The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) has launched its planned ‘phase 2′ article level search service of journals in its database. So far, 276 of its 1,100 or so journals have been article-search enabled. The 276 searchable journals contain a grand total of 48,613 articles.
The new article level search will allow searches for specific articles in its journals within the fields: title, journal title, ISSN, author, keywords, or abstract. Up until now, the DOAJ has simply been a listing of open access journals with data and search capability confined to journal titles.
The DOAJ defines open access journals as journals that do not charge readers or their institutions for access. It takes its definition from the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI). This says that open access journals must allow users to freely ‘read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of their articles’. In addition, the DOAJ applies a ‘quality control’ which says that journals in its database must be scientific or scholarly journals operating a peer review system for all their articles.
Since the DOAJ’s launch in May 2003 with 350 open access scientific and academic journals, the number of journals in its database has steadily increased to the current 1,107 journals. The DOAJ is hosted by Lund University Libraries. The project is funded by Open Society Institute - Budapest and also supported by SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).
The press release gives the full details.
Footnote: the DOAJ’s article level search is not a full text search - this is a possible future development. Interestingly, especially for librarians, a ‘demonstration’ full text search of 19 DOAJ library related journals, DOAJI Search, is set up independently of the DOAJ by Mr Eric Lease Morgan (a journal librarian enthusiast based at University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA).