Dominic Mitchell, DOAJ Keynote lecture during Open Science Platform event “Practical perspectives on scientific publishing”, 21.10.2019 "Praktyczne perspektywy publikowania naukowego" http://pon.edu.pl/1000

1. The global movement of
open access and DOAJ’s
part in that
Dom Mitchell, DOAJ
Praktyczne perspektywy publikowania naukowego
University of Warsaw Library
21st October 2019

2. Budapest Open Access Initiative, 14th
February 2002

3. So why DOAJ?

4. What is DOAJ?
• Launched in 2003 with 300 journals.
• Core team and 100 volunteers around the world
• 100% funded by donations
• DOAJ is 100% independant
• Not for profit, not for sale

5. What is DOAJ?
A community-curated online directory that indexes and
provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed
journals.
13,813 Journals
130 countries
4,349,325 Articles

6. From our mission
DOAJ's mission 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.

7. Where is DOAJ?
www https://doaj.org
Blog https://blog.doaj.org
https://twitter.com/DOAJplus

8. The Global Movement of Open Access

9. The Global Sharing of Open Access
‘An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make
possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the
willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of
their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the
sake of inquiry and knowledge.’
https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read

10. The Global Movement of Open Access
• “Open” applies to so much….
• science, knowledge, access, data, metadata
• journals, books, platforms, repositories
• licensing
• It is often associated with “transparency” and...
• … the adoption of Best Practice and standards
• It requires a sustainable business model and technology

11. The Global Advancement of Open Access
image credit

12. The problem is that the generation and
distribution of science is far from global
• The Budapest, Berlin and Bethesda declarations were
mainly prepared and supported by Western institutions
• Two thirds of the open repositories are hosted in Europe or
North America
• One third of the open access journals are published in six
countries from the "global North", including the United
States, Spain and the UK.
Joachim Schöpfel - http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march17/schopfel/03schopfel.html

13. ‘The research environment in the global South faces many
pressing challenges given resource inequality. Technical and
financial issues aside, ... it is the values and practices shaped by
the Northern research agenda which contribute just as much
to the imbalance.’
Laura Czerniewicz - https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/04/29/redrawing-the-map-from-
access-to-participation/
blogs.lse.ac.uk

14. Global production of Science papers
published in 2016
image credit - World Mapper

15. Neo-colonialism
This imbalance is called “neo-colonialism”.
‘Another element which contributes to the continued
intellectual domination of Western countries over the Third
World is the deliberate policies of the industrialized nations to
maintain their power. These policies have been called
neocolonialism, and they operate in the arena of education and
intellectual life, as well as in other areas.’
Scholarly Publishing in the Third World Philip G. Altbach, Library Trends, 1978

16. Cognitive justice
Those seeking to redress the imbalance are working for
“cognitive justice”.
Commenting on the destructive impact of Western science on
developing countries and non-Western cultures, Visvanathan
calls for the recognition of alternative sciences or non-Western
forms of knowledge… Cognitive justice is a critique on the
dominant paradigm of modern science and promotes the
recognition of alternative paradigms or alternative sciences by
facilitating and enabling dialogue...perceived as contributing to
a more sustainable, equitable, and democratic world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_justice

17. Europe
image credit

18. Berlin Declaration - 2013
Standards | Quality | Stability | Transition
• Cooperate with one another
• The full text of every research work is open immediately
upon publication.
• Reduce and where possible eliminate embargoes
• Improve the ability to reuse works
• Ensure a smooth transition to a stable and functioning,
truly open scholarly publishing system
• Support new and innovative OA publishing models
• Increase the support for... OA repositories for scholarly
materials
• Invest into a publication infrastructure optimised for the
needs of research and scholarship
https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration

20. ‘Accelerating the transition to full and immediate open access
to scientific publications.’
https://www.coalition-s.org/

23. Fundamental principles
• No scholarly publication should be locked behind a
paywall;
• Open Access should be immediate i.e., without embargoes;
• Full Open Access is implemented by the default use of a
Creative Commons Attribution CC BY licence;
• Funders commit to support Open Access publication fees at
a reasonable level;
• Funders will not support publication in hybrid (or
mirror/sister) journals unless they are part of a
transformative arrangement with a clearly defined
endpoint.

24. Task forces address shortcomings
A group of consultants in the UK have been working to fill in the
gaps:
• For example, for society publishers:
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.9805043.v1
‘27 business models and strategies that can be
deployed by [Learned society]publishers to transition
successfully to OA. Only three of these rely on author
payments to fund article publishing.’
https://www.informationpower.co.uk/press-release-
spaops-report-toolkit/

25. DOAJ’s open letter to SSHA communities
DOAJ has been named as a key tool in helping assess journals
for Plan S compliance.
We want to help society publishers and SSHA publishers:
‘... we are putting out an open call to representative groups in
the social sciences, humanities and arts to collaborate with us
and help us to identify journals that are fit for purpose, and
which should be indexed in DOAJ.’
Pilot with Federation of Finnish Learned Societies

26. Plan S falls short in a major way
From the Berlin Declaration:
‘Invest into a publication infrastructure optimised for the needs
of research and scholarship.’

27. The Problem with Plan S is…
“Plan S does nothing to take the control away from a
few commercial companies and the academic
institutions and countries still have no control beyond
commercial agreements.”

28. Latin America

29. Not-for-profit dissemination of science is
the norm.
Non-profit, non- APC open access is the default and has been
the standard for communicating scientific knowledge since
2003

30. AmeLICA: ‘a communication infrastructure for
scholarly publishing and open science, sustained
cooperatively [which] endorses a non-profit publishing
model to preserve the scholarly and open nature of
scientific communication’
http://amelica.org/index.php/en/home/
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01816693v1 (Becerril-Garcia, Aguado-
Lopez.)

31. The AmeliCA Solution
Amelica’s solution: a cooperative set of actions that take
advantage of the existing resources and experience of multiple
organizations in a way that means that academic institutions
and academia remain in control of the knowledge.

32. Credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kXe1UO4beE

33. Africa
image credit

34. Global Production of Knowledge in 2016
Africa
image credit - World Mapper

35. ‘Low commitment towards science,
policy, incentives and infrastructure by
African governments’
• Infrastructure and politics seriously affect the development
of the infrastructures need to encourage open science
• ‘Policy is a process, and depends on the government of the
day.’
https://blog.doaj.org/2019/10/11/guest-post-overview-of-the-african-open-access-landscape-with-a-focus-
on-scholarly-publishing/

36. Awareness of open science is evident…
• 12 Open Science-related declarations and agreements
• 200 African Open Access journals in DOAJ
• 174 Open Access repositories in OpenDOAR
• 33 Open Access/Open Science policies registered on
ROARMAP
• 24 data repositories registered in Registry of Data
Repositories (re3data.org)
• 1 data repository assigned the CoreTrustSeal.

37. ...but the infrastructure is lacking
• Internet access isn’t reliable
• Internet shutdowns and censorship are common
• 20 African governments applied some form of Internet
censorship 45 times since 2001, of which 36 times the
shutdowns related to anti-government related protests.
Academy of Science of South Africa. (2019). African Open Science Platform – Landscape
Study. Unpublished.

38. There is progress!
• African Open Science platform -
http://africanopenscience.org.za/
“The Platform will play a critical role to assist African
countries in developing the necessary capacities to manage
and exploit scientific data for the benefit of society”
• Joint project between DOAJ and AUF on the dissemination
of open access throughout Africa
• Next Einstein Forum - https://nef.org/
Our work is shaped by our belief that the next Einstein will
be African. We are working to make Africa a global hub for
science and technology.

39. Other parts of the world
• India: has a reputation for being the source of many
“predatory” journals and is working hard to change that
reputation
• China: open access isn’t trusted and some even doubt the
need for it.
• Indonesia: government mandated open access means that
every University department is launching journals.
• Canada: a strong leaning towards the French language
• USA: mostly green open access route is preferred.

40. DOAJ

41. DOAJ is Open for All
• Funders - for implementing policy and checking compliance
• Publishers - as a mark of quality for journals, raising
visibility
• Society publishers - helping to societies meet member
mandates and assuring quality
• Researchers - to identify viable journals to read and in
which to publish
• Universities - for encouraging the culture of open and
identifying viable journals to publish in
• Libraries - as a service to faculty and encouraging the
culture of open
• Research managers - for monitoring compliance

42. For publishers, there are clear benefits
• We will work with journal editors and publishers to help
their journals get indexed
• It can be tough but well worthwhile:

43. For publishers, there are clear benefits
• We will work with journal editors and publishers to help
their journals get indexed
• It can be tough but well worthwhile:

44. For publishers, there are clear benefits
• As an index:
• emphasises reliable journals
• raises visibility
• raises awareness
• Increases readership and submissions
• increases traffic to sites
• Particularly important for encouraging researchers to publish
in local journals.
http://bit.ly/2VTj2us

45. DOAJ metadata is everywhere
Our metadata cascades into all the major discovery services
across disciplines, languages and continents and is in almost all
library portals. It is free to use, re-use and distribute.

46. DOAJ’s coverage in Poland
Since January 2014, usage of DOAJ from Poland accounts for
only 0.56% despite that there are 607 Polish journals registered
in DOAJ.
Usage from Poland remained static from 2014 to 2017,
increased slightly in 2018, and then again 2019.
Most traffic from Poland is via Google (25.6%) or directly to
DOAJ (21.6%).

47. DOAJ’s coverage in Poland
The Top 10 Polish publishers in DOAJ are:
Sciendo (262)
De Gruyter (54)
Termedia Publishing House (24)
Lodz University Press (16)
University of Lodz, Poland (9)
Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences (8)
Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń (8)
Poznań University of Life Sciences (7)
Polish Academy of Sciences (6)
Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika (6)

48. Flyers on why DOAJ is good for:
Publishers
Libraries/universities

49. Thank you!
Dom Mitchell: dom@doaj.org
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