2014 has had a promising start. After relaunching the new DOAJ site in December 2013, IS4OA has signed a further 2 development agreements with its new technology partner, Cottage Labs. While our first priority is to reinstate many of the features that were used daily by DOAJ publishers and users alike, we have also had the chance to layout development priorities for DOAJ to make sure it remains useful and at the heart of quality of open access publishing. For example, the clear need for better quality markers in open access publishing led IS4OA, with the help of DOAJ’s advisory board, to implement a hugely extended Application form and seek out a network of voluntary editors to help process applications.

IS4OA is now well positioned, through its partnership with Cottage Labs, to develop DOAJ features that the community is asking for: an API, OpenURL, the ability to collect metadata from PubMed.

We will be posting more details as the year progresses but most of the DOAJ updates can be found on their Twitter account: @doajplus

IS4OA is pleased to announce that from May 1st 2014, it will adopt the Open Citations Corpus (OCC) as one of the academic Open Access services that it supports, providing it with an organisational structure within which it can attain financial sustainability and growth.

Read the press release in full.

In December 2013, DOAJ parted ways with SemperTool and started work with a new technology partner, Cottage Labs LLP. They are helping us to build a new, improved DOAJ on an open source platform.

The DOAJ Team has been reduced accordingly:

Lars Bjørnshauge – Managing Director
Rikard Zeylon – Managing Editor
Sonja Brage – Managing Editor
Dominic (Dom) Mitchell – Community Manager

We are delighted to announce that Lars Bjørnshauge, one of our founding Directors, has been elected to the OASPA Board. It is fitting recognition for the important work that Lars has done for the open access community, not only through the DOAJ, but through his involvement with other academic and library organisations as well.

Lars founded the DOAJ in 2003, with the support and assistance of Lund University and SPARC. 10 years later, DOAJ is still at the heart of the open access community. Lars said: “I am very happy to elected to the OASPA board. I believe this shows a good appreciation of the work that I and the DOAJ team are doing for open access publishing. I am very much looking forward to working with the OASPA group of committed open access publishers.”

Congratulations Lars!

Yesterday, at the OASPA 2013 conference in Riga, Lars presented an overview and an update of DOAJ and its progress to date. His talk also gave details on the work that DOAJ has committed to undertake for the rest of 2103.

His slides are now available on DOAJ’s slideshare account:

www.slideshare.net/doaj/doaj-presentation-oaspariga2013

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