Best Practice, the DOAJ Seal, and Why It Matters

Posted on June 24, 2015 by Darren Chase

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the Committee on Publications Ethics, Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) and other scholarly publishing organizations have collaborated to identify principles of transparency and best practice, “that set apart legitimate journals and publishers from non-legitimate ones and to clarify that these principles form part of the criteria on which membership applications will be evaluated.” ¹

Principles of Transparency

1. Peer review process: All of a journal’s content, apart from any editorial material that is clearly marked as such, shall be subjected to peer review. Peer review is defined as obtaining advice on individual manuscripts from reviewers expert in the field who are not part of the journal’s editorial staff. This process, as well as any policies related to the journal’s peer review procedures, shall be clearly described on the journal’s Web site.

2. Governing Body: Journals shall have editorial boards or other governing bodies whose members are recognized experts in the subject areas included within the journal’s scope. The full names and affiliations of the journal’s editors shall be provided on the journal’s Web site.

3. Editorial team/contact information Journals shall provide the full names and affiliations of the journal’s editors on the journal’s Web site as well as contact information for the editorial office.

4. Author fees: Any fees or charges that are required for manuscript processing and/or publishing materials in the journal shall be clearly stated in a place that is easy for potential authors to find prior to submitting their manuscripts for review or explained to authors before they begin preparing their manuscript for submission.

5. Copyright: Copyright and licensing information shall be clearly described on the journal’s Web site, and licensing terms shall be indicated on all published articles, both HTML and PDFs.

6. Identification of and dealing with allegations of research misconduct: Publishers and editors shall take reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred, including plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data falsification/fabrication, among others. In no case shall a journal or its editors encourage such misconduct, or knowingly allow such misconduct to take place. In the event that a journal’s publisher or editors are made aware of any allegation of research misconduct relating to a published article in their journal – the publisher or editor shall follow COPE’s guidelines (or equivalent) in dealing with allegations.

7. Ownership and management: Information about the ownership and/or management of a journal shall be clearly indicated on the journal’s Web site. Publishers shall not use organizational names that would mislead potential authors and editors about the nature of the journal’s owner.

8. Web site: A journal’s Web site, including the text that it contains, shall demonstrate that care has been taken to ensure high ethical and professional standards.

9. Name of journal: The Journal name shall be unique and not be one that is easily confused with another journal or that might mislead potential authors and readers about the Journal’s origin or association with other journals.

10. Conflicts of interest: A journal shall have clear policies on handling potential conflicts of interest of editors, authors, and reviewers and the policies should be clearly stated.

11. Access: The way(s) in which the journal and individual articles are available to readers and whether there are associated subscription or pay per view fees shall be stated.

12. Revenue sources: Business models or revenue sources (eg, author fees, subscriptions, advertising, reprints, institutional support, and organizational support) shall be clearly stated or otherwise evident on the journal’s Web site.

13. Advertising: Journals shall state their advertising policy if relevant, including what types of ads will be considered, who makes decisions regarding accepting ads and whether they are linked to content or reader behavior (online only) or are displayed at random.

14. Publishing schedule: The periodicity at which a journal publishes shall be clearly indicated.

15. Archiving: A journal’s plan for electronic backup and preservation of access to the journal content (for example, access to main articles via CLOCKSS or PubMedCentral) in the event a journal is no longer published shall be clearly indicated.

16. Direct marketing: Any direct marketing activities, including solicitation of manuscripts that are conducted on behalf of the journal, shall be appropriate, well targeted, and unobtrusive.

The Principles are derived largely from those developed by the DOAJ to identify journals that, “fulfill a set of criteria related to accessibility, openness, discoverability, reuse and author rights.” ²

The DOAJ Seal is a manifestation of the criteria, and signifies to readers and authors that a journal has generous use and reuse terms, author rights and adheres to the highest level of ‘openness’. All DOAJ Seal jourals are listed here.

To qualify for the Seal the journal must:

have an archival and preservation arrangement in place with an external party such as CLOCKSS, LOCKSS, Portico;
provide permanent identifiers in the published content such as DOIs;
provide article level metadata to DOAJ;
embed machine-readable CC licensing information in article level metadata;
allow reuse and remixing of content in accordance with a CC BY, CC BY-SA or CC BY-NC license;
have a deposit policy registered in a deposit policy directory such as SHERPA/RoMEO;
allow the author to hold the copyright without restriction.

The DOAJ Seal and related criteria for Best Practice, and the Principles of Transparency are important to readers, authors, and librarians because they express standards that: establish the provenance, ownership, and editorial body of the journal; indicate a framework that facilitates easy access, sharing and discoverability; seek to ensure the permanence of the journal through archiving and preservation requirements.

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