessary journal business information pages (by 'business information pages', we mean the journal's aims and scope, the editorial board, the instructions for authors, the description of the quality control system, the Open Access statement, the plagiarism policy, and the licensing terms) must be hosted on this same site and not be held centrally on another web site, or must be prominently linked to from the journal's homepage. This is a basic requirement for entry into DOAJ

I think we are OK on this with the secondary GitHub site, since it is prominently linked from the journal's homepage.

We strongly recommend that your content is preserved in a dedicated, digital archiving and preservation service, sometimes referred to as Long Term Preservation and Archiving (LTPA). You can find a list some of these services here.

Not a requirement but something we should look into.

Having detailed and comprehensive guidelines for authors (Instructions for Authors) is a good way of helping potential contributors. A link to these guidelines must be clearly presented on the journal's homepage. This is a basic requirement for entry into DOAJ. We recommend that author guidelines include the following information: A detailed style guide; A description of the quality control processes; Information about copyright (please note the importance of informing authors about whether the journal will be the copyright holder after publication of an article or if the copyright remains with the author(s). We strongly believe that authors should be informed about your copyright/licensing conditions before they submit their work); the plagiarism policy; description of how to submit an article; a contact email address.

I think we have all of this, but will need to check, for example, and explicit plagiarism policy

Open Access statement: The journal's Open Access policy must be clearly stated on the journal's web site (not the publisher's own site). It should also be linked to from the home page. The full text of the articles of the journal should be freely available without embargo.These are basic requirements for entry into DOAJ.

DOAJ will accept a short open access statement—even as short as ‘This journal is open access.’—but ONLY in combination with a Creative Commons licensing statement, or equivalent licensing statement, on the same page and, preferably, in the same paragraph. If the licensing statement is not on the same page as the open access statement then the extended open access statement complying with BOAI definition will be required.

Not sure we have an explicit one, we will need to make sure this matches. Just a matter of getting the language right.

Licensing your material with a CC license: An optimum way of showing exactly how a journal is Open Access is by licensing the content with a Creative Commons (CC) license. DOAJ considers the application of a CC license, or its equivalent, as best practice. Such licensing is very beneficial for authors since it shows, for example, if there are any limits in creating derivative works. Read more about applying licenses and copyright on our Copyright and Licensing Help page.

Basically, we do this, but may need to make it more explicit. A little complicated since we don't actually have any copyright, we just ask that the articles are licensed to us. Will have to look into this. Looks like they do consider the case of authors retaining rights but I'll need to look into it further.

It is recommended that publishers make use of one of the several plagiarism detection services that are available. Plagiarism is a big problem and plagiarised articles on a web site are often an indicator of a poor quality journal, or a journal that uses no quality control system. You should publish a plagiarism statement on your site, as well as the name of the piece of software that you use to detect plagiarism.

We will need to look into this - at least an explicit statement.

They currently say it is taking up to 6 months to make a decision on an application or update request.

WE should check with Scholastica about how to upload journal metadata.

When applying for a journal to be included in DOAJ, one of the questions asks whether or not you have machine-readable licensing information embedded in your article metadata. There are guidelines on the Creative Commons web site that tell you more about this. The information must be embedded in the HTML, the XML or the PDFs. Sometimes, it will be embedded in individual article components too, such as an MP3, an image or a video. The emphasis for DOAJ is not HOW the license is embedded but that there IS a machine-readable version of it. Here are a couple of examples:

We should also check about how to add the machine-readable licensing information.

[dmzuckerman]

Maybe Scholastica wants to make this easy for their journals via templates etc. It's something they could then advertise.