DOAJ API: Open Access Journals & Articles Search

DOAJ API for librarians, publishers, research teams and data analysts: search open access journals and articles, or look up ISSN and DOI lists, and get clean rows with the fee, licence and publisher data. $1 per 1,000 records, no API key, no login.

What does the DOAJ API Actor do?

It reads the public search API of the Directory of Open Access Journals (doaj.org) and returns one row per journal or article. Lists stay lists, true and false stay booleans, and every row has the DOAJ page of the record and a source field.

• Search journals: by keyword, subject, publisher country, language, article processing charge (APC) yes or no, and licence type.
• Search articles: by keyword, journal ISSN and year range.
• Look up journals by ISSN: paste a list of print or electronic ISSNs.
• Look up articles by DOI: paste a list of DOIs.

Try it now. The form opens with journals about "public health", capped at 25 results. Click Start. It finishes in a few seconds and costs about 2.5 cents.

How to use it

1. Pick What to get.
2. Fill the fields for that mode. Journal filters are marked "(journals)", article filters "(articles)". The look-up lists have their own fields.
3. Set Maximum results and click Start.
4. Open the Journals or Articles view in the output tab, or download JSON, CSV or Excel.

What does it cost?

One event type: record, $0.001 per record ($1 per 1,000). Rows that report a problem are free: invalid input, nothing found, an ISSN or DOI that is not in DOAJ, a rejected query or a rate limit. You can also set a spending limit on the run.

Worked example: a look-up of 400 DOIs where 380 are in DOAJ gives 380 records and 20 free rows. Cost: 380 x $0.001 = $0.38, plus the normal Apify platform usage, which for a run this size is small because the Actor uses 256 MB of memory and runs a few seconds.

Input

{
  "mode": "search_journals",
  "keyword": "public health",
  "hasApc": "no",
  "maxRows": 25
}

Other examples:

{ "mode": "search_articles", "keyword": "vaccine hesitancy", "yearFrom": 2022, "yearTo": 2023, "maxRows": 100 }

{ "mode": "journals_by_issn", "issns": ["2518-8526", "1932-6203"] }

{ "mode": "articles_by_doi", "dois": ["10.1371/journal.pone.0257164", "https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00479"] }

Field	Used in	Meaning
mode	all	search_journals, search_articles, journals_by_issn or articles_by_doi
keyword	both searches	All words must match. Use "double quotes" for an exact phrase.
subject, country, language, hasApc, licence	journal search	Filters. Country and language accept a name or a two-letter code.
journalIssns, yearFrom, yearTo	article search	Filters.
issns	journals by ISSN	One ISSN per line.
dois	articles by DOI	One DOI per line. Links starting with https://doi.org/ work.
maxRows	all	Stop after this many records.
sortBy	searches	Relevance, newest added, oldest added or title.

A search needs at least one filter.

Output

Journal row, from a run of the journal search with hasApc set to yes (keywords shortened out of this sample):

{
  "mode": "search_journals",
  "recordType": "journal",
  "doajId": "0186d00072d64108b58976acbb0b34d5",
  "title": "Archives of Public Health",
  "eissn": "2049-3258",
  "issns": ["2049-3258"],
  "publisherName": "BMC",
  "publisherCountry": "GB",
  "publisherCountryName": "United Kingdom",
  "subjects": ["Public aspects of medicine"],
  "languages": ["EN"],
  "licenses": ["CC BY", "CC BY-NC-ND"],
  "hasApc": true,
  "apcAmount": 2690,
  "apcCurrency": "EUR",
  "apcAll": [
    { "amount": 2690, "currency": "EUR" },
    { "amount": 3090, "currency": "USD" },
    { "amount": 2390, "currency": "GBP" }
  ],
  "peerReview": ["Open peer review"],
  "hasWaiver": true,
  "oaStart": 2011,
  "url": "https://archpublichealth.biomedcentral.com",
  "doajUrl": "https://doaj.org/toc/0186d00072d64108b58976acbb0b34d5",
  "dateAdded": "2013-08-13T16:57:24Z",
  "source": "DOAJ (doaj.org), CC0",
  "status": "ok",
  "charged": true
}

Article row, from a look-up by DOI (abstract shortened here):

{
  "mode": "articles_by_doi",
  "recordType": "article",
  "title": "The influence of catch trials on the consolidation of motor memory in force field adaptation tasks",
  "doi": "10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00479",
  "journalTitle": "Frontiers in Psychology",
  "journalIssns": ["1664-1078"],
  "publisherName": "Frontiers Media S.A.",
  "subjects": ["Psychology"],
  "keywords": ["interference", "motor learning", "reaching movements", "after-effects", "manipulandum"],
  "year": 2013,
  "month": 7,
  "abstract": "In computational neuroscience it is generally accepted that human motor memory contains neural representations of the physics of the musculoskeletal system and ...",
  "fullTextUrl": "http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00479/full",
  "authorCount": 5,
  "source": "DOAJ (doaj.org), CC0",
  "status": "ok",
  "charged": true
}

The abstract is filled only when DOAJ holds one. Author names and affiliations are not output on purpose: the row has authorCount instead. status is ok for data rows. Free rows have no_results, invalid_input, invalid_query, rate_limited or api_error, with the reason in error.

Related Actors

These Actors are built by the same author. Each answers one kind of question from an official public source, so an AI agent or a workflow can pick the right one by the question. All return one clean row per record, a source field naming the original publisher, and free rows for errors and empty results.

Question	Actor
What did US federal agencies publish: rules, proposed rules, notices, comment deadlines?	Federal Register API
Which drugs, devices or foods were recalled, and what adverse events were reported?	FDA Recalls & Drug Adverse Events
Who won a US federal contract or grant?	USAspending Awards API
Which public tenders are open in the EU and the UK?	Public Tenders API
What is the US national debt, a Treasury interest rate or an auction result?	Treasury Fiscal Data API
What is the official ECB exchange rate for a date?	Exchange Rates API
What did a public company file with the SEC, and what are its financials?	SEC EDGAR Filings API, SEC Company Financials API
Which startups raised money (SEC Form D)?	Startup Funding Rounds Tracker
Who is this company in an official register, and who owns it?	Company Registry Search, GLEIF Ownership Change Monitor
Is this company hiring, and for which roles?	Career Page Jobs Scraper
What are the citation details of a paper or DOI?	Crossref Works Search
Which new preprints match a topic?	Preprint Papers API

FAQ

Is it legal to use this data? DOAJ states in its terms (doaj.org/terms) that journal-level and article-level metadata are under a CC0 waiver, so you may reuse them, including for commercial use. This Actor reads only metadata from the public API. It does not download full texts.

Is this an official DOAJ product? No. This Actor is unofficial and is not affiliated with or endorsed by DOAJ. It was built by the Actor author.

What are the limits? DOAJ serves at most 1,000 records for one search. If more records match, the Actor returns the first 1,000 and writes a warning to the log. Split a large job with filters, for example one year range at a time. The look-up modes send 10 identifiers per request and can return up to 10,000 records. Requests go one at a time, about 600 ms apart. If the API rate limit is reached, the run ends with a free rate_limited row.

Why does the subject filter match more than I expect? DOAJ matches subject words, not whole subject names. Medicine also finds "Public aspects of medicine".

Can I filter by the DOAJ Seal? Not at present. The public API does not return the Seal field, so the Actor cannot filter on it or output it.

Why are author names missing? The Actor is built to leave out personal data. Use authorCount for the number of authors, or open doajUrl or fullTextUrl for the record itself.

How current is the data? The Actor returns what DOAJ holds at the time of the run. lastUpdated shows when each record last changed.