You might have wondered how many people are behind the scenes at DOAJ and what they do. This blog post series will offer our community an opportunity to meet several of our team members and learn more about their roles and responsibilities. In this blog post, we will meet Dominic Mitchell, Platform Manager
Hello Dom! Tell us a little about your background before joining DOAJ!
I graduated from university with an English and French degree, and was working as a Food and Beverage Manager at the Student’s Union in Aberdeen. I wanted to top up my degree with something that could be applied to an industry. At that time I was helping out one of the Senior Lecturers at the English department, who was putting together a new book on Oscar Wilde. She suggested I go into publishing, so I did a postgraduate diploma in publishing. At the time, the university had connections with BMJ, who had offered student placements in the past. An opportunity came up to cover for someone’s sick leave on a temporary basis in London and I took it as I had family I could stay with.
So, I worked as Editorial Assistant on a paediatrics journal that was run by the BMJ Group, where I ended up working for 9 and a half years as the person never came back from sick leave. During the time I worked there, all the journals went online – so it’s a long time ago! I was working very closely with HighWire Press, which is a journal hosting provider, specialising in society journals. I eventually got a job with HighWire, representing their European interests. In 2012, I decided to move to Sweden. I was put in touch with Caroline Sutton, who was the head of Co-Action Publishing and one of the three people who had set up Infrastructure Services 4 Open Access, which was DOAJ’s new home after it came out of Lund University and became a separate entity. I was then introduced to Lars, founder of DOAJ, and started working at the DOAJ at the end of 2012. And I have been here ever since!
You’ve been at DOAJ for a while – how has your role(s) developed since you became a part of DOAJ?
Lars brought me on to work with the community, reaching out to aggregators and publishers to understand their needs, but also to get them to financially support DOAJ. There were already librarians on the team who were liaising with the librarian community, whereas I had a publisher background. About a year after I started, we had to find a different platform provider – which is when we started working with Cottage Labs. This became a new responsibility as a part of the Community Manager role. We spent a really intense 3-4 months migrating the platform over to Cottage Labs. That’s kind of what I have been doing ever since, even though my job title hasn’t necessarily reflected that! One of the wonderful things about DOAJ is that the team has always been small in relation to the size of DOAJ. That means you end up doing a lot of things that aren’t necessarily in your job title or description!
At the same time that we started working with Cottage Labs, Lars expanded the team to bring on Tom Olijhoek (former Editor-in-Chief) and later Judith, and established the Editorial ‘department’. At this point my work didn’t really fit into a ‘Community Manager’ role, so I became the ‘Operations Manager’, as I was also doing HR, training and induction tasks.
When Joanna came on in 2022, she brought with her some much needed changes and stability. She suggested splitting my role into two. Since the official definition of an Operation Manager includes a lot of HR and finance qualifications that I do not have, it made sense to hire a new Operations Manager, and for me to become the Platform Manager.
What would you say your priorities are now as a Platform Manager?
I would say there are three areas where, if I had all the resources in the world, I would focus on.
The first one would be to finish the work we started with Editorial and get them a new system so that they can keep on top of the applications coming in and keep the journal records up to date. We’ve got over 21,000 journals in DOAJ, and every time we add a new one it adds to the burden of what we need to keep current.
The second area is that I would really like to see DOAJ proactively go out and ingest article metadata. We’ve had research back from the Community Survey we did earlier this year that very clearly shows that even though DOAJ isn’t used as a primary source of article metadata in the Economic North, in the Economic South people do come to DOAJ for open access content. We rely on publishers to upload this content, which is a barrier and means we don’t have as much as we could have. I would love to see DOAJ become a proper indexer of article metadata – go out and bring that metadata back to DOAJ. It would make such a difference for indexed journals, especially for those that do not have the time or resources to spend on providing article metadata to us manually.
Before you move to the third area – Is this second point really that hard to achieve? Why can we not just link up with publishers and set up an automatic process?
Well, yes that is really all that it is. But publishers’ systems are so disparate, and have also grown organically. So, it’s not one connection but hundreds, possibly thousands of connections that we need. These connections, or APIs, need to have interactions built to them. And then you need to know what to do for each of those connections if an API breaks. You also need to be on top of version changes. It’s a lofty ambition, I don’t know yet how technically possible it is. Other solutions have done it, but I know that they too find it a challenge. This is something that I think would be worth investigating though, as it would make such a huge difference.
And the third area?
To add better support to how we display article metadata – listening to the global community that uses us as a primary source of research content. I would like to start supporting PIDs (Permanent Identifiers); ORCIDs, organisational IDs, ARKs, Handles – get all those into the article display. And also add more functionality and allow people to export multiple articles to reference managers. I’d like to be able to support multilingualism – OJS does a great job of sending us article metadata in multiple languages, but we can only display one. Another one is to correctly display authors that have multiple affiliations.
You’ve mentioned a lot of article metadata – but you haven’t mentioned citation metrics. Do you think DOAJ should display these?
That is a really interesting question. I think that metrics are problematic. They give a very single view of usage. People interpret it as quality, importance and impact. I think it’s more important that the article information is given visibility and that it’s distributed. That has to be DOAJ’s primary goal. I can’t see us getting into metrics and citations. I would like to see references supported on our article pages though, because there’s a huge movement for open references and open citations.
You’re involved with some of the projects and collaborations DOAJ is a part of, like Think.Check.Submit, JASPER and you’re a Chair of the OASPA Board, what does this entail?
Think.Check.Submit is a great initiative because it’s cross-industry, and it’s not about one particular form of publishing, but all scholarly publishing. It’s a direct attempt for these cross-industry bodies to try to help researchers not publish in predatory journals. DOAJ was one of the founding organisations of Think.Check.Submi., and all the organisations and publisher bodies involved volunteer their time to maintaining and developing the resource. A lot of the resources have been translated to lots of different languages, with the most recent development being the Think.Check.Submit video translated to Japanese.
JASPER was set up as a project, but has now been absorbed into DOAJ as a standard service. It’s a part of our commitment to help those publishers or journals with less resources, particularly Diamond journals. And also to raise awareness of the importance of long-term digital preservation. It’s really important that the research that is published is preserved forever. With JASPER, we’ve got an agreement with some long-term preservation partners, and are able to subsidise the costs of having these journals preserved forever.
DOAJ has been involved in OASPA for a long time. I started as an ordinary member 5 years ago. I became the Secretary and then Chair. OASPA’s work is really important, because it’s a non-trade association and the only place open access publishers of any kind can come together to talk about issues around open access. In the recent OASPA conference in Lisbon, a lot of the conversations were around how we can maximise the impact and equity of open access. We’re no longer talking about how to achieve it, but how to make access to knowledge and research equitable .
What does an average week look like for you?
There’s always development work with Cottage Labs, and we have a standard weekly meeting which dictates what I do for a large part of the week. I have lots of discussions with the Editorial team about prioritisation of tasks. I spend a lot of time answering emails, and do a lot of support work for helpdesk. I’m still very much involved in helping publishers upload their article metadata to DOAJ or understand the API. We’re also getting more and more applications for journals that want to be preserved through JASPER.
As DOAJ is a totally virtual organisation, there’s a lot of writing and documenting to give visibility to the work you’re doing and let other team members know. And as Operations Manager, people look to you to play a key role in that.
What do you find challenging about your role?
As DOAJ is getting bigger, we spend a lot of time developing processes to compensate for the fact that we don’t sit next to each other or see each other face-to-face regularly. I’m so proud of the fact that DOAJ is so global – we have people in lots of different countries and we have a mixture of culture and experiences. But that does come with challenges, and we spend a lot of time compensating for it and trying to make us more efficient. We also have a lot of different communication channels, so sometimes it’s difficult to remember where you’ve communicated something!
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges is myself and the way I work and have adapted in this environment. I jump around all over the place, and don’t work very linearly. I just find myself constantly moving between tasks instead.
In terms of the role of actually managing the platform, it’s always been a challenge for DOAJ that we are under-resourced as an open infrastructure. Therefore we have a finite number of developer days with Cottage Labs and a very small, thin prioritisation pipeline. This means that things get re-prioritised or de-prioritised all the time. That constant juggling of different tasks is really challenging, as we don’t have the resources to have our own in-house IT department.
What do you like most about your role?
I love the people that I work with. I’ve also loved the people I’ve worked with in previous roles, but it’s different at DOAJ because we are such a small team. We’re all working for a non-profit in a severely underfunded part of academic publishing, so we’re not doing this to get rich. Everyone in the team has passion, and I love people’s passion, dedication, commitment and the experience everyone brings. That makes coming to work for DOAJ every day really pleasurable for me.
What are your personal views on Open Access?
Open access in some form has been around for 30 years – since Steven Harnad’s Subversive Proposal in 1994. It’s more officially recognised to have started with the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Everyone’s saying it’s too slow and that nothing has happened, but I think a lot has happened. Being at DOAJ you see that a lot has happened and is still happening. We are constantly being approached by new partners, new groups of people that want to work with us and requests from all over the world about new uses for our metadata. We see something new at DOAJ almost every week
When people say that open access has stagnated or is dominated by APCs and commercial publishers, I disagree. I think there’s a lot of work left to do. There’s a huge need for open access, especially if we can use it to solve some of the biggest problems facing humanity, like climate change. I’m filled with hope rather than thinking “It’s been 30 years and nothing has happened”.
