From: ElHassan ElSabry <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2016 06:51:27 +0900

Dear Liblicense Members,

I am writing to you to announce the release of the second version of
the Directory of Free Arab Journals . It is an independent initiative
to produce a directory for all OA journals produced in Arab countries,
curated and funded by a group of OA activists in the region (myself
included). The website was there since 2013 the new version released
last week includes over twice as many journals and many new website
features. It currently lists 250 journals from 172 publishers in 17
Arab countries. The guide is published under a CC-BY-NC license.

So far, the interface is available only in Arabic but our (near)
future plans include adding an English interface as well as creating a
list of "distinguished" journals (those meeting extra quality
criteria) to induce competition among listed journals to raise their
own standards. The scientific publishing scene in the Arab World is
not so bright and we aim to contribute to changing this situation.

Other plans include using the current website blog and a future
mailing list to steer discussion about OA in the region. The plan is
to move the website from just being a directory to a portal/forum for
Open Access activism in the region. I am personally working now to
create a guide for editors on how to create and maintain OA journals
(probably using OJS) which should be the first of it's kind in Arabic.
Hopefully we can later extend the training material to include
repository management software too.

Several universities have already linked to DFAJ and I encourage the
librarians in the group to add it to their Lib-guides if they believe
their patrons might be interested in scientific literature coming from
the Arab World.

You can find more about the directory by visiting the website (link
above, in Arabic though). However, for your reference, DFAJ currently
offers the following features:
1. A listing of all Arab journals (produced by Arab universities and
research institutions) that are openly available on the internet
(regardless of their field and whether or not they have a print
edition)

2. Hyperlinks to all listed journals and their publishing organizations

3. Standard information including ISSN, Publisher (and commercial
publishing partners, if any), country of publication, frequency,
keywords and fulltext language(s)

4. The ability to browse journals by field as well as an advanced
search function (to search by any of the elements mentioned above)

5. A form to suggest new journals

6. Information about the peer-review style as well as indexing in
international databases (only Scopus & DOAJ for now)

7. The ability for visitors to create accounts and save their favorite journals

Needless to say, we would be very happy to receive any feedback or
suggestions to enhance the directory.

Regards,
ElHassan
(on behalf of the DFAJ team)

--
ElHassan ElSabry, M.Sc.

Doctoral Candidate
Science & Technology Policy Program
National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (Japan)

Content Development Specialist
Directory of Free Arab Journals (DFAJ)

Assistant Editor
"Backchannels": the Official Blog of the Society of Social Studies of Science