Tom Olyhoek has been living and working in Africa for many years. After obtaining his PhD in molecular microbiology from Amsterdam University (1982) he has been at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin for 7 (seven) years. He has spent 7 (seven) years in Kenya and Algeria doing research on malaria, sleeping sickness and meningococcal epidemics. Since 2012 he is advocating for open access and open science as Open Access working group coordinator for Open Knowledge International. In 2013 he became a member of the DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) advisory board which was instrumental in redefining the criteria for journals being indexed in DOAJ. Since 2014 he is Editor-in-Chief at the DOAJ. From January 2018 his main task has been the managing of the global DOAJ ambassador program and global outreach activities including connecting to other open communities like the Creative Commons Global Network and OCSD Net. From 2019-2021 the program has a special focus on Africa. He is also a member of the programming committee of Force11 where he teaches at the yearly Force11 Summer School on the topic of how to evaluate the scientific quality of journals, articles, and individual scholars. His current research interests are copyright and licensing in open access publishing, developing new ways to assess the quality of scholars and scholarly works and following research in the area of soil microbiology in relation to soil health and human health (microbiome research).