Renewed partnership: DOAJ and Crossref focus on equitable scholarly metadata and global support

Reyhana Mahomed — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We have renewed our partnership with DOAJ to focus on a new set of objectives that reflect both organisations’ commitment to improving sustainable and equitable services and infrastructure. This renewed collaboration focuses on improving the quality of scholarly metadata while expanding support for journals in low- and middle income- countries.

We have worked together since 2021, primarily to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using online technologies, and regional and international networks, partners and communities. This partnership has helped to build local institutional capacity and sustainability within the global scholarly communication ecosystem. A continued partnership also reflects that we have a shared community; currently almost 90% of DOAJ journals are represented in Crossref.

Our renewed collaboration will support:

Article Metadata Enhancements: DOAJ will improve the ingestion, processing, storage, and display of article-level metadata. Improvements include:

Author affiliations and persistent identifiers
Open references
Expanded metadata harvesting

These enhancements are expected to benefit both direct users of DOAJ and downstream discovery, aggregation, and research analytics services that rely on DOAJ metadata.

Ambassador Programme: Our collaboration with DOAJ will support the continued development of DOAJ’s Ambassador programme. This global network of ambassadors primarily based in low- and middle-income countries:

Support journal editors in understanding and applying good practices in open access publishing
Organise and deliver workshops, webinars, and local events
Collaborate with regional partners and policymakers
Raise awareness of DOAJ and publishing standards within local scholarly communities

Crossref’s contribution will support ambassador travel and the organisation of workshops and events.

We value our longstanding collaboration with Crossref. As fellow open scholarly infrastructures, we share a commitment to strengthening the systems that support trusted, global research discovery. This new partnership enables DOAJ to move forward with important work around interoperability. Improving how infrastructures connect and exchange information is a priority for us, and this support helps ensure we can continue to serve the community in line with the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure—with openness, collaboration, and long-term sustainability at the centre.

– Joanna Ball, Managing Director of DOAJ

The collaborations with DOAJ so far only reaffirmed our shared goal to help make the global scholarly communications system more equitable wherever we can. Our joint projects aim to seek out and devise support for resource-constrained journals in multiple ways. DOAJ’s work is essential in helping journals to adopt good practice, while Crossref offers an open infrastructure to ensure all journals can be included and discoverable in the global scholarly record.

– Ginny Hendricks, Chief Program Officer at Crossref

About DOAJ

DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer reviewed journals. DOAJ deploys around one hundred carefully selected volunteers from the community of library and other academic disciplines to assist in curating open access journals. This independent database contains over 20,400 peer-reviewed open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities. DOAJ is financially supported worldwide by libraries, publishers and other like-minded organizations. DOAJ services (including the evaluation of journals) are free for all, and all data provided by DOAJ are harvestable via OAI/PMH and the API. See https://doaj.org/ for more information.

Contact: DOAJ - Joanna Ball, Managing Director - joanna@doaj.org.

About Crossref

Crossref is a non-profit organisation that runs an open infrastructure to link research objects, entities, and actions, creating a lasting and reusable scholarly record that underpins open science. Together with their 24,000 members in 166 countries, Crossref drives metadata exchange and supports nearly 2 billion monthly API queries, facilitating global research communication, for the benefit of society.

Contact: Crossref - Kora Korzec, Director of Community – kkorzec@crossref.org.

DOAJ and Crossref sign agreement to remove barriers to scholarly publishing for all

Ginny Hendricks — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

22 June 2021, London, UK and Boston, MA, USA — The future of global open access publishing received a boost today with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Crossref. The MOU formalizes an already strong partnership between the two organisations and furthers their shared pursuit of an open scholarly communications ecosystem that is inclusive of emerging publishing communities.

Both organisations aim to encourage the dissemination and use of scholarly research using open infrastructure, online technologies, regional and international networks, and community partners - all supporting local institutional capacity and sustainability around the world.

“DOAJ is delighted to be formalizing today’s agreement with Crossref, an organisation we are already closely aligned with. Together we stand a greater chance of encouraging an open, fair, and fully inclusive future for scholarly publishing,” said Lars Bjørnshauge, DOAJ Founder and Managing Director.

The agreement will enable content from journals indexed on DOAJ to be more easily identified through the use of Crossref metadata. The MOU also covers the exchange of a variety of services and information and greater coordination of technical and strategic requirements between DOAJ and Crossref. Included too is the development of outreach and training materials, coordination of service and feature development, as well as research studies to explore the overlaps and gaps in the journals and metadata covered by each organisation.

“As academic-led journals continue to grow in number and geographic reach, it’s important we support this community more effectively. Our partnership with DOAJ means we can share strategies, data, and resources in order to lower barriers for emerging publishers around the world,” said Ginny Hendricks, Crossref’s Director of Member & Community Outreach.

About DOAJ

DOAJ is a community curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer reviewed journals. DOAJ deploys more than one hundred carefully selected volunteers from among the community of library and other academic disciplines to assist in the curation of open access journals. This independent database contains over 15,000 peer-reviewed open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities. DOAJ is financially supported worldwide by libraries, publishers and other like-minded organisations. DOAJ services (including the evaluation of journals) are free for all, and all data provided by DOAJ are harvestable via OAI/PMH and the API. See doaj.org for more information.

About Crossref

Crossref makes research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse. We’re a not-for-profit membership organisation that exists to make scholarly communications better. We rally the community; tag and share metadata; run an open infrastructure; play with technology; and make tools and services—all to help put research in context. Visit crossref.org for further information.

Please contact louise@doaj.org or feedback@crossref.org with any questions.

DOAJ on Crossref

Renewed partnership: DOAJ and Crossref focus on equitable scholarly metadata and global support

About DOAJ

About Crossref

DOAJ and Crossref sign agreement to remove barriers to scholarly publishing for all

About DOAJ

About Crossref