Apply

The DOAJ Seal

The DOAJ Seal is awarded to journals that demonstrate best practice in open access publishing. Around 10% of journals indexed in DOAJ have been awarded the Seal.

Journals do not need to meet the Seal criteria to be accepted into DOAJ.

There are seven criteria which a journal must meet to be eligible for the DOAJ Seal. These relate to best practice in long term preservation, use of persistent identifiers, discoverability, reuse policies and authors' rights.

Criteria

All seven criteria must be met for a journal to be awarded the Seal. Failure to maintain the best practice and standards described in these criteria may lead to removal of the Seal.

  1. Digital preservation
    • The journal content must be continuously deposited in one of these archives:
      • any archiving agency included in Keepers Registry
      • Internet Archive
      • PubMed Central
  2. Persistent article identifiers
    • Articles must use persistent article identifiers. DOI, ARK or Handle are the most commonly used.
    • All persistent links must resolve correctly.
  3. Metadata supply to DOAJ
    • Article metadata must be uploaded to DOAJ regularly.
  4. License type
    • The journal must permit the use of a Creative Commons license that allows the creation of derivative products.
      • CC BY
      • CC BY-SA
      • CC BY-NC
      • CC BY-NC-SA
  5. License information in articles
    • Creative Commons licensing information must be displayed in all full-text article formats.
  6. Copyright and publishing rights
    • Authors must retain unrestricted copyright and all publishing rights when publishing under any license permitted by the journal.
  7. Self-archiving policy
    • Authors must be permitted to deposit all versions of their paper in an institutional or subject repository.
      • Preprint
      • Author's Accepted Manuscript
      • Published article (Version of Record)
    • An embargo may not be applied.