The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Announces Support For the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) with 3-Year Collective Action Agreement

From a BTAA Announcement:

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.”

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