Mrs Delia Mihaila

I am delighted to have been nominated for the EASE Council Elections.

I have been involved in EASE activities in different ways in the last 4 years. I was a speaker at the EASE conference in Bucharest in 2018, I delivered a webinar for the EASE members on the transition to the OA model in 2021 and I was part of the Program Committee of the EASE conference in Valencia in 2022 and last but not least I have been a member of EASE for several years. The reason why I like being part of the EASE community and attend its conferences, is because we are all focused on the hands-on editorial work and we all aim to improve the quality of science publishing through very concrete measures.

As a Council Member I would be delighted to advise members on the transition to the OA model. I can share my experience in launching and developing open access journals in a financially sustainable manner. I hope I can work closely together with other EASE members interested in open access to find solutions meant to help the community of editors and small scientific publishers to adopt the open access model for their journals. I have extensive experience working with society and university journals and I am keen to support smaller publishers or individual editors in the transformation process. I could also contribute to the training and professional development working group, based on my experience in hiring and training big teams of editors in various countries in the recent years.

The areas which interest me most at the moment are: research and publication ethics, assistive technologies to help editors cope with the increased volume of articles and the need to speed up the editorial process, technologies to help readers navigate content, innovation and incentives in peer-review models, transdisciplinarity, the impact of research beyond publication and last but not least improving the author, reviewer and editor experience.

Career Summary

Delia Mihaila has recently taken over the role of Chief Publishing Officer for Academia.edu. In this capacity, she will be responsible for building up the publishing business of the organisation.

Previously she held various roles, including CEO and Chief Publishing Officer, within MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute), a leading fully open-access publisher, whose mission is to foster open scientific exchange in all forms, across all disciplines. MDPI offers a wide range of services, including journal and book publication, early publication at preprints.org, and conferences hosting on sciforum.net, to support scientific communities worldwide in making a positive impact on research.

Delia joined MDPI in 2013 and served in various positions within the company, including as Publishing Development Manager and Publishing Director. She held two CEO mandates within MDPI from February 2015 to April 2016 and from May 2019 to November 2022. During the 10 years at MDPI her various roles involved a wide range of responsibilities from hands-on editorial work on journals to strategic development of journals and portfolios, training of editorial staff, to operational work, expanding the organization worldwide, and doing advocacy work for the open access model.

She holds a Master of Arts in International Publishing from Oxford Brookes University. Before joining MDPI she worked as Journal Publishing Manager for John Wiley & Sons in the UK, where she was responsible for the strategic development and performance of a large portfolio of journals within the health sciences division. Before obtaining her Master’s degree in the UK, she worked as Business Development Manager for a medical publisher in Romania and acquired project management experience being involved in several PHARE European projects.

Read Delia’s CV

Conflict of Interest declaration