The Big Ten Academic Alliance Announces Collective Action Agreement with DOAJ

The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) have announced a three-year collective action agreement that provides multi-year support for DOAJ from all fifteen member libraries. DOAJ indexes and promotes quality, peer-reviewed open access journals from around the world, providing a community-driven service to play an essential role in the creation of a sustainable model for the future of scholarly publishing.

The BTAA is delighted to take collective action on behalf of its members to support DOAJ’s mission to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals. With this agreement, the libraries of the BTAA affirm their principled commitment to open scholarship for worldwide public good and a more equitable society.

The Big Ten Academic Alliance members are: Indiana University, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, Rutgers University–New Brunswick, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, University of Iowa, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of Chicago. DOAJ is delighted that many of the BTAA members are supporting DOAJ at the Sustaining rate, which means that they will have the opportunity to nominate and vote on candidates for DOAJ’s Advisory Board and the DOAJ Council.  These bodies help to keep DOAJ aligned with the world-wide library community.

“We are delighted to welcome the support of BTAA members, whose collective action is a significant contribution in our efforts to continuously improve services to the scholarly community. BTAA represents not only the interests of libraries, but of the wider academic communities within the universities that benefit from DOAJ’s services,” said Lars Bjørnshauge, DOAJ Founder and Managing Director “This support from the Big Ten also provides important visibility to DOAJ and will help further aid our mission, enabling a greater impact throughout North America.”

Maurice York, BTAA Director of Library Initiatives, said: “To build a sustainable, scalable, and trustworthy open knowledge ecosystem, developing open infrastructure must go hand in hand with expanding open content. This collective investment in support of DOAJ represents an essential part of our coordinated strategy to advance the growth of open science and open scholarship to directly benefit our researchers and scholars.”

About the Big Ten Academic Alliance: The Big Ten Academic Alliance is the nation’s preeminent model for effective collaboration among research universities. For more than half a century, these world-class institutions have advanced their academic missions, generated unique opportunities for students and faculty, and served the common good by sharing expertise, leveraging campus resources, and collaborating on innovative programs. Governed and funded by the Provosts of the member universities, Big Ten Academic Alliance mandates are coordinated by a staff from its Champaign, Illinois headquarters.

About DOAJ: The Directory of Open Access is a community curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer reviewed journals.  DOAJ deploys more than one hundred carefully selected volunteers from among the community of library and other academic disciplines to assist in the curation of Open Access Journals. This independent database contains over 15,000 peer-reviewed open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities. DOAJ is financially supported worldwide by libraries, publishers and other like-minded organizations.

 

CONTACTS:

Maurice York
Director, Library Initiatives
Big Ten Academic Alliance
maurice.york@btaa.org

Louise Stoddard
Public Relations Officer
Directory of Open Access Journals
louise@doaj.org