Publication to press: building trust in research communication - online seminar 2023

Nita has over 10 years experience working for a range of non-profit organisations working across policy and research. Nita was previously at the World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists (WFSA) where she oversaw their portfolio of projects focused around training and upskilling anaesthesia providers in low and middle income countries. Prior to that, at the Fairtrade Foundation, Nita led the policy and research team before developing the organisation’s work on the impact assessment and evaluation of Fairtrade projects. She has extensive experience of working on complex global projects and programmes and working with, and coordinating diverse teams. Nita has also worked at Consumers International, the Overseas Development Institute and ActionAid. Nita also has a PhD in Microbiology and a Masters in Public Health Nutrition from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Dr Danny Kingsley is an Australian-based thought leader in the international scholarly communication space. She took up the position of Community Manager for the Southern Hemisphere at OAPEN in August 2023 and is a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science. Danny has consulted for multiple Australian universities since returning from the UK where she worked as the Deputy Director of Cambridge University Libraries from 2015-2019. She established Open Access Australasia in 2013.

Colin Angus is a mathematical modeller in the Sheffield Alcohol Research Group at the University of Sheffield. His research mostly uses complex computer models to answer questions about the potential impact of alcohol policy and has played a major role in the development of policies such as Minimum Unit Pricing in Scotland and the UK's low risk drinking guidelines. He also developed a side hustle in COVID analysis during the pandemic. He is a strong believer in the power of a good graph, and spends altogether too much time drawing graphs and posting them on Twitter.

Robyn joined Frontiers in 2018, having previously worked for several other international publishers including Springer Nature and the NIHR Journals Library. In 2019 she established the Publishing Partnerships program at Frontiers, where her work now focuses on strategic collaborations with societies. Robyn is also the interim Co-Chair of the ALPSP Education Committee, and in her spare time, she enjoys writing her publishing blog www.MugsPubs.com and speaking publicly at publishing events.

Rachael Pells is a freelance journalist who writes news articles and long-form features about science and research for a wide range of newspapers and magazines, online and in print. She was previously a reporter at Times Higher Education magazine, where she covered the research beat. Before that, Rachael worked for the Independent newspaper, and later the website. She has written two books: Plan S for Shock, a story about the campaign for open access research; and Genomics: How genome sequencing will change our lives, which was published by Penguin last year.

Claire Sewell is the Research Support Librarian for the Physical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. In this role she works to support researchers across a range of disciplines to comply with Open Research practices and ensure that their valuable work is available for others to build upon. Prior to this Claire worked to train library staff at Cambridge in research support to ensure that they were best placed to support the growing needs of the research community.

Jane Secker is Senior Lecturer in Educational Development at City, University of London. She leads the modules related to digital education and digital literacies and is Programme Director of the Masters in Academic Practice. She is Chair of the CILIP Information Literacy Group and a member of the Copyright Advisory Panel which is a governance group of the UK’s Intellectual Property Office.

 

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.

Maria is Professor of Palaeontology at the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at University College Cork. Her primary research interests are in the field of soft tissue preservation in fossils, with particular focus on fossil colour and on feather evolution. She uses advanced microbeam and spectroscopic techniques to explore the ultrastructure and chemistry of soft tissues in fossils and their extant analogues, with a strong emphasis on taphonomic experiments to help bridge the gap between ancient and modern materials. Her current research on ancient biomolecules, including melanin and keratin, is supported in part by two ERC grants (Starting and Consolidator Grants). Maria is committed to public engagement to help diversify palaeontology and STEM more broadly and to inspire an appreciation of the natural world amongst the public.

Sara Fletcher is Head of Impact and Evaluation at the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source - a publicly funded research organisation. She is a professional science communicator with expertise in research impact and communicating with a wide range of stakeholder audiences, including government funders and the science media.