Pilot Funding Cycle
In late 2017, SCOSS launched our pilot funding cycle with the presentation of two services for funding: SHERPA/RoMEO and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Since then, 2,483,889 euros have been pledged by more than 200 institutions: 917,379 euros for SHERPA/RoMEO and 1,156,651 for DOAJ.
DOAJ is primarily (but not only) a list of peer-reviewed open access journals covering all disciplines and more than 50 languages. Journals are listed after a detailed evaluation based on the application from journals and their publishers. DOAJ receives around 500 applications per month, with a rejection rate of around 50%. Evaluation is free of charge, like all other DOAJ services. DOAJ also provides article metadata (currently 70% of journals upload article metadata) for download and harvesting. Currently DOAJ lists nearly 9.400 journals and 2.500.000 article metadata records are available. The data DOAJ provides are harvested and downloaded with an API and integrated in all major discovery services, indexing databases etc.
DOAJ has become the reference point for good open access journals. DOAJ serves research funders and managers, universities, libraries, researchers, students and the public as well as publishers. DOAJ is an important source for research in scholarly publishing as well.
Sherpa RoMEO is an online service that aggregates and analyses publisher open access policies from around the world. Additionally, they provide summaries of self-archiving permissions and conditions of rights given to authors on a journal-by-journal basis. This service is available free of charge at the point of use and is used worldwide. It is a respected and authoritative source for the interpretation of publishers’ copyright transfer agreements (CTAs), as they relate to open access archiving.
Sherpa RoMEO is widely considered to be an essential part of the open access environment in giving information and guidance to depositors who wish to make material available on an open access basis, whether in subject repositories, central archives, institutional repositories or otherwise.
Sherpa RoMEO serves the following stakeholder groups: Repository Managers and Administrators, Academic Authors and Researchers, Research Managers, Open Access Software Developers and Publishers.