DOAJ Open Access Journals — Fees, Licences and Publishing Policies

Search the Directory of Open Access Journals for the things that decide where you publish or whether you trust a publisher: article processing charges in every currency quoted, fee waivers, licence terms with the Creative Commons flags broken out, peer-review process, plagiarism screening, digital preservation, copyright retention and typical time to publication.

Keyless public register, no login, no proxy.

Not another article index

The catalogue already reaches article metadata through Crossref and PubMed. This is the journal register — publisher-level policy data that neither of those carries. Use it to find journals that charge nothing, to compare APCs across currencies, or to audit a publisher's screening and preservation practices.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
searchQueries	array	—	Subject, title or publisher — medicine, machine learning, Elsevier
filters	array	—	no-apc, has-apc, has-waiver, cc-by, author-retains-copyright, plagiarism-screened, preserved
maxItemsPerQuery	integer	200	DOAJ serves at most 1,000 per query

Filters combine with each search term, and work on their own — leave searchQueries empty and ask for every journal that charges nothing.

Output

{
  "_input": "medicine",
  "_source": "S1-doaj-api",
  "_scrapedAt": "2026-09-13T02:04:11Z",

  "doajId": "…", "title": "European Psychiatry",
  "doajUrl": "https://doaj.org/toc/…", "journalUrl": "…",
  "publisherName": "Cambridge University Press", "publisherCountry": "GB",
  "eissn": "…", "pissn": "…",
  "openAccessSince": 2007,
  "languages": ["EN"],
  "subjectTerms": ["Medicine"], "keywords": ["psychiatry", …],

  "hasApc": true,
  "apcPrices": [
    { "currency": "GBP", "price": 2320 },
    { "currency": "USD", "price": 3150 },
    { "currency": "EUR", "price": 2850 }
  ],
  "apcCurrencies": ["EUR", "GBP", "USD"],
  "apcUsd": 3150, "apcEur": 2850, "apcUrl": "…",
  "hasOtherCharges": false,
  "hasWaiver": true, "waiverUrl": "…",

  "licenceTypes": ["CC BY-NC"],
  "licences": [{ "type": "CC BY-NC", "BY": true, "NC": true, "ND": false, "SA": false, "url": "…" }],
  "allowsCommercialReuse": false,
  "authorRetainsCopyright": true,

  "reviewProcess": ["Double anonymous peer review"], "reviewUrl": "…",
  "plagiarismScreening": true,
  "hasPreservation": true, "hasDepositPolicy": false,
  "publicationTimeWeeks": 4,
  "pidScheme": ["DOI"],
  "aimsScopeUrl": "…", "authorInstructionsUrl": "…",

  "addedToDoaj": "…", "lastUpdated": "…"
}

Three things worth knowing

A journal can quote the same charge in several currencies, and 37 of 100 do. European Psychiatry lists 2,320 GBP, 3,150 USD and 2,850 EUR for one fee. Collapsing that into a single price would pick one arbitrarily and silently mislead anyone comparing costs, so the full list ships as apcPrices and the convenience fields name their currency: apcUsd, apcEur.

Licences come with their Creative Commons flags already separated. BY, NC, ND and SA are booleans alongside the label, so "may I reuse this commercially?" is allowsCommercialReuse rather than a string comparison against "CC BY-NC".

DOAJ stops at 1,000 records per query and tells you so. pageSize is silently clamped to 100 — asking for 200 returns 100 with a 200 status — but the record ceiling is honest: page past it and the body reads "You cannot access results beyond 1000 records via this API." It is a record limit, not a page one, so pageSize=10 with page=100 hits the same wall. The actor treats that as a stop condition, logs it, and keeps what it has. Narrow the search to reach the rest.

Errors

_error	Meaning
invalid_query	DOAJ rejected the query syntax
no_results	The search ran and matched no journals
unexpected_shape	A 200 without a results list, or a record with no title
blocked	DOAJ returned nothing usable
network_error	Never reached the server

If every search fails, the run itself fails rather than reporting success over an empty dataset.