A boost in open scholarly communication with MOU between DOAJ and CrossRef

 

      Taking Open Access and Scholarly Communications to the next level, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Crossref  signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on June 22, 2021.

The agreement will enable: 

• Rapid and easy discovery of contents of the journals indexed in DOAJ through the use of CrossRef metadata.

• Exchange of services and information on various issues of technical and strategic matters between both organizations.

• Coordination in developing training materials, new services and features.

• New research to find out practical and technical issues in journals and metadata covered by each organization.

• Sharing strategies, data, and resources in order to lower barriers for emerging publishers across the world.

• Encourage an open, fair, and fully inclusive future for scholarly communication.

Scholarly communication 

 
Scholarly communication is the system through which research findings and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the the research community, and preserved for future use. Common methods of scholarly communication are publishing research papers/articles, book reviews, primarily in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, and books. Besides papers/ articles, book reviews, the other textual formats of communicating information are Preprints, working papers, reports, encyclopedias, dictionaries, sound, and video recordings, data visualization formats, blogs, and discussion forums, etc.

 

Open Scholarly communications:

The word “Open” in open scholarly communication denotes the open-access to scholarly communication. The knowledge which is open to all for free without any restrictions. It is available to the wider scholarly community to use for the sustainable development of society.

“Open Access in Scholarly Communications is opening up the research process for quicker dissemination of research findings and rapid discovery by making scholarly information available online, free and unrestricted.” (https://www.rwu.edu/library/help-and-services/)

It is the process of publishing and sharing the research findings of researchers to be available to the wider research community and beyond that. The aim is to contribute to the sustainable development of society by keeping close relationships between teaching and research and through the pursuit, dissemination, and application of knowledge.

 

About DOAJ and CrossRef

Both organizations walk on the same aim of encouraging global open access publishing and focusing on the emerging publishers. They aim to promote the access, availability, and use of scholarly research findings through International networks, open-access community partners, online technologies, and using the open infrastructure.

DOAJ is a community-driven database of over 15 000 peer-reviewed open access journals from all the countries and in all languages covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts, and humanities.

With a firm commitment to open access and the infrastructure that supports open access, Many libraries, publishers, and other like-minded organizations financially support DOAJ. 

CrossRef is a community-driven, not-for-profit membership organization that aims to make scholarly communication better. Crossref is registered as Publishers International Linking Association, Inc. (PILA) in New York, USA.

The organization operates a community governed, shared, and open infrastructure that changes from time to time according to the changing needs. They are continuously experimenting with technology to solve the problems of members for the betterment of communicating knowledge.

CrossRef structure, process, and share metadata to reveal the relationship between research outputs.

 “Crossref makes research outputs easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse.” (CrossRef) 

According to Polina Grinbaum, PLOS

“CrossRef metadata is to link references on our journal platforms, pull citation statistics for our Article-Level Metrics, and ensure we are publishing unique science. Crossref metadata is vital to our everyday operations and the discovery of the research we publish.”(https://www.crossref.org/services/metadata-retrieval/user-stories/)

As academic journals are growing more and new publishers are emerging. This MOU will make open scholarly communication better with the shared services, technologies, the infrastructure of both organizations.

 

 

References:

• 1.     https://blog.doaj.org/2021/06/22/doaj
• 2.     https://doaj.org/
• 3.     https://www.crossref.org/
• 4.     https://guides.lib.unc.edu/open-access-and-scholarly-communications
• 5.     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholarly_communication