Open access publishers: the DOAJ Seal profile

The DOAJ database was created in 2003 and includes almost 14,000 peer-reviewed open access journals covering all knowledge areas, published in 130 countries. There is a selective process to be followed to assure the quality of the titles. DOAJ is maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA) and its funding is derived from donations (40% from publishers and 60% from the public sector). DOAJ introduced a quality distinction, called the DOAJ Seal, to identify the most prominent journals. There are 1354 journals (around 10% of the total) that have been awarded the Seal.

The search strategy involved using the Seal option, then ranking the journals to identify the biggest publishers, the number of journals and the number of articles. We have extracted the following indicators from DOAJ: publisher, title, ISSN, country, number of articles, knowledge area (according to the DOAJ classification), value of article processing charges in USD, time for publication in weeks, and year of indexing in DOAJ.