Damascus Library
Trusted knowledge — a gateway for research
A digital knowledge project reviving the Arabic library tradition — a peer-reviewed scientific journal, a digital library, and a complete researcher's education path, built as one platform rather than three separate tools. Publisher of the Damascus Journal of Scientific Research (ISSN 3080-3713, verified with the ISSN International Centre).
What Damascus Library offers
Damascus Journal of Scientific Research
A semi-annual, open-access journal (ISSN 3080-3713) with double-blind peer review, spanning ten research fields — development economics, reconstruction, AI, governance, humanities, law, education, medicine, engineering and sustainability. Every issue is archived and permanently accessible, free to read, with no paywall on either side.
A Real Editorial Workflow
Submissions move through a tracked pipeline — received, under review, revisions requested, accepted, published — with editor notes attached at every step and a full status-change history logged against each manuscript: who changed it, from what, to what, and why, not just a final yes or no.
Digital Library
A cataloged, searchable collection of books, manuscripts and theses, each with its own browsing view, cover art, metadata and full-text search across the whole collection — a reading room, not just a file dump of PDFs.
The Complete Researcher's Guide
A free, 12-stage curriculum of 65+ in-depth articles — research fundamentals and ethics, methodology, SPSS/R/Python analysis, academic writing stage by stage, four citation systems, journal selection and quartile rankings, peer review, and building an academic identity with ORCID and Google Scholar.
Built to Be Indexed
Every article carries Google Scholar–compatible citation_* metadata, Schema.org ScholarlyArticle JSON-LD, a permanent DOI slot and an auto-generated APA reference — the exact infrastructure academic search engines and AI answer engines crawl for, wired in from the first line of code rather than bolted on.
The Institutional Layer
An editorial board page, a public researcher directory, an events calendar, a bilingual glossary of research terms, a heritage archive of Arabic scholarly material, and a service-request desk for researchers who need direct editorial support — the parts around the journal that make it a real institution.
Engineered as a publishing system, not a page
Damascus Library isn't a WordPress theme with a journal skin — it's a custom PHP platform with its own router, its own 15-table relational schema (users, authors, research, submissions, submission history, issues, categories, books, manuscripts, theses, heritage documents, events, glossary terms, service requests and researcher profiles), and its own self-contained installer. Nothing about the editorial process is hardcoded: a submission's status change is written to a submission_history table with the previous status, the new status, the editor's comment and who made the call — an audit trail, not just a status field. The submission form itself mirrors a real journal's intake: title, abstract, keywords, research field and type, language, author and co-author details, institutional affiliation, ORCID, a PDF upload, and a mandatory research-ethics acknowledgment before anything reaches an editor's desk.
The ISSN (3080-3713) is real and verifiable directly with the ISSN International Centre. DOI infrastructure is built into every article record and ready for prefix registration as the journal's publication history grows — infrastructure in place, not a claim of live indexing.
A curriculum, not a blog
The single largest piece of content on the platform isn't the journal — it's the researcher's guide: a free 12-stage path covering the entire life of a research project. It opens with the fundamentals and ethics of scientific research, moves through planning and literature review across Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science, quantitative/qualitative/mixed methodology, and data-collection instruments. From there it covers statistical analysis in SPSS, R and Python; academic writing stage by stage from title to conclusion; four citation systems — APA, Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver — with Zotero and Mendeley workflows; journal selection and quartile rankings; peer review and responding to reviewers; building an academic identity through ORCID, Google Scholar and ResearchGate; and a dedicated stage on using AI responsibly in research. Sixty-five-plus articles, each substantial enough to stand alone, free to every visitor with no login wall.
The mission
The Arabic-language academic publishing ecosystem is underserved relative to the size and ambition of Arab scholarship. Researchers in Syria, Iraq, Jordan, the Gulf, and the diaspora produce significant work that lacks reliable, indexed publication venues — and often lack a clear, Arabic-language roadmap for how to do rigorous research in the first place. Damascus Library exists to fill both gaps at once, working in close coordination with Claryon on research methodology and with the broader khaledjassem.com ecosystem on knowledge production and distribution.