IASJ (Iraqi Academic Scientific Journals) is Iraq’s national platform for discovering and reading peer-reviewed research published by Iraqi universities and academic institutions. Operated by Iraq’s Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, it aggregates several hundred Iraqi academic journals into a single searchable index, covering everything from engineering and medicine to Arabic-language humanities and social-science titles that few international databases index at all. The platform has recently changed its primary web address, moving from the long-standing iasj.net to iasj.rdd.edu.iq, and posts sharing "the new IASJ link" have been circulating in Facebook groups used by Iraqi researchers and students. This guide explains what IASJ actually is, how to confirm you are on the legitimate current site rather than a stale or look-alike link, how the search and browse tools work, and what submitting to an IASJ-listed journal involves.
What IASJ Is and Who Runs It
IASJ stands for Iraqi Academic Scientific Journals (المجلات الاكاديمية العلمية العراقية). It is a government-operated aggregation and hosting platform, not a publisher in its own right: the individual journals listed on IASJ are edited and published independently by their home universities, colleges, ministries, or research institutes, and IASJ’s role is to give them a shared, searchable, full-text online presence. The model is conceptually similar to how AJOL aggregates African-published journals or how VJOL aggregates Vietnamese ones, though IASJ is operated directly by Iraq’s Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research (MOHESR) rather than by an independent non-profit. The platform indexes journals from Iraqi public universities, government ministries, and affiliated colleges, spanning disciplines including medicine, engineering, agriculture, education, psychology, chemistry, law, and the humanities.
The Domain Migration: iasj.net to iasj.rdd.edu.iq
For years, IASJ operated at iasj.net. The platform has since moved to iasj.rdd.edu.iq, an address on Iraq’s .edu.iq academic domain space. As of this writing, iasj.net does not reliably resolve; attempting to reach it returns a connection failure rather than the working search interface long-time users remember, consistent with the old domain having been retired rather than simply mirrored. This migration is genuinely current: Facebook groups used by Iraqi researchers and students have been actively sharing posts pointing people to "the new IASJ link," which is a reasonable thing to be uncertain about, since a platform quietly changing domains is also a pattern that phishing and look-alike sites can exploit.
Two practical checks before trusting any link claiming to be IASJ:
- Confirm the domain itself. The current legitimate address is iasj.rdd.edu.iq. The .edu.iq portion places it on Iraq’s academic and education domain space, which is a stronger signal of legitimacy than a generic .com or .net address making the same claim.
- Don’t rely on a shared social-media link alone. Navigate to the domain directly, or cross-check it against the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research’s own references to the platform, rather than clicking a link forwarded in a group post.
IASJ itself does not charge readers to search or browse its index, and full-text access to the articles it lists is very commonly free, consistent with how comparable national journal-hosting platforms such as AJOL and VJOL operate. The access terms for any individual article ultimately follow that journal’s own policy, so a site asking for payment to unlock an article that should be freely available on IASJ is worth treating with caution.
Scale and Coverage
As of this writing, IASJ’s own platform statistics show 506 journals from 138 institutions, comprising more than 340,000 indexed articles. As with any actively maintained index, these figures will have moved somewhat by the time you read this, since journals and institutions are added on an ongoing basis. Listed institutions span Iraqi public universities, government ministries (including the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research itself, and other ministries such as the Ministry of Interior), and affiliated colleges, publishing journals across the sciences, medicine, agriculture, law, education, and Arabic-language humanities and social-science fields.
How to Search and Access Journals on IASJ
IASJ offers a few main routes into its index. A simple search box handles quick keyword lookups, while an advanced search adds filters for article title, journal name, author, abstract, keywords, publisher, and ISSN, which is the more precise route when you already know part of a citation. Separate browse options list journals directly by subject or by publishing institution, which is often faster than keyword search if you already know which Iraqi university or research center’s journal you’re looking for. Each journal’s page on IASJ typically links through to its individual issues and articles, most commonly as downloadable PDFs alongside basic bibliographic metadata such as title, authors, abstract, and keywords, with ISSN and other identifiers included where the journal has assigned them.
Submitting a Manuscript to an IASJ-Listed Journal
IASJ itself is a discovery and hosting layer, not a submission portal: it does not run a single, unified peer-review or manuscript-submission system across the 500-plus journals it lists. As with comparable platforms such as AJOL, each journal on IASJ retains its own editorial board, its own peer-review process, and its own way of accepting submissions. Many Iraqi university journals run their own online submission and peer-review workflow, commonly built on Open Journal Systems (OJS), a submission platform widely used across Global South academic publishing; others handle submissions by direct email to an editor. There is no single "submit to IASJ" workflow. Authors need to locate the specific journal they want to publish in using IASJ’s search or browse tools, then follow that journal’s own author guidelines and submission process, which is usually linked from its individual journal page on the platform.
How IASJ Fits Among National Journal-Hosting Platforms
IASJ belongs to a broader family of national and regional platforms that aggregate a country’s academic journals into one searchable, freely accessible index — a pattern that also includes AJOL for Africa, VJOL for Vietnam, ASJP for Algeria, BanglaJOL for Bangladesh, and the Philippine E-Journals (PeJ) platform. These platforms share a common purpose: making nationally published, often locally peer-reviewed research findable and citable for researchers outside that country, since much of this content is not comprehensively indexed by Scopus or Web of Science. The comparison is a little different with Egypt’s Egyptian Knowledge Bank (EKB): EKB is primarily a national licensing portal giving Egyptian researchers access to subscription databases like Scopus and Web of Science, rather than a hosting index for locally published journals, so it solves an adjacent but distinct access problem for an Arabic-language research audience.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is iasj.net still the correct website for IASJ?
No. IASJ has moved to iasj.rdd.edu.iq. The old iasj.net address does not reliably resolve any longer, and links to it that are still circulating (including in social-media posts) should be treated as outdated.
What does "IASJ" stand for?
Iraqi Academic Scientific Journals. It is Iraq’s national index of academic journals published by Iraqi universities, ministries, and research institutions, operated by the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research.
Is IASJ the same as Scopus or Web of Science?
No. IASJ is a national hosting and discovery index for Iraqi-published journals, most of which are not comprehensively covered by Scopus or Web of Science. It is a separate, complementary source rather than a substitute for those citation databases.
Do I need an account to search IASJ?
Browsing and searching the index does not require registration. An account or login becomes relevant mainly on the editorial side, for journal staff or authors managing submissions through a specific journal’s own workflow.
Is IASJ free to use?
Yes. IASJ does not charge readers to search, browse, or download the articles it indexes; access to any individual article otherwise follows that journal’s own policy, which on this platform is very commonly free.
