Earlier this year, Verfassungsblog – probably the largest German legal scholarship blog – announced that the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) had decided to remove it from its index (Dalkilic, 2025). In the course of the ensuing debate, the DOAJ (Hodgkinson, 2025) and Verfassungsblog (Di Rosa, 2025) explicitly invited discussion from the open access community. This blog post comments in particular on the discipline-specific dimension of the removal decision, in the hope that it can thereby draw attention to particularities of German legal scholarship that are not yet adequately reflected in the DOAJ’s decision-making criteria.

But first a word about the background: Verfassungsblog’s application for indexing in the DOAJ was accepted in September 2021 (Hodgkinson, 2025). In late 2024, the acceptance criteria for the blog were reassessed as part of a reassessment of all indexed journals with average submission-to-publication times of under 3 weeks (Hodgkinson 2025). As a result of the reassessment, the DOAJ decided to remove Verfassungsblog from its index. Verfassungsblog was informed of this decision last January (Dalkilic 2025). It appealed the decision, and the appeal was denied in May. In June, Verfassungsblog published the letter of appeal and the DOAJ’s reply on its website (Dalkilic, 2025). The DOAJ (Hodgkinson, 2025) and Verfassungsblog (Di Rosa, 2025) subsequently published further statements.

Now, it would be conceivable to conclude that non-acceptance of a publication for inclusion in the DOAJ index is simply an expression of the criteria applied, and that Verfassungsblog – and many other scholarly publications – do not meet these criteria. That should not be a problem as such. However, Verfassungsblog itself has highlighted two dimensions of the removal from or non-acceptance for inclusion in the index that may become a manifest problem for the publication. The first dimension, the recognition effect that inclusion in the DOAJ index has on potential authors (see Di Rosa, 2025), is likely to (still) be of minor relevance in German legal scholarship. Few legal scholars consider themselves part of the open access community and/or make their choice of publication venue dependent on that (see Hamann & Eisentraut, 2023). Thus, recognition from the open access field by the gatekeeper DOAJ is of minor relevance for the disciplinary field of legal scholarship.

However, the fact that research funding organizations use inclusion in the DOAJ as a quality criterion poses a major challenge. Verfassungsblog itself pointed out that the German Research Foundation (DFG) has made DOAJ inclusion a criterion for funding decisions in some cases (Di Rosa, 2025), and as a result of the strategic cooperation between the DFG and the DOAJ, this trend is likely to become more marked for many funding lines in the future (German Research Foundation, 2025). So, if as a result of its removal from the DOAJ index, a publication medium like Verfassungsblog, whose scholarly acceptance is likely to be undisputed, could be excluded from funding lines in the future for formal reasons alone, a problem becomes apparent. The DOAJ has pointed out that funding should not be made dependent on DOAJ inclusion (Hodgkinson, 2025). However, as long as this is the case – and the DOAJ by entering into a strategic cooperation with the DFG also promotes this development – it is not enough for the DOAJ to point out that funding should not be linked to DOAJ inclusion. Rather, this advice should form part of the DOAJ’s reflection process.

The decision to remove Verfassungsblog from the DOAJ index was ultimately based on four criteria: an insufficient number of published research articles, a lack of scholarly referencing, a lack of information about publication fees, and the absence of peer review (Dalkilic, 2025). Each of these points would be debatable in its own right, particularly as the first two appear to refer to quantitative criteria that are not otherwise made transparent (see Dalkilic, 2025). However, the fourth point – the absence of peer review – highlights a problem with the list of criteria itself that goes beyond the individual case and is therefore of particular interest here. The case in relation to this point is relatively clear. Although Verfassungsblog has emphasised that peer reviews are conducted occasionally, editorial reviews remain the rule. (Dalkilic, 2025). This is a conscious decision, and it will not be changed in the foreseeable future (Dalkilic, 2025; Di Rosa, 2025).

In my view, the handling of the peer-review criterion underscores a fundamental problem to which Evin Dalkilic (2025), Head of Publishing at Verfassungsblog, drew attention when she noted: “If two external peer reviews is the standard requested by the DOAJ, German law journals are in effect almost entirely excluded.” The DOAJ peer-review criterion does not apply absolutely. Rather, an exception is allowed for arts and humanities journals: “For these disciplines […], DOAJ can accept journals that undertake editorial review, rather than peer review” (Directory of Open Access Journals, 2025).

It is therefore good that Matt Hodgkinson, Head of Editorial at DOAJ, asked: “Is that exception still reasonable? If so, should it be widened and to what fields (such as law), settings, or types of journal or article?” (Hodgkinson, 2025).

I consider this debate to be particularly pressing in this context. The existing exception for the arts and humanities has not been further substantiated. It is presumably motivated by the desire to accept established quality assurance practices in certain disciplines and not to prescriptively require a certain type of quality assurance.

Legal scholarship is thus in a similar starting position to the arts and humanities, without the DOAJ criteria taking this adequately into account. This may be due to the fact that a specific particularity of legal scholarship – compartmentalisation into national fields and discourses – has not been incorporated sufficiently into the DOAJ criteria. In contrast to other social systems and their respective discourses, law and legal scholarship have not become completely globalized; rather, they still take place in national, state-centred discourses (see Luhmann, 1987). And in German-language legal scholarship, the finding is relatively clear: Peer review is the exception (Purnhagen & Petersen, 2018; Hamann & Hürlimann 2019; Rux, 2020), and in light of considerable disciplinary resistance, it will remain so for the foreseeable future (Kostorz, 2016).

Thus, if the DOAJ wishes to take discipline-specific particularities adequately into account, it should allow room for both the national differentiation of legal scholarship and the respective nationally specific quality assurance practices. It has not done so to date. Its openness and willingness to reconsider the criteria in future and to allow exceptions to the peer-review requirement beyond the arts and humanities is therefore to be welcomed.

The Verfassungsblog case points beyond itself to overarching issues with the DOAJ inclusion criteria. My hope in this post is that, on the one hand, the DOAJ will in future reflect more deeply on the long-range effects of its actions – for example, when its inclusion decisions may have a concrete material impact on publications – and on the other hand, it will critically refine and if necessary expand discipline-specific inclusion criteria.

• Dalkilic, E. (2025, June 13). Access denied. Verfassungsblog, DOAJ, and the meaning of “scholarly”. Verfassungsblog. https://doi.org/10.59704/089986e7cd09bbc5
• Di Rosa, E. (2025, July 30). Who is in, who is out? Verfassungsblog’s response to its removal from DOAJ. Verfassungsblog. https://doi.org/10.59704/ff5448e7c90de564
• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). (2025, June). Guide to applying [Version 2.5]. https://doaj.org/apply/guide/#additional-criteria-for-some-journal-types
• German Research Foundation (DFG). (2025, May 5). DFG launches cooperation with the Directory of Open Access Journals (Information for Researchers No. 33). https://www.dfg.de/en/news/news-topics/announcements-proposals/2025/ifr-25-33
• Hamann, H. & Eisentraut, N. (2023). Handbuch Open Science/Rechtswissenschaft. https://de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Handbuch_Open_Science/_Rechtswissenschaft
• Hamann, H. & Hürlimann, D. (2019). Open Access bei der Veröffentlichung rechtswissenschaftlicher Fachliteratur – was soll das? Rechtswissenschaft, Sonderheft 2019, 3–30. https://doi.org/10.5771/9783748903659-9
• Hodgkinson, M. (2025, July 09). What is a scholarly journal? A case study of applying the DOAJ criteria. DOAJ Blog. https://blog.doaj.org/2025/07/09/what-is-a-scholarly-journal-a-case-study-of-applying-the-doaj-criteria/
• Kostorz. P. (2016). Review-Verfahren bei der Veröffentlichung juristischer Fachartikel – Was soll das? Kritische Justiz 49 (3), 417–422. https://doi.org/10.5771/0023-4834-2016-3-417
• Luhmann, N. (1987). A sociological theory of law (2nd ed.). Routledge.
• Purnhagen, K. & Petersen, N. (2018). Evaluation of academic legal publications in Germany. In R. van Gestel & A. Lienhard (Eds.), Evaluating academic legal research in Europe. The advantage of lagging behind (pp. 88–103). Edward Elgar. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788115506
• Rux, J. (2020). Zum Anliegen der Rechtswissenschaft. Rechtswissenschaft 1(1), 3–10.

Header picture: Andreas Axel Kirch / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 DE

Ramson, L. (2025). Disziplinäre Realitäten. Ein Kommentar zur Diskussion um den Ausschluss des Verfassungsblogs aus dem DOAJ. open-access.network. https://doi.org/10.64395/enrjf-3ha67.