On the 8th April 2025, DOAJ retired the Seal from its index. This post provides an explanation as to what changed in the Directory and help you to understand why our journal doesnʼt display the Seal anymore.
The Seal was introduced in 2014 to encourage journals to strive for best practices centered on content findability and usability.
- It was successful for many years, encouraging hundreds of journals to strive for and meet best practices.
- By 2025, it became apparent that the larger community widely misunderstood and misused the Seal.
- A community survey showed that the community associated the Seal with high editorial quality and prestige.
- The Seal was more straightforward to achieve for better-resourced journals that had an unfair advantage.
What has changed
- The Seal logo no longer appears on the journalʼs entry in DOAJ.
- Journal metadata no longer shows that the journal had the Seal.
- Journals should no longer refer to the Seal or display the logo on their websites or social media.
What has not changed
- The application form has not changed.
- The information in journal records about the best practices previously used for the Seal has not changed.
- The metadata about the best practices is still available and collected by discovery and aggregator services globally.
- DOAJ still actively encourages journals to strive for those best practices through initiatives such as JASPER and its work with Crossref and Open Policy Finder.
The Seal was universally retired, not just removed from our Journal. DOAJ criteria are the global gold standard for open access journals. A journal indexed in DOAJ adheres to a very high standard.
We will continue to upload our article metadata to DOAJ. Article metadata in DOAJ increases traffic to the journal threefold.
For more information about this please contact the DOAJ Help Desk: [email protected].