This community brings together outputs created by University of Ottawa Master of Information Studies (MIS) students as part of the ÉSIS course on Knowledge Organization (ISI 5302) taught by Professor Stefanie Haustein in Fall 2022.

Students worked in groups to evaluate universal classification systems for the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The goal of the project was to identify and evaluate a new classification system for the DOAJ that enables researchers to use the DOAJ website to find a quality, peer-reviewed open access journal in their field to which they can submit their research.

The DOAJ currently uses a truncated extract from the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) system, which is too US-centric, dated and not granular enough to reflect their global and multi-disciplinary scope. Many researchers leave the DOAJ unable to identify a suitable open access journal that matches their area of research. The DOAJ wants to find a new classification system that is able to reflect DOAJ’s diversity, is open source, user friendly and machine readable and easy to map to the existing LCC.

Students assessed the following classification systems:

• Group 1: Elsevier All Science Journal Classification (ASJC)
• Group 2: Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC)
• Group 3: LCC main classes (2022)
• Group 4: Science-Metrix Classification of Scientific Journals
• Group 5: Open Alex Wiki Concepts
• Group 6: Canadian Research and Development Classification (CRDC) Field of Research (FOR)