Directory of Open Access Journals

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a website that hosts a community-curated list of open access journals, maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA). It was launched in 2003 with 300 open access journals. The project defines open access journals as scientific and scholarly journals making all their content available for free, without delay or user-registration requirement, and meeting high quality standards, notably by exercising peer review or editorial quality control. DOAJ defines those as open access journals where an open license is used so that any user is allowed immediate free access to the works published in the journal and is permitted to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of [the] articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose. The mission of DOAJ is 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." In 2015, DOAJ launched a reapplication process based on updated and expanded inclusion criteria. At the end of the process (December 2017), close to 5,000 journals, out of the 11,600 indexed in May 2016, had been removed from their database, in majority for failure to reapply. Notwithstanding the substantial cleanup, the number of journals included in DOAJ has continued to grow, to reach 14,299 as of 3 March 2020. As of December 2022, the independent database contains more than 18,650 open access journals and 8,265,272 articles covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences and the humanities. DOAJ provides a change log on Google Sheets that has been updated since March 2014 and identifies the journals added and the journals removed with the justification for the removal.