The directory contains information about 350 open access journals, i.e. quality controlled scientific and scholarly electronic journals that are freely available on the web. The service will continue to grow as new journals are identified.

The goal of the Directory of Open Access Journals is to increase the visibility and accessibility of open access scholarly journals, thereby promoting their increased usage and impact. The directory aims to comprehensively cover all open access scholarly journals that use an appropriate quality control system. Journals in all languages and subject areas will be included in the DOAJ.

The database records will be freely available for reuse in other services and can be harvested by using the OAI-PMH (http://www.openarchives.org/), thus further increasing the visibility of the journals. The further development of DOAJ will continue with version 2, which will offer the enhanced feature of allowing the journals to be searched at the article level, and is expected to be available in late fall 2003.