DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) API

Use in your agent

Load DOAJ article records for a search into pandas and Parquet. Checked against the provider's documentation on Nov 3, 2026.

Access

• No key to search; API keys are mainly for publishers who submit data.
• Base URL https://doaj.org/api/; search routes are /search/articles/{query} and /search/journals/{query} with page and pageSize.

Request

curl 'https://doaj.org/api/search/articles/bibjson.title:%22systemic%20risk%22?page=1&pageSize=50'

Format

JSON with total, page, pageSize and results; each article has id and bibjson with title, year, journal (title, ISSNs, publisher), identifier (type doi, eissn, pissn), abstract, keywords and link (type fulltext).

Load into pandas and Parquet

Needs Python 3 with requests, pandas and pyarrow.

"""DOAJ article metadata -> pandas -> Parquet. No key for search; 2 requests a second."""
import requests
import pandas as pd

r = requests.get("https://doaj.org/api/search/articles/bibjson.title:%22systemic%20risk%22",
                 params={"page": 1, "pageSize": 50}, timeout=60)
r.raise_for_status()
js = r.json()
rows = []
for a in js["results"]:
    b = a["bibjson"]
    rows.append({
        "doaj_id": a["id"],
        "title": b.get("title"),
        "journal": (b.get("journal") or {}).get("title"),
        "year": b.get("year"),
        "doi": next((i.get("id") for i in b.get("identifier", []) if i.get("type", "").lower() == "doi"), None),
        "fulltext": next((l.get("url") for l in b.get("link", []) if l.get("type") == "fulltext"), None),
    })
df = pd.DataFrame(rows)
df.to_parquet("doaj_articles.parquet", index=False)
print(len(df), "articles on this page of", js["total"], "matches")

Run by us on 2026-11-03 (python 3.13.5 | pandas 3.1.0 | pyarrow 26.0.0 | requests 2.34.2). Result: 50 articles on this page of 395 matches

Limits

• Two requests per second on all API routes; bursts of up to five requests per user are queued.
• Not all fields are available on all records.

Quirks

• The query goes in the URL path, so URL-encode quotes and spaces.
• Short field names (title, doi, issn, publisher, abstract) cannot take the .exact suffix; use the full bibjson path for exact matches.

Terms and attribution

• Article metadata copyright is waived under CC0; DOAJ website content is CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Data dumps are granted case by case under the licences that accompany the data.

Sources

• https://doaj.org/docs/api/: “There is a rate limit of two requests per second on all API routes.”
• https://doaj.org/docs/api/: “API keys are usually only available to publishers who submit data to DOAJ.”
• https://doaj.org/docs/api/: “Copyrights and related rights for article metadata waived via CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0) Public Domain Dedication.”