Unit 3.2 : Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

BLIS-102: Information Sources and Services

1. Meaning

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is an online directory that indexes and provides free access to high-quality, peer-reviewed academic journals. It was launched in 2003 at Lund University, Sweden, and is now maintained independently with support from libraries, publishers, and universities worldwide. It acts as a global platform for Open Access (OA) journals, ensuring that scholarly research is freely available to all without subscription or paywall barriers.
The Directory of Open Access Journals is a community-governed index that lists quality-controlled, peer-reviewed open access journals and their article records. It makes core indexing and metadata free to read and reuse. It is a trusted gateway for discovering legitimate open-access scholarship across disciplines, languages, and regions. DOAJ offers rich search and browse at the journal and article level and open technical services for libraries, including weekly public data dumps in JSON and CSV, an API, and OAI-PMH harvesting with subject sets. It also provides simple embeddable widgets that let a library show a DOAJ search box or fixed query on its website. In 2023 and 2024, DOAJ introduced and refined safeguards for guest-edited special issues to protect editorial integrity. In April 2025, it retired the visible “DOAJ Seal” while improving metadata to reflect good practices without a badge. These features make DOAJ a learner discovery tool and a standards reference for librarians and editors.

2. DOAJ Growth and development

3. DOAJ Objectives

DOAJ’s objective is to make trusted open access research easy to find and reuse, and its features give libraries and students open, standards-based tools to discover and integrate that content.

4. DOAJ Features