Today I converted Eric Lease Morgan‘s c4lj2doaj.cgi into a WordPress plugin.
What is the DOAJ?
The Directory of Open Access Journals is an avenue for readers to discover and access the contents of thousands of open access journals (i.e., journals that don’t charge for access to the full text of their articles).
Publishers of said journals can provide article-level data to the DOAJ, opening those articles up to discovery through the DOAJ interface. One can provide this data to the DOAJ through a form (entering the title, authors, abstract, keywords, etc., for each article, one at a time) or by uploading data that conforms to the DOAJ acticle XML schema.
Enter the DOAJ Export plugin
Eric built a Perl module to grab the necessary info from the Code4Lib Journal‘s database and present it in this format. This functionality seemed to belong in a WordPress plugin, so I set out to convert Eric’s script into the plugin before you today.
Since this is just presenting the data for each issue in yet another XML format, similar to all the feeds WordPress already creates, I thought it appropriate to make the data accessible as another feed, using the add_feed function I’ve mentioned before.
By going to an issue of the journal and appending /feed/doaj to the URL, you’ll get the contents of that issue in the DOAJ XML format. E.g., http://journal.code4lib.org/issues/issue4/feed/doaj for the latest issue.
You can download the DOAJ Export plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory.