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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 practices 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.

Digital preservation (Archiving policy)
- The journal content must be continuously deposited in one of these archives:
  - any archiving agency included in Keepers Registry
  - Internet Archive
  - PubMed Central
Self-archiving (Repository 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.
Persistent article identifiers (Unique identifiers)
- Articles must use persistent article identifiers. DOI, ARK or Handle are the most commonly used.
- All persistent links must resolve correctly.
Metadata supply to DOAJ
- Article metadata must be uploaded to DOAJ regularly.
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
License information in articles
- Creative Commons licensing information must be displayed in all full-text article formats.
Copyright and publishing rights
- Authors must retain unrestricted copyright and all publishing rights when publishing under any license permitted by the journal.

In other languages

French - hosted by Érudit
Portuguese - hosted by Editora Cubo

Version history

This is Version 1 of our Seal criteria.