A presentation given by DOAJ's Operation Manager, Dominic Mitchell, at the 1 day conference Licensing and Open Access in Stockholm on 1st June 2018. The conference was organised by the National Library of Sweden. The slides lay out DOAJ's philosophy of focussing on the positive and how DOAJ does a lot of reviewing and filtering so that users, especially authors, researchers and librarians, don't have to.

1. Questionable and Unethical
Publishers and How DOAJ’s Work
Helps Avoid Them
Licenser och Open Access 2018
Stockholm, 1st June 2018
Dominic Mitchell, Operations Manager
dom@doaj.org

2. • Founded in Lund, Sweden in 2003
• Virtual organisation of 11 employed people;
160 volunteers working globally
• Focus on Global South
• Supported entirely by donations or
sponsorship.
About DOAJ

3. to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and
impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research
journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or
language.
DOAJ will work with editors, publishers and journal owners to
help them understand the value of best practice publishing and
standards and apply those to their own operations.
DOAJ is committed to being 100% independent and maintaining
all of its services and metadata as free to use or reuse for
everyone.
Our Mission

4. Questionable?

5. • “Questionable” publishing is not a
problem unique to open access.
• Across scholarly publishing, there is
low quality science and low quality
publishing

6. • The true size of the problem is unclear.
• It may not look big…
– 8000 journals / 420 000 papers.1 OR
– 3275 [active] journals / 121 000 papers.2
• But it’s expensive!
– Over 10 years the South African government paid out
R100m-R300m (€6.6 million - €19.7million) to
questionable journals.3
1 ‘Predatory’ open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics. Cenyu Shen and
Bo-Christer Björk https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-015-0469-2
2 The Problems with Shen/Björk’s “420,000”. Walt Crawford https://walt.lishost.org/2017/04/the-problems-
with-shenbjorks-420000/
3 Predatory journals: government loses millions to articles in journals that swindle. Sarah Wild
https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/national/science-and-environment/2017-09-19-predatory-journals-
government-loses-millions-to-articles-in-journals-that-swindle/

7. How does DOAJ help to avoid
questionable publishers and journals?

8. • Focus on the positive!
• Raise awareness with online resources, targeted
at:
– Researchers / Authors
– Librarians
– Publishers
• Outreach: tackle problems on the ground
• Distribute metadata widely and for free
• Create strategic partnerships with like-minded
organisations

9. Raising Awareness

10. • Our message to publishers: ”If you’ve got it,
flaunt it!”
• Don’t hide crucial information from your site
visitors.
• Declare everything openly and in a manner
which is easy to find and easy to understand.
DOAJ

12. • A badge showing that the journal meets extra
high standards or best practices in 7 areas.
(https://doaj.org/application/new#seal)
• When the Seal scheme started (2014), we had
88 journals; today we have 1281.
DOAJ Seal

13. • DOAJ Best Practice Guide
– Launched in 2017
• An up-to-date Directory of online resources
covering best practice, tools and services,
white papers, online tutorials, organisations ...
• https://www.doajbestpracticeguide.org/
Other Resources

14. •
– DOAJ is a founding organisation
– https://thinkchecksubmit.org/
• Aimed at authors and researchers, showing
them the steps to take to verify the honesty
and validity of a journal.
• Available in 33 languages
Other Resources

15. Outreach

16. • DOAJ does not operate a ”one strike and
you’re out” policy
• We will help honest publishers do a better
job!
– Shortcomings are often down to lack of resources
or understanding; or
– Geographical and cultural differences.

17. • DOAJ
Ambassadors
• Funded by
IDRC
• On the ground
• In the local
language
• Using local
networks

18. • Dedicated outreach program in targeted
territories
– China
– Indonesia
– Japan
– Korea
• Increase quality of applications submitted to
DOAJ

19. Free Metadata!

20. • Visibility and impact of DOAJ-indexed journals
remains high.
– Most discovery services incorporate DOAJ
metadata into their products.
• Top referrers to DOAJ are EBSCO, Primo and Summon
– Available as CSV, CSS, JSON, HTML, via an API.
• Excellent page ranking in search results

21. Partnerships and mandates

22. • Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in
Scholarly Publishing
– DOAJ is a founding organisation (with COPE, WAME &
OASPA)
• 16 areas in which journals and publishers must be
transparent in their operations
– Fees, publication ethics, web site, ownership,
archiving, marketing and more....
• https://doaj.org/bestpractice

23. • Mandated open access where inclusion in
DOAJ is a condition towards releasing research
funding.
• At organisational, consortial or national,
multinational levels around the world.
– Austrian Science Fund
– French COUPERIN
– Science Europe

25. • We take a multilevel approach to tackling questionable
publishers
• Education and raising awareness is vital!
• Encourage best practice and adherence to standards, giving
journals a clear framework to operate within.
• Change the focus away from blacklists, away from low
quality.
• Freely distribute quality, peer-reviewed open access
content, taking the focus off low quality academic output.
• Forge strategic partnerships with like-minded organisations,
lending credibility to our combined efforts.
To conclude

26. DOAJ Gold Sponsor:
Thank you!
Special thanks to
all the Libraries, Library Consortia, Universities and Publishers,
and to our Sponsors for their financial support.