DOAJ celebrates 10 years at the heart of Open Access

It is now 10 years since a new initiative was set in motion: The Directory of Open Access Journals is the result of a unique venture between Lund University Libraries, supported by the Information Program of the Open Society Institute (http://www.osi.hu/infoprogram/), along with SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, (http://sparceurope.org). Back in February 2003, the then Program Manager of the Open Access Program at the Open Society Foundations, Melissa Hagemann said, somewhat prophetically, 'Open access journals can compete with traditional subscription-based journals if librarians and users are made aware of these titles, and the Directory of Open Access Journals is the way to publicise their existence.' Happily, she was right and today, DOAJ sits at the very heart of open access scholarly content on the web. Today, Melissa told us that the 'Directory [has] become a major reference tool for the scholarly communications community. Back in 2002, when OSF helped to define OA, we thought that it wasn't enough to simply call for the development of OA journals, but we knew that there had to be a guide or directory where users could find and access these open resources. Thus we were pleased to support the development of the DOAJ and have been proud to see that it is now a resource used by libraries throughout the world.' Today, DOAJ receives over 12 million page requests a month, lists journals in 51 different languages, from 119 countries and is used the whole world over ... Over the years, open access journals have developed rapidly and so have the demands and expectations of the online communities consuming the information published. DOAJ has already started strategic partnerships to carry it through the next 10 years: a new home under the management of Infrastructure Services for Open Access (www.is4oa.org), a new platform implemented by SemperTool (www.sempertool.dk) and new, tighter criteria for including journals in DOAJ.  DOAJ’s various stakeholders – researchers, funders, universities, libraries, and users - all have demands and expectations of the DOAJ service and thus the next ten years will see continued development of services so that DOAJ can strive to meet and exceed expectations ..."