Fair competition ‒ surely no one minds?

DOAJ comes to high positions compared to Web of Science or Scopus

Only 10% of ISSNs and 10% of all known open access journals are covered in Web of Science or Scopus. DOAJ listed the largest number of quality Open Access journals by far!

While many journals in Web of Science and Scopus are not currently listed in DOAJ (often because they don’t meet criteria DOAJ), large numbers of quality open access journals in DOAJ are not included in either of those services (Figure). DOAJ indexes 11,730 journals that will not be found in Web of Science and 11,229 journals that are not in Scopus. DOAJ is, therefore, much more inclusive in its global coverage of open access journals than either Web of Science or Scopus.

A recently published study using DOAJ data also concluded that Web of Science and SCOPUS were less inclusive than DOAJ.

Thus, DOAJ is confirmed as a unique platform for many open access journals. In particular, DOAJ is confirmed as a key index for African journals! By this, the state management of science in Africa has proved its leading position in caring for its scientists and the value of their work!

Recognizing DOAJ as a key index for journals in other countries will be a positive factor in reducing the monopoly of Web of Science and Scopus. Science knows no boundaries, so when the procedure for assessing the quality of scientific work is monopolized, science itself suffers. And the evidence of this statement lies on the surface: any author, referring to his/her manuscript to some journal, asks the first question: "Is this journal included on the Web of Science and Scopus?". That is, the main thing for the creator of a scientific work is not the desire to share his developments with the world, but the desire to satisfy the formal requirements of the ministries according to the criterion of belonging of the journal to two "promoted" resources. At the same time, it is surprising that in most cases access to the publication is closed by these resources, which significantly reduces its chances of being seen and appreciated by the world community. It is this problem that is being solved, placement of the publication in DOAJ, as a platform with strict criteria for the selection of journals, confirming that the quality of publications in such journals may be higher than the quality of publications in journals indexed by Web of Science and Scopus.

Surely both Web of Science and Scopus are not against fair competition because it allows one to move forward, evolving and creating new opportunities for the development and dissemination of scientific knowledge.