Results of our community consultation: retiring the Seal, changes to our metadata – Part II – DOAJ Blog

"We consulted with the community about the metadata we collect. The responses are helping us to ensure that DOAJ is up-to-date and meets the needs of its users. We will remove some links, we will remove some questions, and we are considering better support for some metadata elements. We will retire the DOAJ Seal at the end of February 2025. This is Part Two of a two-part blog post. Go to Part One....

A significant finding from the survey is that the Seal is widely misunderstood and misused by the community and this confirms our concerns that it is no longer serving its original purpose.

The Seal was introduced in 2014 to encourage journals to strive for best practices centred on content findability and usability. Initially, it was highly effective, with the criteria pushing journals to engage with publishing best practices: ...

By 2015, it had become apparent that the Seal was also causing confusion. We heard of publishers and editors who didn’t want to submit a journal application until their journal was compliant for the Seal. Furthermore, we had unintentionally created a journal ranking system, which goes against our mission of giving equal visibility to all journals regardless of discipline, geography and language. Over time, due to the nature of the criteria, it became clear the Seal was easier to achieve for better-resourced journals: as of today, only 1683 (7.9%) journals have the Seal, and of those, 88% come from the economic North and larger commercial publishers.* The results from the survey showed that the community associates the Seal with high editorial quality and prestige and some even use the Seal as a yardstick of whether they should access or recommend the journal or not...."