I first interviewed the Directory of Open Access Journals staff in August 2008. The nearly 18 months since that interview was published have been a busy time for DOAJ. I thought it was time to catch up with the friendly staff at DOAJ and find out what had been happening and get their thoughts on some topical issues.

Pictured left to right: DOAJ staff Maria Ohlsson, Sonja Brage, Anna-Lena Johansson, Stina Hallin.

Tom: Thank you all for being willing to be interviewed again. I appreciate this particularly because I know how busy you've all been since our last interview. Perhaps you could start by giving us a broad overview of what's happened since August 2008?

DOAJ: 2009 was a very eventful year:

• Launch of the long-term preservation project

• DOAJ receives the SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications 2009

• Implementation of an RSS Feed function

• Continued cooperation with China (ISTIC)

• Arranged 1st Conference for Open Access Scholarly Publishers together with OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association)

• New function to see how many journals have a Creative Commons license and how many have the SPARC Seal for open access journals.

Tom: I am curious to know how many journals DOAJ now indexes? Could you also tell us how many have been added in 2009?

DOAJ: During 2009 we added 770 journals and now we index a total of 4570.

Tom: The flip-side of my last question is to ask how many journals have left DOAJ in 2009? Can you give us some of the reasons why journals leave DOAJ? If one of the reasons is that they are ceasing to be open access, do you have any ideas why this might be happening?

DOAJ: During 2009 we removed 73 titles from the directory.

The reason can be that they have not been regularly published (at least one volume per year) or they are no longer OA. Some have added an embargo.

If a journal stops being OA, we suppose it's a question of funding that makes the journals switch to a subscription model. It is probably not a question of opposing open access.

Tom: Will DOAJ ever remove a journal from its database unilaterally, for example if the journal had a quality control or editorial problem? How would DOAJ identify and verify such a problem?

DOAJ: We remove journals on a continuous basis the moment we identify that they do not fulfill our criteria. (See above.) Now we have staff going through journals added before 2009 to make sure they still live up to our criteria. In the past we have removed a journal because they seem to have been slack in peer reviewing. But that happens very, very rarely. If the editor says they have editorial control or peer review, we have to trust them; after all the DOAJ team are not subject experts. We have to rely on the competence of the editors.

Tom: The Pubmed web interface was recently upgraded. Does DOAJ have any plans to upgrade its own interface?

DOAJ: Yes, we do have plans but nothing decided yet.

Tom: Around the time we went to press with our previous interview DOAJ introduced a new function allowing users to view journals by country. With the existing division into languages what was the rationale for this? Open access has always seemed to me to be internationalist in intention - does DOAJ see a more nationalist tendency developing, or has this perhaps always existed?

DOAJ: The language search was developed to help users who want to read in a special language. Not everybody reads English. Now we are proud to have added the first journal in Hindi. To be able to search by country is useful for small countries. It might give a kick to a developing country to see that they have open access journals.

The country list also gives some interesting information: Bulgaria (with 7.5 million inhabitants) has more OA journals in DOAJ than Russia with 142 million, and it's not the fault of the DOAJ team: the Russians simply do not suggest any journals to DOAJ. Countries like Romania and Turkey are really on the move, and Latin and Central America.

The country view is also a good tool for national OA advocates.

Tom: An RSS function was added recently which provides a feed about new journals added to DOAJ in the last 24 hours. Does DOAJ intend to extend RSS, perhaps to provide updates on user's previous searches?

DOAJ: We will consider this in our future development plans.

Tom: On April 1 2009 a long term open access journal preservation effort was announced. Can you briefly describe this for us? How successful has the service been to date (indeed, how is success measured for it?)

DOAJ: On 1st April 2009 the long-term preservation project was launched. It is a cooperation between DOAJ and the e-Depot of the National Library of the Netherlands, and the project is sponsored by the Swedish Library Association. New formats, new business models and new ways of dissemination of scholarly publications are constantly being developed. It is of major importance for the research community to secure permanent access to scientific output for the future, here focused on the preservation of articles published in open access journals.

During the pilot project methods and work-flows for long term archiving have been outlined. Different formats and protocols were investigated and software developed to harvest articles from the publishers.

The service has been very positively received by the publishers. So far 179 journals have all their articles long term preserved in e-Depot and in a very near future the process will be fully in place to harvest more journals. The requirements are that the articles are in PDF-format. Further information about the long-term preservation project is available here.

Tom: On 2 July 2009 it was announced that DOAJ had received the SPARC Europe Award for outstanding achievements in scholarly communications. Having previously only done so privately in an email, I'd like to publically extend my congratulations to DOAJ on this. I'm sure readers will agree with me that the award is thoroughly deserved. Do you think the award has changed perceptions of DOAJ?

DOAJ: It is a great honor to receive the SPARC Europe Award. The prize makes DOAJ even more recognized and it is also a quality award.

We also want to mention that we get invited to talk about DOAJ at different conferences. In December 2008 we were invited to China (ISTIC) and have since then initiated cooperation with them, reviewing Chinese journals and adding meta-data. In January 2009 DOAJ was invited to Bath to Repository Services Day, and in October to San José in Costa Rica to “Quality and Impact of Ibero-American Scientific Journals” supported by Latindex.

 Tom: This final question is perhaps a question only of relevance to publishers. At present DOAJ operates its own XML schema for uploading articles. Is there any chance in the future that DOAJ will adopt the popular OAI-PMH metadata harvesting protocol?

DOAJ: We used to do it but stopped since there were too many variations and errors due to the large number of different publishers we are dealing with (approximately 2000) – it became too time consuming on our part.

Tom: My thanks to the DOAJ staff for participating in this interview.

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