This weekend we added over 8,000 current, freely readable research journals to our extended shelves, thanks to metadata provided by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). DOAJ is, in its own words, "a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals." The directory was recently renovated, a process that included weeding out a few thousand low-quality, marginal, or defunct journals under new quality criteria. Those that remain are likely to be of interest to readers here.
We expect to update our DOAJ extended shelves listings about once a month, using scripts that should minimize duplication with our own curated listings, and automatically infer appropriate Library of Congress Subject Headings from the keywords and general subject categories in DOAJ's metadata files. We're also happy to make our own curated catalog entries for any open access journal (in DOAJ or not) that meets our listing criteria at readers' request. When we do that, we'll provide more detailed cataloging, and also give the journal a more stable URI for its catalog page here.
This new content represents just one part of our overall plans to make free serial content-- not just of current open access journals, but also of other serials with current and historic free issues -- more easily discoverable online. For more information on this, see my blog post on sharing journals freely online.
John Mark Ockerbloom, Editor
