Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
An independent open-access journal with no institutional publisher submits a DOAJ application documenting its editorial board, peer-review policy, and licensing terms; once DOAJ's reviewers confirm these meet its published criteria, the journal is added to the directory and its article metadata becomes searchable through DOAJ's index.
- Is an instance
A university research office or funder's open-access policy lists "DOAJ-indexed" as one accepted way for a researcher to demonstrate that an unfamiliar journal is a legitimate open-access venue before publishing funded work in it.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A journal that markets itself as "open access" or has merely submitted a DOAJ application is not thereby DOAJ-indexed -- inclusion requires DOAJ to have evaluated and accepted the application against its published criteria; an application under review is not a listing.
- Not an instance
A journal appearing in Google Scholar, or claiming its own self-calculated impact factor, is not evidence it is indexed by DOAJ -- these are separate services with unrelated (and, in Google Scholar's case, uncurated) inclusion processes.
Editorial commentary
What DOAJ is
DOAJ, the Directory of Open Access Journals (at doaj.org), is an independent, community-curated index of more than 20,000 peer-reviewed open-access scholarly journals from over 135 countries. It is not a publisher or funder; journals apply and are vetted against DOAJ’s published inclusion criteria before being listed.
DOAJ was founded in 2003 at Lund University in Sweden, starting with around 300 journals. Since January 2013 it has been operated by Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA), a UK-based, not-for-profit community interest company set up specifically to run DOAJ independently of any single university, publisher, or government. That independence — DOAJ is funded through a mix of publisher/library membership fees, sponsorship, and grants, not by charging journals to be listed — is part of what makes DOAJ inclusion a meaningful third-party signal rather than a paid credential.
Why DOAJ exists
DOAJ’s stated mission is to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage, and impact of quality, peer-reviewed open-access research, regardless of discipline, geography, or language. In practice, DOAJ serves two connected functions research administrators rely on:
- Discovery. DOAJ is a free, searchable index of open-access journal and article metadata — a way for researchers, libraries, and discovery services to find legitimate OA venues and content without relying on a journal’s own marketing claims.
- Quality gatekeeping. Because DOAJ applies published, checkable inclusion criteria and periodically re-reviews listed journals, appearing in DOAJ is evidence a journal has been independently vetted — the same underlying need that produced the predatory journal problem DOAJ was built to counter. DOAJ’s most visible enforcement action to date was a 2015–2017 reapplication process that required every already-listed journal to reapply under tightened criteria, resulting in roughly 5,000 journals being removed from the directory.
Inclusion criteria, at a high level
DOAJ publishes its full application form and criteria at doaj.org/apply/guide. A journal does not need to satisfy every possible best practice to be listed, but it must clear a set of basic requirements DOAJ’s editorial team checks against the application and the journal’s own website:
- Genuine open access. Full-text content must be freely available online under an open license (Creative Commons or a demonstrably equivalent license) with no reader-side paywall, registration barrier, or embargo period.
- Editorial quality control. Every article must go through a documented peer-review or editorial-review process before publication, disclosed on the journal’s website (whether it is single-blind, double-blind, or open review). The journal must have an identifiable editorial board of qualified members, and DOAJ’s application also probes for conflicts of interest — asking, for example, how much of the journal’s recent output was authored by its own editors or board members.
- A verifiable publishing track record. DOAJ generally expects at least one year of continuous open-access publishing, or a minimum number of published open-access research articles, plus an ongoing minimum output rate — not a single-issue or dormant title.
- Correct, checkable identity information. A registered ISSN, a dedicated journal website, an accurate publisher name and country, and individual, stable URLs for full-text articles.
- Licensing and copyright transparency. The journal must state its licensing terms clearly on its site — separately from a generic site-wide copyright notice — and disclose who holds copyright to published articles.
- Business-model transparency. Any author-facing fee (submission, processing, page, or colour charges) must be disclosed publicly, including the amount and any fee-waiver policy for authors who cannot pay. A no-fee journal must say so explicitly rather than leaving the question unanswered — a distinction directly relevant to diamond open access journals.
DOAJ also asks about, but does not strictly require, additional best practices — long-term digital preservation arrangements, permission for authors to self-archive, persistent identifiers such as DOIs, and ORCID iD support in metadata. Until it was retired at the end of March 2025, DOAJ marked journals meeting the fuller best-practice set with the “DOAJ Seal.” DOAJ has since moved to individual, more specific journal labels instead of one blanket badge — for example, the Subscribe to Open (S2O) label it launched in March 2025 — so a journal’s DOAJ listing itself, rather than a retired Seal, is now the baseline signal to check.
Why DOAJ matters for researchers and institutions
A DOAJ listing is one of the more widely used positive signals in journal-vetting workflows precisely because it is independent, criteria-based, and free to check: research offices, libraries, and funders commonly ask “is this journal in DOAJ?” as one screening question when a researcher proposes to publish in, or an early-career author is solicited by, an unfamiliar open-access journal. It complements, rather than replaces, other checks — verifying the journal against a checklist such as Think.Check.Submit, checking whether the publisher belongs to COPE or OASPA, and looking for the specific red flags covered in CASRAI’s guide on how to identify predatory journals and publishers.
Two limits worth holding onto so DOAJ isn’t over-relied on as a single check:
- Absence from DOAJ is not proof a journal is predatory. Many legitimate journals — subscription/hybrid titles, very new OA journals still building the publishing history DOAJ requires, or journals that simply haven’t applied — are not DOAJ-listed without being fraudulent.
- DOAJ indexing is a different claim from being indexed by Scopus, Web of Science, or PubMed/MEDLINE, each of which runs its own separate evaluation for its own purposes (citation analysis and bibliometrics, in those cases, rather than open-access legitimacy specifically). See CASRAI’s guide on what it means for a journal to be indexed for how these different indexes relate to one another.
DOAJ is also one of the four organisations — alongside COPE, OASPA, and WAME — that co-author the joint Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, which underpins DOAJ’s own criteria and several other publishing-ethics frameworks referenced across this site.
DOAJ (the directory) vs. DOAJ Native XML (the metadata format)
“DOAJ” on this site refers to two related but distinct things, and content elsewhere may assume the reader already separates them. This page covers DOAJ the directory and indexing service described above — what it is, who runs it, and what a listing signals. A separate, narrower concept is DOAJ Native XML, the specific XML metadata schema DOAJ defines for publishers to submit article-level records directly into its index. A journal can be DOAJ-indexed without ever using DOAJ Native XML specifically — DOAJ also accepts Crossref XML or an OJS export plugin for the same purpose — so “DOAJ-indexed” and “uses DOAJ Native XML” are not equivalent claims about a journal.
Related terms
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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