Hello everybody and it's a real pleasure to be here today to be speaking to you about the role of DOAJ in supporting journals in Ukraine. I hope you're all familiar with our work, but if you're not then the DOAJ is a unique index of diverse peer reviewed open access journals

and behind that we're an organisation with a broader mission to support the profile, visibility and impact of all quality journals globally and that's wherever in the world they're from, whichever discipline and whichever language they're publishing in.

Our criteria, all journals need to apply to be indexed within the DOAJ and they're evaluated against our criteria and that means that our criteria are now seen as a global gold standard for open access publishing

and our core services and our metadata are divided completely free of charge to everyone. This is the current state of play with the index. We've just hit 21,000 journals in the index, which we are very proud of

and we have a very diverse range of languages and countries in the index. And you can see here the overview of publishers and published countries that we have within the index. That really illustrates that high number I showed just now and I will drill down into the Ukrainian titles in just a while.

The other thing I wanted to mention was that 64% of the journals in DOAJ do not charge APC. So there is a myth that open access means APC and that's really, really not the case if you look at the figures of the journal in DOAJ.

I want to talk a little bit more about the editorial process that we have at DOAJ and how that supports or how that enables quality assurance of Ukrainian journals.

This is a process that all journals go through when they apply to be indexed in DOAJ. The journalist must apply and complete an application. Our triage team then do some initial checks. We then send the journal out to an independent review by our editorial teams.

A final decision is taken by a managing editor as to whether the journal should be indexed or not. And then we provide feedback on unsuccessful publications to the publisher or the editor. I mentioned that our evaluation criteria are now seen as a gold standard for open access publishing.

They are a broad set of criteria which have been developed and extended over the years. They cover, as you would expect, open access but also detail, making sure that the journal understands and uses copyright and licensing effectively.

We require transparency around the editorial board and its membership, the peer review processes and the journal ownership. We expect the journal to meet editorial and publishing standards as well as a minimum level of accessibility and functionality.

And we also look at the operations of the journal and make sure that there is editorial independence and that they're transparent about their business model. We also take note of archiving as well. And just to give you some indication of the numbers of journals that we accept, I

was interested to hear the figures from Elsevier that they accept one in four articles globally. And it's the same figure for journals and DOAJ, so we accept really one in four of the journals that apply to us. So we receive a very high number of journals each year that are managed by our core team and by our volunteers.

That's how we provide quality assurance for journals, but I also want to talk about how DOAJ can then improve discoverability and impact.

And we've heard again from both Elsevier and Web of Science how DOAJ data is used within those services. So our metadata is used within DOAJ, of course, but within Scopus, within Web of Science and other services like OpenALIC.

And what we're proud of, I think, is that we index some of the smaller journals, so journals from societies and university presses, those from languages which are underrepresented in other databases, and diamond and S2O journals.

And through DOAJ, we're able to make them much more visible to the world. We've run a survey recently last year with journals that had recently been indexed in the DOAJ, and this is what they told us that the benefits were of being indexed.

They felt that they had a more enhanced reputation, that they were getting more submissions. I mean, a whole range of benefits from being indexed with us. And now I want to drill down on the data for Ukraine, and I can't take credit for this.

The credit needs to go to some of my DOAJ team members and volunteers, including Natalia, who's just spoken for the work they've done to compile this data, which is in an article that they've just submitted for publication.

So we have a high number of Ukrainian journals in DOAJ, nearly 460, and a large proportion of which do not charge any fees at all.

And actually, Ukraine is the country with the 12th highest number of journals in DOAJ, which I think is very impressive given its size. And DOAJ-indexed journals constitute about a quarter of journals in the Ukrainian professional publications list.

Something else we're very proud of is that DOAJ, there's a target for indexing of journals within DOAJ in the National Open Science Plan, and that's very important for us, and we're very proud to have been included in the Open Science Plan.

We talked a little bit about, Natalia talked about diamond journals and how they are more vulnerable, they're smaller, and they have more resource requirements than some of the larger commercial journals.

So I thought it was important to talk a little bit about the diamond journals within DOAJ and some of their characteristics. As you might expect, we have a high number of diamond journals from the humanities and social sciences,

but I was also really pleasantly surprised to see that there were high numbers across the natural sciences, engineering and technology, and the medical sciences too. If we look at the NOFI journals by the publisher type as well, there are perhaps no surprises there, that mainly they come from research institutions, so from universities and departments.

So talking about the support that we offer to Ukrainian journals, our enhanced support really started in 2022

when we participated in the Suez project with a number of other actors within scholarly communications. We initially offered support to 60 journals who expressed interest in being indexed within DOAJ,

and we also offered webinars on DOAJ indexing, copyright and licensing as part of the summer school in Ukraine, and that was managed by Irina Kuchma. I'll be very pleased about that. Following on from that, we have developed a dedicated Ukrainian editorial team

to really fast track the number of journals that we are able to accept from Ukraine and to really enhance standards of journals within Ukraine. So this is a small team, there are currently three members, and it's managed by Irina Zimba,

and she's paid via a partnership between DOAJ and IBL-PAN in Poland. And we also have two associate editors, including Natalia, who support that work. The team conduct pre-evaluation checks against our criteria to see whether journals are ready to be DOAJ indexed.

If not, then they will go back and provide individual help to journals on policies and practices, perhaps around copyright and licensing, whatever it might be, to enable them to achieve indexing.

And we're very pleased that we've added 90 journals from Ukraine to the index since early 2022. Here's a comment from Natalia around the review process and the benefits that it has for journals

in helping them to improve their policies and their practices. So as I said before, we reject the number of journals, and Natalia and Irina and the team, as they see journals coming in from Ukraine, they've been able to do an assessment of the kinds of challenges

that they see Ukrainian journals facing. Some of them are in common with many other journals, the applications that we see arriving in DOAJ, so issues around open access policies, understanding licensing and copyright, making sure there's a rigorous peer review process.

But there are a few issues which are not unique to Ukraine, but that we have seen that are common here. One is a requirement for PhD students to submit a supervisor's review alongside their manuscript

when they are submitting an article to a journal. Another one is the issue of endogeny, where a high proportion of articles are authored by editorial members. Within DOAJ, we have a limit of 25%, because we think that's a limit in terms of good practice.

And perhaps understandably, there can be a shortage of manuscripts being submitted given the current situation, which makes it difficult for journals to meet the minimum content requirement for DOAJ.

DOAJ has had an ambassador program which we launched back in 2016. This was really to generate more applications and get more journals indexed from across the world. And we have ambassadors in many countries. We did have a high number of countries,

but we just reviewed that program and reduced the number of countries that we are covering now. So I think it's about 14 at the moment. We're hoping to expand that again as we move into the focus on lower and middle-income countries.

So our ambassadors are volunteers. They work within their local communities to promote journal quality and importance of standards. They advocate for open access and for DOAJ, and they support DOAJ indexing for local journal editors and publishers.

And I'm very pleased to say that as part of our review, the part of the review that we carried out this year, we have decided that we're going to be recruiting an ambassador for Ukraine to focus on supporting and giving enhanced support for those journals in future.

I know that Irina has already mentioned this, and I think she's also put the link in the chat, so I'm very pleased about that. But we have had a very successful partnership this year with the Academy of Science of South Africa,

and Research for Life to run a webinar series to support journals or tell them about DOAJ, give them some coaching in terms of how they can get indexed within DOAJ, and also cover other issues around publication standards and research integrity and ethics.

So this series was held in September and October here in Ukraine, and I know that the link has already been shared in the chat, so please do make use of those webinars if you are interested in being indexed within DOAJ or your journal, getting your journal indexed within DOAJ.

And I just wanted to finish off with some final slides about how to go through that process for if there are people on the call who have journals, who are journal editors,

and would like to see their journal indexed in DOAJ. Our criteria are transparent, and they are available on our web pages at the Guide to Applying. So please do go and have a look at those and think about whether your journal meets those criteria or not.

If you have any questions and need any clarification, please contact our help desk, and I've put the address there. We've got a PDF of application questions that you can share between your editorial board if you want to support each other in filling them in, and the application forms online,

and you just need to do that then, and somebody will be in touch with you about your application. And very, very finally, just one other resource that we launched last year with OASPA,

the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, which is a toolkit for open access journals. It's been developed by the community and a broad range of membership in the editorial board,

and we're working hard to keep the content up to date. It's multilingual, and it covers a wide range of things you might need to know if you're running an open access journal. So how you get started, how you make sure your journal is indexed in the right places, how you develop policies, and all the other things that might be useful.

So please do make use of that. Thank you very much for your attention. I'm looking forward to any comments and questions.