The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is offering a new service. (I forwarded the announcement to SOAF on Saturday but forgot to blog the news.) The new "for authors" service lets authors look up journals by keywords and find both full OA journals and hybrid OA journals. Even better, users can filter the results and choose to look only at the no-fee journals or the fee-based journals.
Comment. This is a very useful new service. Authors looking for journals that will offer OA to their articles will want to scan both the full and hybrid OA journals.
It appears that only full OA journals, and no hybrids, appear in the main directory of OA journals. I only tested it on a handful of hybrids, but the pattern seems to hold. If true, this was the right decision. Readers looking for OA literature will be more interested in full OA journals than hybrids; and if they want to look at the hybrids, they can use the new "for authors" service.
I just hope the DOAJ will stop calling the fee-based journals "author pays" journals. Given the frequent availability of fee waivers and sponsors to pay on behalf of authors, the term "author pays" is false and misleading.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/16/2006 08:28:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
