Criteria for Open Access and Publishing

This article gives an overview of the history and current status of the DOAJ. After a brief historical overview, DOAJ policies regarding open access, intellectual property rights and questionable publishers are explained in detail. The larger part of this article is a much requested explanation on how DOAJ uses its new set of criteria for the evaluation of open access journals and the rationale behind choosing the seven extra criteria that qualify for the DOAJ Seal. A final section is devoted to the extended possibilities that DOAJ will be offering shortly to scholars and publishers for searching the database and for uploading metadata. The result is a renewed DOAJ that offers a more robust platform, a more stable database and enhanced services to allow the upload and collection of metadata.