VJOL (Vietnam Journals Online, Vietnamese: Tạp chí khoa học Việt Nam Trực tuyến) is Vietnam’s national aggregation platform for domestically published, peer-reviewed scholarly journals, run by the National Agency for Science and Technology Information and Statistics (NASTIS, Vietnamese: Cục Thông tin, Thống kê Khoa học và Công nghệ Quốc gia) under Vietnam’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST). Like sibling national platforms such as BanglaJOL in Bangladesh and Philippine E-Journals (PEJ), VJOL exists to make locally published research — much of it indexed only sparsely, if at all, in Scopus and Web of Science — discoverable and citable outside Vietnam. VJOL currently lists several hundred participating journals across the sciences, technology, medicine, agriculture, and the social sciences and humanities.
What makes VJOL distinct right now, and worth a dedicated explainer, is a genuinely confusing three-domain situation following a 2026 platform upgrade to Open Journal Systems (OJS) 3.5. Searching for VJOL turns up three different domains that look interchangeable but are not: vjol.info.vn (the real, current public portal), vjol.vista.gov.vn (a separate technical API layer, not a browsing destination), and vjol.info (a domain that is not part of the official platform at all). Getting this wrong wastes time and, in the case of vjol.info, can point a researcher at content that has nothing to do with Vietnamese scholarly publishing.
The three VJOL domains, and what each one actually is
As of the platform’s 2026 migration, VJOL’s infrastructure is deliberately split into a public portal and a backend integration layer, plus one domain that should be avoided entirely:
vjol.info.vn — the public portal (use this one)
This is the current, official, public-facing home of VJOL. Following the upgrade to OJS 3.5, vjol.info.vn is where individual member journals are hosted, updated, and browsed — each journal typically runs as its own OJS instance under this domain (for example, a title’s issues, tables of contents, and full text live at a journal-specific path under vjol.info.vn). This is the domain to bookmark, cite, and link to for a specific journal or article.
vjol.vista.gov.vn — the API/synchronization layer (not a browsing destination)
This domain hosts a RESTful API operated by VISTA (Vietnam Information for Science and Technology Advancement, the umbrella national science-and-technology information system under MOST/NASTIS). Its job is to connect and synchronize article, author, and full-text data across VJOL’s member journals and other national databases — it is infrastructure, not a reader-facing catalogue. Confusingly, because journals were previously hosted directly under this domain before the migration, older links, citations, and search results still point here, and some individual journal sites remain reachable at vista.gov.vn paths even after the cutover. If a vjol.vista.gov.vn link resolves to an individual journal, treat the vjol.info.vn version of that journal as the current canonical one where both exist, and use vjol.vista.gov.vn itself only if you specifically need the underlying API.
vjol.info — not the official platform
vjol.info (without “.vn”) is a separate, unrelated domain. It is not operated by NASTIS, MOST, or VISTA, carries no connection to Vietnam’s official journal-hosting infrastructure, and its content (general study aids, blog posts, and unrelated material) has nothing to do with Vietnamese scholarly publishing. It ranks in general search results for “VJOL” purely because of the similar domain name. Do not cite it, link to it, or treat anything found there as representing VJOL, NASTIS, or MOST.
How to search and access journals on VJOL
VJOL’s coverage spans natural sciences, engineering and technology, medicine and health sciences, agriculture and forestry, and the social sciences and humanities, reflecting the breadth of journals published within Vietnam rather than specialising in one field. As with most national aggregation platforms, access is not uniform across the whole collection: bibliographic metadata (tables of contents, abstracts, author and issue information) is generally free to browse and search for every listed title, while full-text access depends on each journal’s own policy — open access, subscription, or a hybrid/delayed-access model. Check the individual journal’s access statement rather than assuming platform-wide open access. Because each member journal now runs its own OJS 3.5 instance under vjol.info.vn, browsing, searching, and (where a journal supports it) creating a reader account happen at the level of the individual journal site rather than through a single unified VJOL-wide login.
Submission mechanics
VJOL itself is an aggregation and discovery platform, not a single journal accepting manuscripts — there is no unified “submit to VJOL” workflow. Authors submit directly to whichever member journal they are targeting, through that journal’s own OJS 3.5 submission portal under vjol.info.vn, following that journal’s individual author guidelines, scope, and peer-review process. For a journal to be listed on VJOL at all, its editorial team must apply for inclusion and meet NASTIS’s stated criteria, which mirror those used by comparable national platforms: the journal must publish genuine peer-reviewed scholarly research, be published within Vietnam, and provide content (tables of contents, abstracts, and ideally full text) in a format suitable for online hosting. Prospective authors should evaluate a target journal on its own editorial merits — scope fit, peer-review rigor, indexing status — rather than treating VJOL inclusion itself as a quality signal, since listing criteria are about hosting eligibility, not a peer-reviewed-quality endorsement equivalent to Scopus or Web of Science indexing.
VJOL and Vietnam’s wider research-evaluation landscape
VJOL sits alongside, but is organisationally and functionally distinct from, NAFOSTED, Vietnam’s National Foundation for Science and Technology Development, which funds research and maintains its own journal-ranking lists (used, among other things, to assess research output for funding and promotion purposes within Vietnam). VJOL does not itself rank, evaluate, or fund journals — it hosts and aggregates them. A journal appearing on VJOL says nothing on its own about whether that journal appears on a NAFOSTED-recognised list, is Scopus/Web-of-Science indexed, or is DOI-registered; each of those is a separate status a researcher or research administrator should check independently when using VJOL-hosted output for citation counting, funding compliance, or promotion review. For librarians and research-information staff, VJOL functions the way BanglaJOL and PEJ do for their respective countries: the most direct route to a national body of scholarship that international discovery layers cover unevenly, best paired with a direct check of DOI registration and any national or funder-specific journal-quality list before relying on VJOL listing alone as a signal.
Frequently asked questions
Is vjol.info the same as VJOL?
No. vjol.info.vn is the official Vietnam Journals Online portal; vjol.info (without “.vn”) is a separate, unrelated domain with no connection to NASTIS, MOST, or Vietnam’s official journal infrastructure. Use vjol.info.vn.
What is vjol.vista.gov.vn used for?
It is VJOL’s backend API layer, run by VISTA under Vietnam’s Ministry of Science and Technology, used to synchronize article and author data across member journals and national databases. It is not the platform’s primary browsing destination — that is vjol.info.vn — though some older individual-journal links still resolve there.
Who manages VJOL?
The National Agency for Science and Technology Information and Statistics (NASTIS) under Vietnam’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) manages VJOL.
Does every VJOL-listed journal offer free full text?
No. Bibliographic metadata is generally free to browse across the platform, but full-text access depends on each journal’s own policy — open access, subscription, or hybrid — so check the individual journal rather than assuming platform-wide open access.
How do I submit a manuscript to a VJOL journal?
Submit directly to the individual journal through its own OJS 3.5 submission portal under vjol.info.vn, following that journal’s specific author guidelines. There is no single VJOL-wide manuscript submission system.
Is a journal being listed on VJOL the same as being NAFOSTED-recognised or Scopus-indexed?
No. VJOL listing, NAFOSTED’s journal-ranking lists, and Scopus/Web of Science indexing are three separate statuses. A journal can appear on VJOL without being on any of the others, and vice versa; check each independently for funding-compliance or citation purposes.
