Re: Lund University Establishes Directory Of Open Access Journals

[Traugott.Koch _at__ ub2.lu.se]

This message is forwarded on behalf of Sara Kjellberg, Lund University 
Libraries, Head Office.

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Dear list-members,
We have with interest taken part of the discussion on your 'inetbib' mailing
list about the difference between DOAJ (http://www.doaj.org) and EZB. One of
my colleagues is a list-member and forwarded the discussion to us in the DOAJ
project. 

We have of course looked at EZB before we started our project and are
impressed by this extensive journal directory. But we hope and believe that
we are not reinventing the wheel with the Directory of Open Access Journals,
DOAJ. We base that belief on that DOAJ will have a much narrower scope and
somewhat different aims than EZB. The idea we have for DOAJ is to offer
scholarly, quality-controlled Open Access Journals only, through one
interface, and not to mix it with other types of periodicals. Which also
Bernd-Christoph Kaemper points out in his message. 

The main aim of DOAJ is to support the growing movement of alternative
publishing of primary research. This is done  by increasing the visibility
and ease of use of open access journals, thereby promoting their increased
usage and impact. If EZB is a very good "inclusive" service with a wide
coverage over the whole spectrum of periodicals, DOAJ intends to become a
very good "exclusive" service within it´s clearly defined aim and scope. In
the second phase of the project we will include search at article level in
the journals within the directory.

Mr Kaemper also asks how the registration of the journals should be done if
the directory also will be used as a "political tool" in the changing
scholarly communication, considering that the project is sponsored by SPARC
(http://www.arl.org/sparc/) and OSI-Budapest (http://www.osi.hu/). Is it
only the owner of the journal who can "sign" our selection criteria and say
that they meet them and then send information to be included in the
directory? We would answer no on that question since we mean that everybody
will have the opportunity to suggest a journal for inclusion in the directory.
We will use our selection criteria as a quality control for the resources
when we catalog them and also maintain the directory, exactly as we do when
we make selections for other types of collections.

Why have we then chosen not to use the whole BOAI definition of Open
Access? This is because we think that the definition is a bit ahead of it´s
time. We think that many of the journals out there could not manage without 
some technical barriers at this point. We of course would like that the
scenario where the BOAI definition were used for every Open Access Journal
would be true but we think that we have to be somewhat pragmatic at the
moment. Maybe we have misinterpreted something here? Thank you for
bringing it up, maybe we should explain this a bit better in our aim &
scope texts.

Of course we are interested in investigating possible ways of cooperation
with EZB and others. Record-sharing is one obvious area of interest. We will
offer the possibility to harvest our database with OAI-PMH. In general our
service will build on standard formats and solutions allowing datasharing
and combined usage of different services. We have got a lot of response
after we did distribute our press-release this Friday. About 70 journals have 
been suggested through the form at our site and a lot of people has contacted 
us with information about subject specific lists of open access journals.

Since I am not a list-member I hope you can contact me at my regular email
address: sara.kjellberg _at__ lub.lu.se if you have any further questions or
comments.

greetings from Sweden,
/Sara Kjellberg

......................................
Sara Kjellberg
Lund University Libraries, Head Office
P.O.Box 134, SE-221 00 LUND, Sweden
Telephone: + 46 46 222 93 68
Telefax + 46 46 222 36 82
Email: sara.kjellberg _at__ lub.lu.se
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-- 
**ECDL 2003: Submissions now welcome up to 10 March 2003**

Programme Chair of ECDL 2003 (http://www.ecdl2003.org), the 
Seventh European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology 
for Digital Libraries, August 17-22, 2003, Trondheim, Norway 

+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| TRAUGOTT KOCH, Senior librarian, Digital Library Scientist  
| NETLAB, Knowledge Technologies Group. Lund Univ. Libraries 
| P.O. Box 134.  S-221 00  Lund, Sweden                       
| Tel: int+46 46 2229233    Fax: int+46 46 2223682            
| E-mail: traugott.koch _at__ lub.lu.se                             
| Personal homepage: http://www.lub.lu.se/koch.html           
+-------------------------------------------------------------+