At Clarivate, we are proud to have played a pivotal role in enhancing the accuracy of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) metadata through our support of their OAI-PMH feed improvement. This enhancement, which introduces a delete flag to signal when a journal and its article metadata have been withdrawn from DOAJ, marks a significant step forward in ensuring the reliability and precision of metadata used across various platforms.
Our collaboration with DOAJ underscores our commitment to advancing the quality of scholarly communication. By funding this crucial improvement, we have helped DOAJ address a long-standing need, ensuring that systems consuming their data are always up-to-date. This enhancement eliminates the need for complete overwrites of DOAJ metadata holdings, significantly improving efficiency for all users.
DOAJ’s tradition of relying on publishers to voluntarily provide metadata has been a cornerstone of their service. This metadata, freely available under a CC BY-SA license with article metadata rights waived under a CC0 waiver, is essential for the research community. It is used by major search engines, discovery services, library portals, AI solutions like ChatGPT, and scholarly communication tools like journal finders.
Dominic Mitchell, Deputy Director of DOAJ, highlighted the positive impact of this enhancement: “The feedback we have received from the discovery and aggregator community about this enhancement has been fantastic. We are delighted that Clarivate agreed to finance this small but much-needed improvement. It’s been on our To Do list since we migrated to our current platform in 2013, and it feels great to finally knock it off the list!”
This enhancement is a testament to the power of collaboration in driving innovation and improving the research ecosystem. DOAJ encourages other organizations to consider sponsoring specific enhancements or features to further support the scholarly community.
Read more information in the DOAJ Press Release.
