Subject: DOAJ phase 2 - press release

June 3rd 2004

For immediate release:

LUND UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES LAUNCHES PHASE 2 Of THE DIRECTORY OF OPEN ACCESS
JOURNALS - NOW WITH ARTICLE LEVEL SEARCH

Lund, Sweden - Lund University Libraries today launches the phase 2 of the
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ, http://www.doaj.org). The new
version of DOAJ now includes records at article level and a search
functionality allowing users to search articles in potentially all Open
Access Journals.

The directory now contains information about more than 1100 open access
journals, i.e. quality controlled scientific and scholarly electronic
journals that are freely available on the web. As of today 270 of the 1100
journals are searchable on article level and both numbers are growing.
Researchers can now search almost 46.000 articles through the Directory of
Open Access Journals and be sure to get access to the articles.

"As a dynamic inventory of open-access journals, DOAJ has already
succeeded in demonstrating the broad and growing adoption of open access
and has enabled libraries to systematically present open-access journals
to their users," said Rick Johnson, director of SPARC. "Now, by adding
article-level records, DOAJ is taking an important next step that will
further expand use of articles published in open-access journals. SPARC is
proud to support this ground-breaking work."

"The DOAJ provides a platform for open access journals to gain greater
visibility and thereby increase their readership" said Melissa Hagemann,
Program Manager, Open Society Institute.  Libraries throughout the world
have thus far been able to add 1,100 peer-reviewed titles to their
collections, and no where is this more important than to libraries in the
developing world, where access to journals is limited due to the high cost
of most titles.  With today's launch of phase 2 of the Directory,
researchers will now be able to search, and have direct access to, the
thousands of articles included within the DOAJ.  OSI is pleased to partner
w/Lund University Libraries and SPARC on this innovative project."

"With this new article level search functionality we have created an
incentive for owners of Open Access journals to submit article level data
to the DOAJ in order to further increase the visibility, reputation and
impact of their journals", said Lotte Jorgensen, Project Coordinator for
the DOAJ.

The goal of the Directory of Open Access Journals is to increase the
visibility and accessibility of open access scholarly journals, thereby
promoting their increased usage and impact. The directory aims to
comprehensively cover all open access scholarly journals that use an
appropriate quality control system.

The DOAJ is funded by the Information Program of the Open Society
Institute (http://www.osi.hu/infoprogram/) and Lund University Libraries,
and supported by SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources
Coalition, (http://www.arl.org/sparc) and BIBSAM (the Royal Library of
Sweden).

Information about how to obtain DOAJ records for use in a library 
catalogue or other service you will find at: 
http://www.doaj.org/articles/questions#metadata.

The database records are freely available for reuse in other services 
and can be harvested by using the OAI-PMH 
(http://www.openarchives.org/), thus further increasing the visibility 
of the journals. The article level records will be available for 
harvesting within 2 months.
	
Further information: contact Project Coordinator Lotte Jorgensen - 
[log in to unmask]  or  Director of Libraries Lars Björnshauge - 
[log in to unmask]