The UKSG 47th Annual Conference and Exhibition: Glasgow

Joanna Ball is Managing Director for DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. Before joining DOAJ in 2022, her career was based in academic libraries in the UK and Denmark, most recently as Head of Roskilde University Library, part of the Royal Danish Library. She is currently Chair of UKSG.

Professor Inke Näthke was awarded her PhD from the University of California, San Francisco and then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and Harvard Medical School before establishing her independent research team in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Dundee focussed on early changes in bowel cancer. She is Professor of Epithelial Biology and also Associate Dean for Professional Culture.  She co-founded the Scottish Research integrity Network, is a member of the Board of Trustees of UKRIO, and is Research Integrity lead in the University.

Daniel Hook is CEO of Digital Science, co-founder of Symplectic, a research information management provider, and of the Research on Research Institute (RoRI). A theoretical physicist by training, he continues to do research both in physics and in bibliometrics in his spare time, and holds visiting academic positions at Imperial College London and Washington University in St Louis.

Ivan Oransky is one of the two co-founders of Retraction Watch, the editor-in-chief of Spectrum and distinguished journalist in residence at New York University’s Arthur L Carter Journalism Institute.

Susan Halfpenny is Head of Research and Learning Information Services at the University of Aberdeen. She is responsible for the delivery of digital and information skills, open research and subject services within the Library. Susan has led on a range of initiatives to develop staff and students digital capabilities, including the development of skills frameworks, the rollout of training programmes and the creation of digital citizenship and wellbeing MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Her interests are digital scholarship, tackling information inequalities and ethical digital transformation for education and research.

Steph Jesper (she or they) is a Teaching & Learning Advisor in the DISC (Digital Inclusion, Skills, & Creativity) team in Library, Archives, and Learning Services at the University of York. She’s a qualified Librarian who moonlights in IT, developing and delivering digital skills training for students and staff, and looking after the University’s online Skills Guides resources. When she’s not teaching all things digital, she’s the sort of person who makes computer games in spreadsheets for fun.

Siobhan Dunlop (they/them) is a Teaching and Learning Advisor in the Digital Inclusion, Skills and Creativity (DISC) team at the University of York, supporting people's digital skills within the university and beyond. They focus on introductory coding, multimedia creation, and digital creativity, as well as the ways in which digital technologies impact our lives in a digital society and the importance of critical digital literacies and ethics in the technological world. When not doing all of this, they also write poems using code.

Jenni Adams is Open Research Manager at the University of Sheffield, where she leads projects to raise awareness and support uptake of open research practices among researchers at all levels.

Ric Campbell is Research Data Steward at the University of Sheffield. Based in the University Library, he is currently working with departments and research groups across the University to support the adoption of FAIR practices for research data and software.

Simon Bell is the Institutional Sales Manager for Bristol University Press, responsible for all institutional sales across BUP’s book and journal portfolio including BUP’s new digital platform “Bristol University Press Digital”.

Simon has worked in the scholarly and academic publishing industry for the past 22 years (the majority of which in Sales & Marketing at Director/Managerial level) with previous roles at Publons (part of Clarivate Analytics); Emerald Publishing; UCL Press (freelance); Manchester University Press; Liverpool University Press and Hodder Education.

He has a broad experience of working in industry stakeholder groups including the Association of University Presses University Press Week Task Force; the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) Academic and Learned Journal Collection (ALJC) Steering Committee and the Marketing Stakeholder Group for the development and launch of the Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN) Open Access platform.

Dr Beth Montague-Hellen started off academic life as a Molecular Biologist studying at Manchester University. The next 14 years were spent as a bioinformatician, accruing an MSc and a Phd on the way.

Following this, Beth decided that supporting others to do excellent research was far more rewarding than actually doing the research and so moved into Libraries and Research Support. Beth takes an as open-as-possible, EDI focused approach to research support and is a big advocate for green OA alongside a completely transparent research cycle including radically open data and software sharing.

As Associate Director for Research, Katie is a member of the senior management team at University of Nottingham Libraries UK, and departmental lead on developments and innovations in research communications, research support and research technologies. Katie builds relationships throughout the university community, and leads a team providing practical, straightforward advice and training on planning, publishing, sharing and preserving research. Before becoming a librarian, Katie undertook a PhD in Learning Sciences developing insights into, and enthusiasm for, learning, emerging technologies and the process of research. Katie is a Member of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP).

Michael Levine-Clark is Dean of the University of Denver Libraries, where he has worked in various positions since 1999. He serves in leadership roles in multiple consortia and is the chair of the OCLC Americas Regional Council. As a member of many publisher and vendor library advisory boards, he provides guidance about library and higher education trends. For his work on e-books and demand-driven acquisition models, he received the 2015 Harrasowitz Leadership in Library Acquisitions Award. He is widely published and has been invited to speak on six continents about academic library collections and scholarly communication issues.

 

Chris has nearly 39 years’ experience working in Libraries, including over 20 at the British Library in a variety of curatorial, management and strategic roles, and over 16at University Library Director level. She joined Imperial College in September 2013 as Director of Library Services.
Chris's areas of expertise include strategy, open science and scholarly communications, organisational change, public engagement, space, and her original discipline, music.
Chris is a member of the Jisc UUK Content Negotiations Strategy Group, she chairs the Jisc UUK Content Expert Group, she is an elected Board member of Research Libraries UK (RLUK), and a member of the SCONUL Content Strategy Group.

Caren leads Jisc's licensing and negotiation service, providing UK education and research with access to digital content and software solutions that support the digital transformation of research, learning, teaching and assessment and the digital estate of universities and colleges.

Judith Carr is the Head of Open Research Services at Edge Hill University. She has worked in scholarly communications and open research for 10 years and was formerly Research Data Manager at University of Liverpool. Her interest in the Innovation in Scholarly communications project was sparked by a workshop at the Crick Institute in 2016.

Rachel Bury has worked in Higher Education for more than 20 years, previously working in NHS library and information services in Merseyside. Academic Engagement and Resources covers all support and collaboration with academic colleagues and researchers, including resource provision, and developing staff skills. Previous roles include academic liaison, with extensive experience of working with Faculty of Health staff and NHS researchers.

 

Gareth Cole is the Open Research Development and Discovery Lead at Loughborough University. He was previously the Loughborough's Research Data Manager. In his current role he manages the Research Repository team and leads on the University Library's open research work.
Gareth is also a work package lead on the Open Book Futures project, where he leads the work investigating the archiving and preservation of open access monographs. He held a similar role on the earlier COPIM project.

After a 14 year career in public, FE and HE libraries, Adrian joined Figshare from Loughborough University, as Business Development Manager for the UK, Ireland and Nordics. Adrian is a passionate advocate of open research, and supporting technologies. As a first in family graduate with a wealth of experience supporting faculty Adrian believes in the transformative capabilities that libraries have to improve knowledge, understanding and to benefit society. If you catch him at the conference, please come and say hello; he's always happy to talk about all things repositories and OR.

Mark is an Assistant Head Librarian at Cardiff Met – with the focal points of scholarly communications and research support in his remit. He didn't really know what it all meant when he first started in the role originally (don't tell anyone) but now he (very much) does understand (phew!). He is passionate about all aspects of open research, thinks a lot about (and does the work) to support research lifecycles and loves a bit of data wrangling - alongside a healthy interest in shiny new library things. Mark has been working for (nearly!) 20 years in academic libraries.

Hylke Koers is the Chief Information Officer for STM Solutions, STM’s operational arm which develops and manages shared infrastructures and collaborative services to support the scholarly communications community. Before joining STM, Hylke worked in several senior technology and product management roles, in both private and public sector organizations, supporting the research community. Hylke currently serves as Program Director for GetFTR and SeamlessAccess, and is one of the driving forces behind the STM Integrity Hub.

 

Katherine Stephan is the research engagement librarian at Liverpool John Moores University. She is responsible for organising library training related to research, outreach, engagement and publishing for all researchers at LJMU. She has a background in children’s librarianship and is a keen advocate of local libraries, open research and responsible research assessment. She is the librarian member of Think, Check, Submit (an initiative to help researchers identify trusted journals for their research); a member of the UKSG’s outreach and engagement committee; and a co-organiser of Open Research Week, a collaboration between LJMU, Edge Hill, Essex and Liverpool Universities.

Rebecca Wojturska (she/her) is the Open Access Publishing Officer at the University of Edinburgh, functioning within Library and University Collections on the Scholarly Communications Team. She is responsible for managing Edinburgh Diamond: an open access hosting service which offers hosting, technical support, preservation, indexing, and publishing guidance to staff and students who wish to publish diamond open access books and journals. Rebecca is also the Statistician/Bibliometrician for the Journal of Information Literacy. In her spare time she loves nothing more than reading Gothic literature, watching horror films and crushing her enemies at board games.

Cenyu Shen is Deputy Head of Editorial (Quality) for Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Her work focuses on leading and managing the quality team to develop processes and strategies to keep DOAJ away from questionable publishing. Since 2016, she has also been the DOAJ
Ambassador for China to help DOAJ develop the China market. She built the cooperation for DOAJ with Chinese scholarly societies and publishing organisations and established DOAJ's Chinese journals community to help more local journals be indexed in DOAJ. She was the advisory board member on the Learned Publishing DEIA special issue published by ALPSP in 2022. She holds a PhD in Information Systems Science at the Hanken School of Economics in Finland. Her doctoral thesis explored the gold open access publishing model, its sustainable development and problems of questionable publishing. She is the author or co-author of several scientific publications contained in the Web of Science, one of which has been cited more than 800 times and ranked by The Financial Times in the 4th position among the 100 most socially influential research publications from business schools worldwide over the year 2015-2020.

Peter McCracken has been an electronic resources librarian at Cornell University since 2016. He was a reference librarian at East Carolina University and at the University of Washington, before co-founding Serials Solutions in 2000, where he was responsible for creating the first commercially available e-journal knowledgebase. Peter manages the interactions between Cornell’s e-resources, and also advises on Open Access opportunities. In his spare time, he runs an e-resources database, ShipIndex.org, which helps people do research on vessels.

Since joining Ex Libris (part of Clarivate) in 2001 I worked on strategic data projects, library discovery and user centered services for many years. In my current role I focus on leveraging generative AI for discovering library content. Community work is very important to me. I’m involved in various NISO initiatives incl. KBART as well as serving on the CrossRef board. I’m fascinated by the changes in technology, the scale of material that is available today, and the opportunities they offer. I have degrees in library science, information systems, and history and a passion for lifelong learning.

Dr. David Pride is a Research Associate at The Knowledge Media Institute, part of the STEM faculty at the Open University. He completed his PhD. in 2020 and his research focused on extracting citations from fulltext research papers and classifying these citations according to type and influence on the citing paper. He also conducted the largest study into the use of citation data and peer review in the U.K.’s Research Excellence Framework. He has been an invited speaker at international events and has published extensively in the domain. David was also part of the team that recently completed work on the ON-MERRIT project, a Horizon 2020 project.

Shereen Thor is a comedian turned coach who slays with hope and humor. She has shared the stage with greats like Serena Williams, Prince Harry, Pau Gasol, and Les Brown. She is also the bestselling author of Revolutionary Woman, which focuses on inspiring women and people of color to revolutionize how they see themselves to create a more equitable world. She has been featured in Forbes, TEDx, The Wall Street Journal, Insider, Medium, Spike TV, 97.1 AMP Radio, and more. When she isn’t working, she is enjoying the great outdoors, spending time with her family, coaching or playing soccer, enjoying good food with friends and leaving her cell phone in the dust for extended periods of time. To learn more go to www.shereenthor.com.

Grace O'Brien has worked in a variety of libraries across the academic, medical and public sector. She has worked in the European University Institute in Florence and is fluent in Italian. She also worked in a hospital library during the Covid-19 pandemic. She has experience working in Collections, Electronic Resources and Systems. Grace is currently the Electronic Resources Librarian in Maynooth University Library. Grace is a member of the Acquisitions Group of Ireland Committee and she is an Associate member of the Library Association of Ireland.

 

Dr Ruth O’Hara is a Collections and Content Librarian in Maynooth University Library. She holds a PhD in Ancient Classics. She is an Associate Member of the Library Association of Ireland (LAI) and is on the committee of the LAI Cataloguing and Metadata Group. She has held variety of library roles across both general and special collections as well as several university teaching positions.

 

Christina is an early-career information professional at the University of Toronto Libraries, and holds an Master of Information. Her current projects include cataloguing special collections, like the Syd Bolton Collection which comprises of 13,000+ video games, hundreds of consoles, and 5000+ peripherals. Christina's interests include sustainability in DH research, text and data mining (TDM) librarianship, and instruction within the academic library. In her free time, you can find her playing inside (Minecraft, Stellaris, or Star Trek Online) or outside (hiking with her family, or splashing in the mud).

Cath is the Open Access and Digital Scholarship Librarian at Liverpool John Moores University. She takes the lead for open access advocacy at LJMU and manages the institutional repository and open journals service. Cath has over 20 years’ experience in libraries in a range of roles from academic services, customer services, user support and most recently research support. Cath is also the Content Officer for CILIP's Library and Information Research Group (LIRG)

Hossam is Learning and Teaching Librarian at the Open University (OU) Library. Hossam specialises as an Academic Liaison and Accessibility Librarian. Through his accessibility work Hossam worked with the OU Library Econtent Team and Publishers to improve the accessibility of electronic Resources.

Bev has worked in various types of libraries and is now an eContent Manager at the OU working through relationships with publishers to improve accessibility for Open University students.

 

Clare Hooper joined Liverpool University Press in 2008, and was promoted to Director of Journals Publishing in August 2023. She manages the strategic development of LUP's 45 academic journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences, as well as commissioning new titles. She coordinates all journals publishing activity, including editorial, marketing, production, finance, fulfilment and distribution, online publication platform, pricing. She is key contact for all partners, including learned societies, editors and editorial boards, third parties and agents.

 

Ian Morgan is the Global Institutional Journals Sales Manager at Edinburgh University Press, responsible for all global institutional sales across EUP’s extensive journal portfolio.

A highly-experienced and effective Sales & Marketing Professional with a successful background in HSS and STM publishing for global publishers (Reed Elsevier, T&F, IWA Publishing) for over 30 years.

Kate has a passion for academic publishing having worked in the sector for the past 14 years and before this as an academic bookseller. As Institutional Sales Manager for MUP she is responsible for identifying the needs of academic organisations within the humanities and social sciences and provides e-book collections tailored to their teaching and learning requirements. She manages several publishing partners for the distribution of MUPs products, globally. Kate is committed to facilitating relevant and accessible content for her library customers which embraces the University of Manchester’s sustainable developmental goals. She also participates in MUP’s accessibility and social responsibility working groups.

Hannah Crago is the Open Research Development Librarian at the University of Essex, where she leads the Research Services team. Hannah's role includes promoting open research practices across the university, as well as providing training for researchers on publishing, research visibility, and copyright. Hannah's role also involves management of the institutional open access fund, and advocacy for alternative models of open access publication.

Nicola Warren is the Content Management Librarian at the University of Essex. Nic oversees the subscription to, and maintenance of, journal content, databases, and other licensed materials - ensuring relevance to the University community's teaching and research requirements. Nic maintains and develops relationships with suppliers, building key links with these stakeholders. Increasingly, Nic plays a part in the negotiations, decision making, and renewal of read and publish agreements, working closely with both the Open Research Development Librarian, and Open Research Governance Manager.

 

Tom is currently undertaking a secondment as the Research Culture and Open Monographs Lead at Lancaster University Library. Within this role he leads and coordinates programmes of activity to develop an Open Research Culture as well as exploring options to facilitate open monograph publishing. In his substantive post he works across the areas of Open Access, Research Intelligence and Research Data Management to coordinate and deliver a range of projects, services and initiatives as an Open Research Officer. Tom is also co-editor of the UKSG e-News.

Bethany Logan is the Research & Open Scholarship Senior Manager at the University of Sussex. She has worked in academic library roles since 2006 and currently leads the design and delivery of Library services to support research and open scholarship, embedding principles Open Research and Scholarship in policy, practice, and culture across the University.

Ros Pyne is Global Director, Research and Open Access at Bloomsbury Academic. She has worked in open access policy and strategy roles for over a decade and has a particular interest in bringing OA to long-form scholarship and to the humanities. Ros sits on the advisory boards for the OAPEN OA Books Toolkit and the Mellon-funded Book Analytics Dashboard Project and is co-author of several papers on open access books.
 

Toby, Publisher, Policy Commons and Co-Founder of Coherent Digital, has 35+ years experience in scholarly, policy and professional publishing. Previously, he held a variety of senior roles with OECD Publishing and Elsevier Science. Besides the formal stuff, Toby has wrestled with data publishing and is now trying to tame grey literature. He is a regular speaker at publishing and librarian events in Europe and North America. He serves as expert advisor to the Open Research Community. Previously, he was a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry Publishing Board and Chair of ALPSP. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9601-9130 https://twitter.com/tobyabgreen .

Professor Simon Hettrick is Deputy Director of the Software Sustainability Institute and a Director of the Southampton Research Software Group.

He is a passionate advocate for non-traditional research careers. He orchestrated a campaign to gain recognition for Research Software Engineers, which has grown into an international community numbering in the tens of thousands. He was the founding chair of the UK's Association of Research Software Engineers and a founding Trustee of the Society of Research Software Engineering.

Simon is the Chair of the Hidden REF: a national campaign that looks to recognises all research outputs and every role that makes research possible. In this role, Simon campaigns for a broader interpretation of how people can contribute to the conduct of research.

Mac-Anthony Cobblah is an advocate for Open Science and Digital Scholarly Publishing in Africa. He has a strong background in Information Science, Electronic Information Management and Digital Scholarly Publishing. He is currently the University Librarian for the University of Cape Coast. He is also the Chair of the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Ghana (CARLIGH) and the Chairperson, Academic Libraries and Library Consortia Section of Africa Libraries and Institutions Association (AfLIA) as well as the Licensing Coordinator of EIFL for Ghana.

 

Dr Frances Pinter is the Executive Chair of the Central European University Press and formerly CEO of Manchester University Press. She advises several small university presses around the world. She was the founding Publisher of Bloomsbury Academic and the founder of Knowledge Unlatched, taking a particular interest in developing sustainable OA business models. Previously she was Publishing Director at the Open Society Institute where she established EIFL, a leading library consortium, while working in the post-communist countries. She is a visiting research fellow at the London School of Economics and SAS, University of London.

Camille Lemieux is a manager of global diversity, equity, and inclusion at Springer Nature. Committed to creating equitable and inclusive organisations, she uses her expertise in data analysis to help work teams improve their DEI competencies. By monitoring KPIs and conducting programme evaluation, she strives to turn good intentions about DEI into outcomes. She is a member of the Society for Scholarly Publishing DEIA Committee and joined the C4DISC Workplace Equity Survey team in 2022. Prior to joining Springer Nature, she conducted quantitative and qualitative research on education and equity programmes at global non-profit EDC.

Rob Johnson is the Managing Director of Research Consulting, a mission-driven business which works to improve the effectiveness and impact of research and scholarly communication. He began his career with KPMG, the international professional services firm, before working in a senior research management role at the University of Nottingham. Since founding Research Consulting in 2013 he has led more than 150 projects in the field of scholarly communication and research. He is a UKSG Trustee, a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and holds an MSc in Higher Education Management from Loughborough University.

Gaynor is committed to develolping sustainable and fair routes enabling authors the choice of not for profit journals in which to publish their research.

Natasha has a career spanning over 16 years in the library, education, and book aggregation sectors. A qualified librarian, she holds a BA in Classical Literature and Civilisation from University of Birmingham and a MSc in Information Management in the Cultural Sector from City University, London.
Tash has worked and managed library teams in the public, school, further and higher education sectors where she gained first-hand insight into the varying acquisition and collection development trends and issues facing information professionals and their end users.
In her role as Director, Industry & Publisher Strategy, Tash is responsible for driving better understanding of global customer trends in collections development.

Kimberly is a Resource Librarian at Glasgow Caledonian University's Sir Alex Ferguson Library. She is responsible for all areas of resource acquisition and management and is the co-lead on the university’s resource list service.
Kimberly is currently the chair of the SHEDL Learning Content group and is a member of the SCURL EDI Network.
Kimberly has worked at GCU since 2013, but has 18 years’ experience working in a variety of roles across the public library and education sectors. She is passionate about supporting early career professionals, collection development, EDI and wellbeing support in Academic Libraries.

Andrew has been Acquisitions and Content Services Manager at Imperial College London since May 2020. This is a strategic role which looks after acquisitions, metadata and document delivery across seven Imperial College Libraries, identifying and implementing new technologies and innovations, and advising the Library leadership team on sector developments.

Andrew represents Imperial College at a sector level on a number of national groups and networks including Jisc's Learning Content expert group, and SUPC's framework and contract management groups. His particular interests are around collection development, library-supplier relations, and how libraries can do more holistically to support Universities' duty of care.

Jenny Foster has worked in libraries and professional services for more than 20 years, including at Bath Spa University and the University of Southampton. She believes in considering the student experience in its entirety, with experience of developing spaces to support changing approaches to teaching and learning. Jenny leads a combined helpdesk providing frontline student support across multiple departments, including the university wellbeing and mental health service. Based in Catalyst, a shared building encompassing the university library, her teams support students from application to graduation with enquiries ranging from IT help and library skills to support for students in crisis.

 

Siobhan joined the Open Library of Humanities in October 2023 as a Publishing Technologies Librarian, having previously worked at the University of Leeds where she started her career in libraries as a Library Assistant in 2021. She co-leads the Academic Libraries North’s ‘Global Equity Network’ and is an editor for UKSG Insights, whilst working towards her PhD in conversation analysis.

Siobhan is passionate about Open Access, Knowledge Equity, Open Education, and has a keen interest in digital transformation and technological advances in librarianship. She also has an interest in Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, and empowering those historically disenfranchised in education.

Tom is the ORCID Product Director and has a long history of building shared scholarly infrastructure. He has worked at ORCID for the past 8 years and is passionate about connecting researchers and research through technical and social means.

With over a decade of experience working in the Academic Publishing and Educational Technology industries, Shivendra is passionate about supporting Research and Scholarly Communications. He holds a BSc in Physics with Astrophysics, and postgraduate qualifications in Business, and Accounting & Finance.

As a Senior Engagement Lead at ORCID in the Global Direct Members team, Shiv focuses on growing member & integration adoption, and collaborations with Service Providers and Publishers serving the wider research community.

John Cox writes about and analyses issues impacting academic libraries and their positioning. He retired as University Librarian at the University of Galway in November 2023 and is currently writing a book on The Position and Strategic Positioning of Academic Libraries: global drivers and local politics, to be published by Facet Publishing. His most recent published work is a two-part SWOT analysis of academic libraries in the New Review of Academic Librarianship. Previous publications include review articles on the higher education environment driving academic library strategy, positioning the academic library in the institution, and communicating library roles in digital scholarship.

Katrine Sundsbø is the Community Manager at DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals). She has more than 7 years experience working within the scholarly communications community, and is particularly interested in Open Access, Open Research and Open Education as well as community engagement. Kat has created the Open Access Escape Room, the Open Access Mystery and is the co-creator of Copyright Dough, Open Science in Peril and the OER Escape Room.

 

Jonathan has worked in higher education libraries for over fifteen years. Teams he has worked in include special collections, e-resource management, metadata, inter-library lending and collections. He has worked as a Collections Development Manager and is currently seconded into a role that has responsibility for content management and library technologies. His substantive role is Head of Collections Acquisitions and Discovery. In that role he has responsibility for acquisitions and inter-library lending, reading lists and metadata. He has a background in academic research and holds doctorates in geography and philosophy.

I have worked at the University of Southampton for 10 years, largely in Strategic Planning, where I was responsible for the University’s Student Number Planning process.
In May 2023 I moved to the University's library and took up the role of Senior Data Analyst, working on our Collections Development project.
I have a strong background in data analytics and visualization and am using these skills to support the library to reviews and develop it’s collection.

Tasha Mellins-Cohen joined the scholarly publishing industry in 2001. She has held roles within learned societies and commercial publishers across operations, technology, editorial and executive functions. In 2020 she launched Mellins-Cohen Consulting in response to requests for help in developing and implementing learned society-appropriate OA business models. From 2022 she took over the running of COUNTER, the global standard for usage metrics, alongside her consulting work.

Joanna Ball is Managing Director for DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. Before joining DOAJ in 2022, her career was based in academic libraries in the UK and Denmark, most recently as Head of Roskilde University Library, part of the Royal Danish Library. She is currently Chair of UKSG.

Yvonne Campfens holds a MSc Econometrics degree from University of Amsterdam, and has worked in academic publishing and related service sectors for 30 years (Elsevier, Swets Subscription Services, Bohn Stafleu van Loghum/Springer Media, Springer Nature). She was involved in collaborative and workflow solutions like ASA model licenses (1999), ALPSP Learned Journal Collection (2004) and TRANSFER Code of Practice (2009). In 2018, she started her own consultancy business, and has been involved with OA Switchboard since 2019. In 2020 she was appointed Executive Director of Stichting ('foundation') OA Switchboard.

Ádám Dér is Head of Scientific Information Provision at the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL), serving researchers at the more than 80 institutes of the Max Planck Society across Germany. In this role, he acts as lead negotiator and collections strategist, prioritizing publisher negotiations to advance the open access transition in scholarly publishing. He also represents the Max Planck Society in a broad range of national and international strategic activities, including Germany’s nationwide DEAL negotiations and participation in the governing council of SCOAP3. He is an expert advisor in the ESAC Initiative on data analytics, OA workflows and transformative agreements and contributes to a variety of international industry boards and initiatives. Prior to his role at MPDL, he served as Head of Development of the Hungarian National Consortium (EISZ).

Gillian Daly is the Executive Officer of the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL) and the founding Press Manager and at Scottish Universities Press (SUP). Gillian was previously Head of Policy and Projects at the Scottish Library and Information Council, the government development agency for libraries, where she led national-scale projects across library services. Gillian has also worked in knowledge exchange and research management across Scottish HEIs as well as working in education and public libraries.

Dominique Walker is the Publishing Officer for the Scottish Universities Press (SUP). Her role is hosted by the Library and Learning Centre LLC at the University of Dundee. Dominique is working with 18 SCURL member institutions to set up and establish a not-for-profit open access press that is owned and managed by the participating institutions. Prior to this role Dominique worked at the University of Glasgow Library for over 10 years, in the Acquisitions and Access department, focusing on e-resources and open access agreements.

 

Rebecca Wojturska (she/her) is the Open Access Publishing Officer at the University of Edinburgh, functioning within Library and University Collections on the Scholarly Communications Team. She is responsible for managing Edinburgh Diamond: an open access hosting service which offers hosting, technical support, preservation, indexing, and publishing guidance to staff and students who wish to publish diamond open access books and journals. Rebecca is also the Statistician/Bibliometrician for the Journal of Information Literacy. In her spare time she loves nothing more than reading Gothic literature, watching horror films and crushing her enemies at board games.

Cath is the Open Access and Digital Scholarship Librarian at Liverpool John Moores University. She takes the lead for open access advocacy at LJMU and manages the institutional repository and open journals service. Cath has over 20 years’ experience in libraries in a range of roles from academic services, customer services, user support and most recently research support. Cath is also the Content Officer for CILIP's Library and Information Research Group (LIRG)

Katie Hughes is the Open Access Librarian on the Open Research team at King's College London working on the same team with Subscriptions and Access. After earning her MLIS from the University of British Columbia, she started her library career at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at UCL. After moving to the UK permanently in 2016, Katie worked in the Office of Scholarly Communication as the Open Access Research Advisor at the University of Cambridge and as the User Experience Librarian at the Cambridge Judge Business School. Currently, she oversees OA funded publishing, King's institutional repository, Pure, and PhD etheses deposits.

Nadia Casagranda manages the Subscriptions & Access service in Libraries & Collections, overseeing and managing operationally the full lifecycle of a wide range of subscription-based library resources, as well as the interlending and document delivery service to support teaching and research at King’s. She works closely with other managers in the Open Research team to support the shift towards open access and open research and with other colleagues in Libraries & Collections o deliver cost-effective, sustainable and innovative collections. She has over 10 years of experience in subscriptions and eresources management and has worked in other library roles at King’s prior to this.
 

James Rice is a Partner at The White Horse Press, a very small family-run scholarly publisher focusing on environment and society. He joined WHP in 2020 after having worked for many years in cultural film exhibition. He now lives in Edinburgh, where he splits his time between publishing books and journals for The White Horse Press, and consultancy for independent cinemas.

Ian Caswell is the Journals Manager at UCL Press and leads the journals publishing programme. Having launched the programme in 2017, UCL Press now publishes 15 fully Open Access diamond journals, that cover a broad range of topics across the humanities, law, and social sciences, as well as science, technology, and engineering, including their new dedicated, multi-disciplinary, Open Science journal called UCL Open Environment that publishes broadly across all environment related subjects. Prior to UCL Press Ian previously held positions at Biomed Central and Wiley's open access journals team.

 

Rocky Mak is the research services manager of Anglia Ruskin University, who amongst various other things is responsible for promoting open science both in the library and the university as a whole. He holds a Juris Doctor and MSc (Library and Information Management), and is admitted as a lawyer in New South Wales. Before his current role, he had experience working for universities in the UK and Hong Kong in both research and library positions.

Lily Swain is an early career professional, having recently completed a Graduate Traineeship at Anglia Ruskin University. Now working as a Library Services Adviser, she is based within the library’s Customer Services team. Lily is also undertaking a part-time MA in Library and Information Studies at UCL and is a Cambridge Library Group committee member.

David is the co-founder and Publisher of Lived Places Publishing. In previous professional roles, David founded Business Expert Press, which has more than 1,000 titles in its catalog today. He was also editor-in-chief at Person Education early in his career. David later launched Academic Video Online, the largest subscription collection of academic videos in use today in universities around the world. David is a leader in designing and implementing digital, multi-channel distribution of streaming content.
Lived Places Publishing is David’s most recent effort at bringing together innovative thinking in publishing and distribution with doing important work in the world. At a moment in time when voices are being silenced and teaching the value of difference is under assault, LPP is much more than a business to David, it is a mission.
David is a longtime contributor to Against the Grain with his column “Learning Belongs in the Library.” His writing has appeared in the Scholarly Kitchen, EdTech Times, UKSG Insights, and more. David consults with mission-based organizations seeking to build distribution of their teaching and learning content into university libraries. David is a competitive triathlete, yogi, and a passionate connector of people who always, always, always answers his email!


 

Dr. Kadian Pow is a Lecturer, in Sociology and Black Studies, at Birmingham City University.

Dr. Pow is also one of Canvas 8 Expert Consultant in Cultural Trends, and has worked on racial equity projects with Beatfreeks, and Museums in the UK and USA. Her main interests include Black feminism in online spaces, television, fandoms and representation, intersectionality, the sociology of Black hair and identity, and museum decolonisation efforts.

Extending her Black feminist praxis, Kadian founded Bourn Beautiful Naturals in 2017 during her PhD studies.

Her first book, Stories of Black Female Identity in the Making: Queering the Love in Blackness was published by Lived Places Publishing in 2023.

Chris is Commercial Director at Cambridge University Press, having served eleven years at the renowned education and research publisher. Before that, he held a variety of roles at Oxford University Press. Chris believes passionately that quality publishing continues to inspire, is relevant and should drive innovation for the benefit of learners, instructors and researchers alike. He’s a leading advocate for rapid (yet sustainable!) model change in open research and online learning, the uptake of adaptive technologies and the use of data science to inform student and researcher success. When not furthering these ambitions, Chris may often be found in his engineering workshop, somewhere in or under his classic Land Rover.

Tom is a Work Package Lead on the Copim Open Book Futures project where, with Professor Martin Eve, he helped to launch and runs the Opening the Future revenue model funding new Open Access monographs. Prior to joining Copim, he has worked in most areas of libraries, academic and public, and was a founding team member of the UK's first jointly-run and library-led Open Access publisher, White Rose University Press.

Elaine Sykes is currently acting as the Associate Director (Content and Open Research) at Lancaster University where she leads the teams that deal with all content and scholarly communications activities. Her substantive post is the Head of Open Research where she has strategic lead for scholarly communications, research data management and research intelligence.

Her research interests include open access publishing and data visualisation. She is widely active in the library sector including involvement with SCONUL, RLUK and the Library Performance Measurement Conference, where she acts as a Director. She has recently joined the Ebsco Academic Advisory Board.


 

Tim Fellows is a product manager at Jisc, a not-for-profit that provides various services to support further and higher education institutions. In this role, Tim is responsible for the growth and development of the Octopus platform, and works closely with a range of researchers, research support, and library staff to ensure that the platform delivers on its goal of improving research culture and serving researchers of all disciplines. Previously, Tim has worked on other research-adjacent services, including ethics review, clinical compliance, and human tissue banking platforms.

Natalia Gordon has over a decade of experience working in academic libraries across the North of England. Currently working as the Collections Engagement Manager at the University of Salford in Manchester, Natalia’s remit focuses on increasing engagement with the Library's content and collections. She has been recognized as an Advance HE Fellow since 2015 through her extensive work with academic reading lists. Additionally, she is a member and former Chair of the CILIP Yorkshire and Humberside regional network and has been involved with library engagement in some way for most of her professional career.

Helen is a Licensing portfolio specialist for research content at Jisc. She leads a team working to deliver agreements that meet the requirements of UK universities, achieve savings and support the transition to open access. Helen’s background is in academic libraries and in previous roles she oversaw services providing Open Access and Research Data Management support and publishing advice.

Kira supports Jisc's licensing services with high-quality data analysis, by evidencing negotiations for digital content and software solutions for UK education and research. In particular, Kira focuses on assessing how Jisc's agreements contribute to Open Access and routes to compliance for funded authors.