DOAJ team

Managing Editor

Alejandra Manco Vega

Alejandra has a Bachelor's degree in Information Science and a Master's in Digital Media. She has around ten years of experience in information management, knowledge management and scholarly communication at national and international levels.

Deputy Head of Editorial (Quality)

Cenyu Shen

Before joining DOAJ, Cenyu was a researcher at the Hanken School of Economics in Finland. She holds a PhD in Information Systems Science. She has worked on open access research for over seven years, focusing on gold open access publishing models and the problems of questionable publishing. She authored and co-authored more than ten research articles, book chapters and conference papers. In 2016, Cenyu joined DOAJ as the DOAJ Ambassador for China and later became a managing editor. She currently works as Deputy Head of Editorial (Quality), leading the quality team to prevent questionable publishers from being indexed in DOAJ. Cenyu is originally from China and now lives in Helsinki, Finland. She loves movies and painting. She also enjoys snowboarding during winter.

Programme Manager

Clara Armengou

Clara has ten years of experience in the scholarly publishing industry. She worked at Cambridge University Press as an Open Access Project Manager until 2015. She works in science communication as a freelancer at the University of Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Clara speaks Spanish, Catalan, English and some German and French. She loves cetaceans, freediving, cycling, and is an enthusiastic cook.

Operations Manager

Dominic Mitchell

Dominic has over 25 years of experience working with the publisher and library communities. He is responsible for operations, and the development of the DOAJ platform. He acts as Committee chair for the Think. Check. Submit. initiative, of which DOAJ is a founding organisation. He represents DOAJ in Project JASPER, a cross-industry project working to ensure that journals are preserved for the long term. He is also Chair of the OASPA Board of Directors. His spare time is divided between looking after his twin sons and his vinyl record collection.

Managing Editor

Gala García Reátegui

Gala holds a Master's Degree in Information and Documentation from Lyon 3 University in France. Before joining DOAJ, she worked for the Digital Strategy and Data Directorate at The French National Research Agency (ANR) and for the Open Archive HAL at the Center for Direct Scientific Communication (CCSD). Gala is Peruvian but lived for more than ten years in France. Today, she is based in Denmark. She loves meeting people from other cultures and trying local dishes or experiences. Currently, Gala goes winter bathing in the Limfjord, Denmark! She also loves running.

Managing Editor

Iemima Ploscariu

Iemima holds a PhD in History from Dublin City University, Ireland, as an Irish Research Council fellow. She also has an MA in Comparative History and an MLitt in Central and East European Studies. She is originally from Romania, grew up in California, and now lives in Barcelona, Spain. She volunteered as an Editor for DOAJ from 2014 until 2020, when she became a Managing Editor.

Managing Editor

Ikhwan Arief

Ikhwan is a faculty member in the Industrial Engineering Department at Universitas Andalas, Indonesia. He is an enthusiastic photography hobbyist. He used to manage the university's library information system, including establishing the online public access catalogue (OPAC) and the repository servers. He is keenly interested in data science, primarily industrial and manufacturing systems research. He has been assisting Indonesian journal managers in their application to DOAJ. He joined DOAJ in 2018 as an ambassador, then became a volunteer editor and joined the DOAJ Team as Managing Editor in 2024.

Community Manager

Ivonne Lujano

Ivonne Lujano holds a Ph.D. in Education Policy and Evaluation at Arizona State University (ASU). She writes about higher education systems, research evaluation, science policy, scholarly communication, open access, and open science. Ivonne is a Community Manager at the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and a DOAJ Ambassador in Latin America. She is also an Editorial Board member of the Open Access (OA) Journals Toolkit led by OASPA and DOAJ and an Advisory Council member of the Library Partnership Rating (LP). Ivonne has taught at public and private universities in Mexico. She has been a guest lecturer at universities in Latin America and the U.S. She earned a Master's degree with an emphasis in Education from Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), campus Argentina. Ivonne also has a background in dance; she is currently an amateur tango dancer.

Managing Director

Joanna Ball

As Managing Director, Joanna is responsible for ensuring DOAJ fulfils its mission by setting strategic direction, leading advocacy and engagement, and securing the organisation's sustainability. Before joining DOAJ in 2022, Joanna spent over 25 years in management and leadership roles within research libraries in the UK and Denmark, most recently as Head of Roskilde University Library. She has experience in strategy development, managing cultural change and developing open access services and programmes. She is a member of UKSG's Insights Editorial Board and is currently Chair of its Board of Trustees. Joanna lives with her family in Roskilde.

Advisor

John G. Dove

John has had a career in executive management and is now an independent consultant and open access advocate who works with organisations seeking to accelerate their transition to open access. He advises both for-profits and non-profits and has a particular interest in identifying the steps necessary to flip an entire discipline’s scholarly record to open access. His ambassador activities focus on increasing the support for DOAJ from the community. He served for six years on NISO’s Information Discovery and Interchange Topic Committee, and has written for Learned Publishing, Against the Grain, and Scholarly Kitchen. John serves on the Board of Trustees of his local public library in Revere, Massachusetts. He has a B.A. in Mathematics from Oberlin College.

Head of Editorial

Judith Barnsby

Judith has 25 years of experience in the scholarly publishing industry, working for a range of non-profit society publishers and service providers before joining DOAJ. She has a keen interest in publishing standards and protocols and has served on the board of CLOCKSS and as chair of the UK's PALS (publisher and library solutions) working group. Judith loves books, especially detective fiction, and volunteers in her local library.

Managing Editor and Ambassador

Kamel Belhamel

Kamel BELHAMEL is a Full Professor of Chemistry at the University of Bejaia, Algeria (ORCID). He is the DOAJ Ambassador and Managing Editor for North Africa and the Middle East. His scientific activity is focused on scholarly communications, new developments in academic publishing and the chemistry of Natural Products. Kamel has strongly advocated for open access and open science. He is the Creative Commons Representative to the Global Network Council and editor-in-chief of the Algerian Journal of Natural Products. He is father to three daughters and likes travelling, healthy local foods and home-made snacks.

Community Manager

Katrine Sundsbø

Katrine holds a Master’s degree in Cognitive Neuroscience and has six years of experience in scholarly communications. She has advocated for open access and visibility of research through various working groups, projects and through gamification of scholarly communications. Though Katrine is half Danish and half Norwegian, her son is named after a Swedish singer - and her British husband suggested the name!

Advisor and Founder

Lars Bjørnshauge

Lars worked at Danish university libraries for two decades and was Director of Libraries at Lund University, Sweden from 2001 to 2011. He founded the DOAJ in 2003, and was Managing Director from 2013-2021. He has vast experience in change management, re-engineering academic libraries, and developing information services for research & higher education. For more than two decades, Lars has strongly advocated open access and provided services to the open access movement. He is co-founder of OpenDOAR, the Directory of Open Access Books and Think. Check. Submit. Lars lives outside Copenhagen and is married with four children and four grandchildren. He enjoys vegetable gardening, growing cacti and succulents, and playing internet chess.

Deputy Head of Editorial (Workflow)

Leena Shah

Leena has a Master's degree in Information Studies and worked as an academic librarian, where she developed a keen interest in scholarly communication and open science. She joined DOAJ as an Ambassador for India in 2016. She continued her journey with DOAJ as a Managing Editor overseeing the indexing of journals from India, Indonesia and other countries. She is currently the Deputy Head of Editorial (Workflow), assisting in leading and developing the DOAJ editorial workforce. Leena is a yoga enthusiast who loves visiting museums and watching sci-fi shows in her spare time. She is originally from India and has lived and worked in Singapore for a long time. Leena now resides in London, UK, with her family.

Managing Editor and Ambassador

Mahmoud Khalifa

Mahmoud is a PhD candidate at Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. He is writing his dissertation about national information policies. Mahmoud was an associate at the IFLA International Leaders Programme, 2016-2018, and an accredited trainer for the IFLA BSLA programme (Building Strong Library Association), as well as an OCLC Fellow at Jay Jordan IFLA/OCLC Early Career Development Fellowship Program, class 2010. Professionally, he worked in the Library of Congress Cairo Office from 2006-2018. As a researcher, he published more than 20 articles, book chapters, and conference papers.

Managing Editor

Paula Marjamäki

Paula, based in southern Finland, is a published researcher and holds a PhD in Biological Sciences from the University of Exeter, UK. She is a big believer in open science and has been actively involved in science outreach throughout her academic career. She joined the DOAJ team in March 2020 as a Database Assistant before moving to editorial duties in August 2020, with a focus on managing applications from Nordic countries. Outside of work, she is a natural history enthusiast and enjoys yoga, hiking, and participating in various dog sports with her Swiss Shepherd.

Database Assistant

Popi Florou

For the past 20 years, Popi has been working as a support Librarian for the Greek National Consortium for Academic and Research Institutions. During this time, she has been mainly responsible for the management of the Consortium's electronic resources database and portal, and she is also involved in almost all the Consortium's projects, including the support and promotion of Open Access as a means of recording, promoting and outreaching its members' qualitative research.

Managing Editor

Ramazan Turgut

Ramazan Turgut is a teacher at Mardin Artuklu University in Türkiye. He has a Ph.D. in History of Religion and has done research at Radboud University and the University of Chicago. He speaks Kurdish, Turkish, English, and Dutch, which helps him to work with scholars from different countries. Ramazan is a proud father of three children and enjoys reading, cooking, and travelling to learn about new cultures. If he could be a character in Middle Earth, he would have chosen Boromir.

Managing Editor

Sonja Brage

Sonja is a former Information Librarian from Lund University Library. She has a B.A. in English, Bulgarian and Russian from Lund University and specialises in applications for journals in the Slavonic languages. In her free time, Sonja dances and reads a lot, especially antique history. Rome is her favourite city.

Finance Administrator

Zhanna Protasevych

Zhanna has a Bachelor's degree in Finance. She has around seven years of experience in finance, accounting, and supervising. Zhanna speaks Ukrainian, Russian and English. She loves snowboarding, art photography, and music.