Visibility and discoverability (including indexation) of Diamond OA journals

More than half or the respondents (106; 53.3%) have said that their journals are indexed in AJOL and half of them are discoverable via Google Scholar. Those indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) account for nearly one-third (65; 32.7%), while the share of those indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus is considerably smaller – 10.1% and 13.1%, respectively. The analysis of free-text responses reveals a long tail of indexing venues relevant in the African context and throws light on national (Portail des Revues Scientifiques Marocaines) and continental platforms (e.g. the South African journal platform
Sabinet African Journals). It is reasonable to assume that many more surveyed journals are indexed by these services but did not mention it in the survey. Therefore, the data presented in the table are merely illustrative.

Table 13. The presence of the surveyed journals in databases / indexing services

Journal # journals indexed % journals
AJOL 106 53.3%
Google Scholar 101 50.8%
DOAJ 65 32.7%
Google 59 29.6%
Scopus 26 13.1%
WorldCat 21 10.6%
Web of Science 20 10.1%
SciELO 12 6.0%
BASE 11 5.5%
PubMedCentral 10 5.0%
OpenAIRE 8 4.0%
EBSCO 7 3.5%
Portail des Revues Scientifiques Marocaines (IMIST-CNRST) 7 3.5%
Algerian Scientific Journal Platform 6 3.0%
CORE 6 3.0%
Medline 4 2.0%
ARCIF 4 2.0%
ProQuest 4 2.0%
Sabinet African Journals 4 2.0%
Mirabel 3 1.5%
Ulrichs Web 3 1.5%
Not indexed 17 8.5%

Note: The percentages in the table are calculated with respect to the total number of respondents. The sum of the numbers in the table is greater than 100% because many journals are indexed in multiple databases/services. The table includes coded free-text responses.

 

Although the majority of journals are indexed or merely discoverable in multiple databases or services, the number of those indexed with only one indexing service is not insignificant (82; 41.2%; see table below), and in most cases this single service is usually AJOL.

Table 14. Journals indexed in only one database / indexing service

Database / indexing service # journals
AJOL 38
DOAJ 5
Google Scholar 18
Google 4
WorldCat 17
Total 82

 

The most common challenges faced by journals when applying for indexing include satisfying the technical criteria and membership fees (42; 21.11%), followed by satisfying the metadata requirements (34; 17.1%) and non-technical participation criteria (30; 15.1%). The language used in the application process does not seem to be a major issue. 

Although insufficiently detailed, free-text responses provide more information about the challenging non-technical requirements: some journals are rejected because of their local, i.e. African focus, low citation rates in citation databases, authors coming from limited geographic areas and endogeny (too many papers authored by editorial board members or the reviewers working for the journal). A few respondents also mentioned the unresponsiveness of the indexing services, who have never provided feedback about their applications. 

Table 15. Challenges faced by journals applying for indexing in databases / indexing services

Challenges # journals % journals
Satisfying the non-technical participation criteria 30 15.1%
Satisfying the technical participation criteria 42 21.1%
Satisfying the metadata requirements 34 17.1%
Paying for membership, annual or one time 42 21.1%
Paying for recurring charges, for example, monthly fees 31 15.6%
The language of the communications/requirements/paperwork is only in English 7 3.5%
The language of the communications/requirements/paperwork is another language that is hard to understand 5 2.5%
The service/its requirements/its paperwork are too technical 13 6.5%