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 Matt Hodgkinson, Head of Editorial.
Hello Matt! Tell us a little about your background before joining DOAJ!
After studying biology and then finishing a Master’s degree in genetics I decided that lab work wasn’t for me. I moved into science editing and got my first position at BMC in 2003 – in the early days of open access, around the time the Berlin Declaration, Bethesda Statement e Budapest initiative were launched. After I worked as a scientific editor on the BMC series, I moved to PLOS One and then Hindawi, where I headed the research integrity team. I then worked at UKRIO, the advisory charity. I am also on the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) council and was, until last month, Treasurer at the European Association of Science Editors (EASE). So, I’ve got a background in open access, publication ethics, science editing, and assessment of journals.
So you found the world of publishing a bit more appealing than the lab work?
The best part of being a research student was writing up the thesis. My knowledge and understanding of science greatly improved as an editor because it exposes you to a breadth of areas and techniques in science and the disputes and disagreements within fields. You understand the real process of how people arrive at scientific answers, which you don’t necessarily get as a research student when you’re narrowly focused on one topic. I found science editing and communication more rewarding; there’s a more rapid ‘action-to-result effect’.
Though one can also argue it’s also sometimes very slow, given publication times?
It can be, yes!
You started as Head of Editorial at DOAJ in 2025: tell us about this role and what made you want to work for DOAJ
DOAJ was founded the year I started working in publishing, so our careers have kind of gone in parallel! I joined DOAJ’s new Editorial Policy Advisory Group last year, and saw the Head of Editorial position come up. I thought it was a good opportunity, as it combined my interests in open access publishing and publication ethics. I’ve recently done a similar, voluntary role as Co-Chair of the membership subcommittee with COPE, so I was already really familiar with a lot of the general processes. Both DOAJ and COPE are founders of the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, so there’s a lot of similarities, though sometimes the details can differ.
In my role, I am a part of the Executive Team, looking at the day-to-day challenges that DOAJ faces, as well as contributing to strategy and planning. In addition, I oversee the editorial decision-making processes, including reassessing which journals are indexed, the Appeals Committee, and the Quality Team. The Appeals Committee reconsiders journals and publishers that have been removed from the index and the Quality Team, headed by Cenyu Shen, checks journals that might be unusual or questionable to make sure we do a really deep dive into those. I am also involved with some of the individual complex decisions.
I’m also responsible for the way in which we’re applying our criteria, and whether our criteria need to be revised. I consult both the DOAJ team and the Editorial Policy Advisory Group about this. Sometimes wider consultation with the community is needed to check that we’re applying our criteria in the right way, and whether we need to revise them or add new policies and recommendations.
Why would DOAJ need to revise its criteria? Do they not uphold a standard that should be constant?
There’s certainly some consistent standards in journal publishing, but things are always changing over time. The norms might change, and different models may become more acceptable, like post-publication peer review, for example. Then there’s new challenges: I don’t think anyone imagined that there was such a thing as a paper mill 20 years ago — people knew about vanity publishing, but that was usually quite easy to spot.
Generative AI is another new area that we’re developing a policy on at the moment.
There will also be disagreements about the ‘edge cases’, where we need to decide whether journals fall within or outside of our scope. There will always be room for discussion around that.
What is the most challenging part of your job?
DOAJ is generally high volume, so we’re dealing with a lot of individual tasks. We’ve got thousands of journals every year that we need to assess – not just applications but also appeals, updates and general reassessment. For me, and the rest of the team, making sure that we keep all the balls in the air is the main issue. I think we’re quite good at it, but finding the time and headspace to take a deep look at things can be tricky.
I recently looked at the number of journals coming in annually: we’re consistently indexing around 2,000 new journals every year, but the number of journals that apply is rising.
Do you think this is a trend that will continue? Or will applications eventually start to decrease?
In many settings there’s government mandates or encouragement for institutions to be founding OA journals. For these small institutional publishers, and for other new OA journals, they will reach a point where they feel that indexing in DOAJ is appropriate. There’s also a large number of journals that we have rejected or removed, which might reapply once the issues we identified have been resolved.
We’re thinking a lot about how we might be able to help those journals reach the point where they can meet our criteria, or whether there are particular criteria that may be too exclusive. We might have to relax some criteria, or work out ways in which we can work with journals to overcome those barriers or misunderstandings that prevent them from getting indexed. I don’t think our work will ever be done, but I don’t know what the future holds for the number of OA journals globally.
Why doesn’t DOAJ just set up a process to immediately assist journals that are rejected with good publishing practices and help them meet the criteria?
Part of it is capacity. We’re a small team of about a dozen Managing Editors, supported by a larger group of volunteers. We’ve been considering how we might be able to move towards that kind of process, but it won’t be something that happens immediately and we need to consider how we can resource it in the most effective way.
There is also a tension between wanting to help journals and knowing that some journals and publishers are not acting in the best interest of scholarship and their communities. There are questionable publishers who apply and whom we’ve had to exclude. What we don’t want to do is give those journals more information on how to evade scrutiny. It’s difficult separating the journals doing the best they can with limited resources versus the ones who are not acting in good faith, and who we don’t want to help.
What is the best part of your job?
I think it’s the satisfaction of knowing that we’ve done a detailed assessment and that what we’re doing is the right action. It’s never enjoyable to have to turn down, remove, or exclude journals or publishers, but the satisfaction comes in knowing that we’ve gone through the right process and we’ve assessed things in the right way. That’s when we know we’ve done a good job — when we feel that the journals that we’ve indexed are those that will help the community find quality open access content.
What are your views on open access?
I first heard about open access when I was a genetics research student at Cambridge, when I was introduced to it by the late Michael Ashburner, who was the head of the Drosophila (fruit fly) genetics group and one of the instigators of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) petition in 2000. It struck me as such a powerful movement — Michael could be very persuasive! It was not too long after that I had the opportunity to start at BMC, an early OA publisher. It’s been 22 years now, and I’m still passionate about open access and having open access publishing succeed in its different forms. I think it’s vital for the continued progress of scholarship.
There are countless examples of how people have struggled to access knowledge because it was behind paywalls or registration walls. It feels like we’re moving towards open access being the default, but it’s taken a long time to get there. There’s been unintended and unforeseen issues around things like Article Processing Charges (APCs); there’s a lot of debate at the moment about appropriate business models, and how those interact with research integrity, which is valuable.
Open access is here to stay. It’s a lot more well-established than it was a couple of decades ago. There’s a lot more understanding of what it is, what it means, and how it works — and that it doesn’t mean abandoning the checks and balances that exist within scholarly publishing. That’s something DOAJ has been instrumental in, by having well-defined criteria and applying them in a consistent way to help highlight those journals that are operating using good practice, and doing a lot of good for the community. Hopefully, we will be able to continue doing that for a couple of decades more and longer.
