Directive Publications is not listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Our DOAJ application is under way, not granted. We meet DOAJ's requirements on licensing, copyright terms, fee disclosure and metadata. We are not enrolled in a preservation archive — a Seal criterion DOAJ asks applicants about, not a bar to listing. Every criterion and its evidence follows.
What DOAJ assesses, and what it does not
DOAJ is an independent, community-curated index of open access journals that admits a title only after checking it against a published set of criteria. Assessment is carried out by people, against evidence on the journal's own website, not by algorithm and not by reputation.
Two things about DOAJ are worth knowing before you search it. DOAJ indexes journals, not publishers, so there is no publisher record to find; a publisher name in the search box matches the publisher field on each journal record and returns that publisher's listed journals — searching ours returns nothing, because none of our journals is listed. DOAJ also assesses practice and transparency: whether a journal states what it does, publishes the terms and follows them. DOAJ does not assess the scientific merit of individual papers.
The application covers these areas. Some are conditions of listing; preservation, persistent identifiers and unrestricted copyright retention are recorded but count towards the DOAJ Seal below rather than deciding admission:
- Open access status and the article licence.
- Copyright terms, including whether authors keep copyright.
- The peer review type, described publicly before submission.
- A named editorial board with affiliations.
- All author-facing charges disclosed before submission.
- Long-term digital preservation arrangements.
- Persistent identifiers and machine-readable article metadata.
- A registered ISSN matching the journal title.
- Publication ethics, misconduct handling and similarity screening.
- A minimum recent research output.
The DOAJ Seal is a separate, higher tier awarded to some listed journals. It asks for preservation with an archiving agency, persistent identifiers, regular metadata supply to DOAJ, a CC BY, CC BY-SA or CC BY-NC licence, unrestricted copyright retention and a registered deposit policy. A journal can be listed without the Seal.
Why a DOAJ record answers a predatory accusation better than a denial does
An accusation of predatory publishing asks the publisher to prove a negative about its own motives, and nothing it says about itself settles that. A DOAJ record inverts the problem: it is a third-party judgement, made against criteria the reader can look up and recorded in a public database libraries and funders already read, which is why it carries weight where a badge on a website does not. It cuts both ways, and we would rather say so. Absence from DOAJ is not evidence of misconduct, and presence is not a quality guarantee, because DOAJ certifies transparent practice rather than sound science.
Where our DOAJ application stands, criterion by criterion
The third column exists so you need not take the second on trust.
| What DOAJ looks for | Our current position | Evidence you can verify |
|---|---|---|
| Open access with an explicit licence | Met on the site. Every article is open access under CC BY 4.0 by default, with the licence named on the article page. Licence metadata is in some, not all, Crossref deposits. | Any article page; the licence field in its Crossref record, where deposited |
| Authors retain copyright | Met. Authors retain copyright; we do not require a transfer as a condition of publication. | The copyright page |
| Peer review type declared and described | Met. Double-blind review; at least two independent expert reviewers sought per research manuscript; the handling editor decides; appeals go to the Editor-in-Chief. | The peer review page |
| Editorial board named, with affiliations | Partly met. Board members are named with affiliations on each journal's board page. Verification against ORCID, ROR and OpenAlex is in progress, not complete. | Each journal's board page; look up any member's ORCID record |
| All charges disclosed before submission | Met. Submission is free. An article processing charge is payable only if a manuscript is formally accepted after peer review. Charging terms, refunds and three waiver routes are published on the linked pages. | Publication charges, waiver policy, refund policy |
| Long-term digital preservation (a Seal criterion recorded on the application, not a condition of listing) | Not met. We are not enrolled in a third-party preservation archive; our preservation policy says so. | The preservation policy |
| Persistent article identifiers | Met. We are a Crossref member and register a DOI under prefix 10.52338 for every article. | https://api.crossref.org/prefixes/10.52338/works |
| Machine-readable metadata | Met. Articles are produced as JATS XML, exposed over OAI-PMH, and appear in OpenAlex and Google Scholar. | An article's JATS XML; the same DOI in OpenAlex |
| Ethics, misconduct and screening policies | Met. Our editorial policies align with COPE Core Practices and similarity screening runs on submissions. We do not claim COPE membership, which DOAJ records separately and does not require. | Publication ethics, research integrity, plagiarism policy |
| Registered ISSN matching the title | In progress. Each journal displays its ISSN. We are confirming every register entry matches the journal title exactly; a mismatch alone is grounds for rejection. | The journal home page; the same ISSN in the ISSN Portal |
Three DOAJ criteria examined: preservation, the board and metadata
Preservation is a real gap, though not a bar to listing
Digital preservation is where we are weakest. DOAJ asks every applicant which service preserves its content, and we have to answer that none does. That answer is not a bar to listing — DOAJ lists thousands of journals that record no preservation service, and preservation is a Seal criterion rather than a condition of admission — but it is a real gap, and we will not present it as a formality. Our articles sit on our own infrastructure; their metadata and DOIs are held by Crossref, so the bibliographic record survives independently of us. The article files are not deposited with a preservation archive, and we will not name one we have not joined.
Editorial board verification is in progress
Every board member is published with a name and an affiliation. What is incomplete is the verification pass behind those names: matching each member to an ORCID record, each affiliation to a ROR identifier and each publication history to OpenAlex, with recorded consent to appear. A partly verified board should be presented as one.
Metadata is where a reader can test us hardest
A DOI under a registered prefix, JATS XML, an OAI-PMH endpoint and OpenAlex records let a library discover and harvest an article without asking us for anything. The deposits are not uniform: licence fields are missing from some and author ORCID identifiers from most, and we would rather you found that in the API than take our word for it. We are backfilling both. Metadata is expensive to fake and cheap to test from outside.
What "under way" means for our DOAJ application, and what it does not
Under way means we are closing the remaining criteria and assembling the evidence DOAJ asks for. It does not mean a decision is pending, expected or imminent, and we will not put a date on it. DOAJ sets its own queue and its own standard.
We will change this page when the position changes, in either direction. We intend to publish a refusal too, with the reason given. A publisher that reports only flattering outcomes has made its disclosures worthless.
How to check every line of the DOAJ readiness table yourself
- Search DOAJ for a journal title, and for the publisher name as well: publisher is a searchable field on every journal record, so a publisher with listed journals will surface them.
- Take any published DOI and resolve it. Check that it lands on the article, and that the article page names its licence.
- Query
https://api.crossref.org/prefixes/10.52338/worksand read the deposited metadata: titles, authors, dates and, where we have deposited it, the licence. Author ORCID identifiers are almost entirely absent from our older deposits, and licence metadata is missing from a substantial minority. - Look the same DOI up in OpenAlex. A record there was harvested from the deposit, not asserted by us.
- Read the fee pages before you submit. Confirm the charge, when it becomes payable and the waiver routes are all stated before submission, not after acceptance.
- Open the preservation policy and see whether it names an archive. Ours does not, and says so.
- Pick three editorial board members and look them up in ORCID and their institution's own directory. A board that cannot be found is the finding.
Run the seven checks on a journal you already trust, then on us. None depends on a badge, a logo or a list.
Our policy pages carry the detail behind each row: open access, copyright, publication charges, fee waivers and the preservation policy. If you are assessing us or anyone else, read what a DOI is and what it guarantees for the identifier that carries every record in that table, what impact factor, CiteScore and h-index really mean for the metrics publishers quote, and how to identify a predatory journal for the checks that do not depend on any single index.