We are proud to announce that Dr Pierre de Villiers, Managing Director at AOSIS, has been elected as one of four new Board members to serve on the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) Advisory Board. View all board members.

About DOAJ

The DOAJ Advisory Board, with a maximum of 11 seats, is governed by Terms of Reference and provides advice and expertise to the Managing Director and DOAJ Team on any business issues. This includes issues around the DOAJ strategy, budget, fundraising, HR, partnerships, staffing, and organisational structure. They are initially elected for a fixed term of 3 years, with the possibility of re-election for a further 3 years.

The DOAJ, an independent index for open access scholarly journals, was launched in 2003 with 300 open access journals. Today, it contains almost 17 500 peer-reviewed, open access journals across all the areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities. Open access journals from all countries and in all languages are accepted for indexing. Learn more about the DOAJ.

AOSIS Publishing is proud to have 42 journals that are indexed in the DOAJ. View all AOSIS’s 46 open access journals.

Dr Pierre de Villiers is the first individual from the African continent to serve on the DOAJ Advisory Board, thus giving recognition to the excellent research work done by journals, editors and authors on the African content.

Quote from Dr Pierre de Villiers:

“I am a great supporter of the DOAJ. I firmly believe that open access is the best way to ensure access and equity in science, and that is why I chose the open access model for AOSIS, right from the start. When I was the editor of a scholarly journal in the early 2000’s I converted the journal to open access, to become the first open access journal in South Africa. I believe the whole scholarly publication model will change to open access over the next decade, if not earlier. That is why we need an organisation like the DOAJ which will act as standard setter for the “new” scholarly publishing economy – to set and preserve acceptable standards, to weed out questionable publishers and to protect scholars and institutions. I also want to protect the smaller publishers, as they are needed and very often the incubation laboratories for innovation.

I believe DOAJ should be THE standard setter for scholarly journal publishing in open access. Its role will expand rapidly as most scholarly publishing will move towards open access. As such, it will play an important role in protecting the scholarly community from exploitation, and through that, protect the people of the world from poor quality research.”

AOSIS is very proud of this major achievement and would like to congratulate Dr Pierre de Villiers as our Managing Director.