We are excited to announce that we have appointed four new DOAJ ambassadors in Latin America, North America and Africa.
Gimena del Rio Riande from Argentina will be our second ambassador for Latin America sharing this role with Ivonne Lujano from Mexico. Gimena is a researcher at IIBICRIT, the institute for Bibliographic Research and Textual Criticism at CONICET, the main agency that fosters science and technology in Argentina.
Most of her research projects are related to Open Science and Digital Humanities, with a focus on the Global South. She is also the president of the Asociación Argentina de Humanidades Digitales (AAHD), and part of the Board of Directors of Force11, OpenMethods-DARIAH, Hypotheses, and Area (Open Education Network in Argentina).
Adrian Stanley will be our new ambassador for North America. Adrian is the recent past President for the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP). He has previously lived and worked in China and is well connected with the global publishing community, especially in places like Brazil (SciELO) and Japan (J-Stage). In his day job, he is the Managing Director, Publishers for Digital Science, which supports, invests in and incubates new startup companies like Altmetric, Dimensions, and Figshare.
Thomas Herve Mboa Nkoudou from Cameroon is our new ambassador in Africa. He will join the existing team of ambassadors for East, North and South Africa as the representative for West and Central Africa. He is a PhD candidate in Public Communication at Université Laval (Canada) and deeply engaged in advocating for open science and promoting best practices of Scholarly communication in Africa. He has been involved in promoting Open access in Haiti and African French-speaking countries (projet SOHA) and is the initiator and organizer of the yearly Africa Open Science and Hardware Summit (AfricaOSH). He is a member of the OpenCon organizing committee and an instructor at Force11 Scholarly Communication Institute. He has made it his mission to make scientific resources produced in African- based universities more visible locally and abroad.
John G. Dove, based in the United States has a career in executive management of information-intensive businesses including several that served libraries and academic institutions. His ambassador activities will focus on increasing the support to DOAJ from the community.
He is now an independent consultant and open access advocate who works with organizations that are seeking to accelerate their transition to open access. He advises both for-profits and non-profits and has a particular interest in identifying what steps are necessary to flip an entire discipline’s scholarly record to open access. He serves on NISO’s Information Discovery and Interchange Topic Committee, 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.
We welcome all 4 new ambassadors to our team at DOAJ and look forward to working with them for a world where open access and open science will be the default for doing and communicating on Science and Arts.
