Andrew Barker has been Director of Library Services & Learning Development at Lancaster University since September 2019. Prior to that he held a number of senior roles within diverse university libraries, including the University of Liverpool and Liverpool John Moores University. Andrew was Chair of UKSG between 2018 and 2022, and has been Vice-Chair of SCONUL since December 2021.

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

Jane Belger has been Research and Open access librarian at the University of the West of England since 2014, having previously held a number of customer service roles. Her focus as part of the Library research support team is providing training on open access and data management for research staff and students as well as managing open access publishing payments and the UKRI block grant.

Ben Ramster is Journals Manager at ICE Publishing, of society and UK charity the Institution of Civil Engineers. He has >15 years of experience working in journals editorial teams, first at Elsevier (life science) and then for a medical communications agency working with the pharmaceutical industry. He has seen ICE Publishing grow from 13 peer-reviewed titles to today’s 35, and has organised seminars for ALPSP on both Author Care and Open Access.

Professor Colette Fagan, FAcSS, Vice-President for Research, is responsible for leading and implementing The University of Manchester’s research and doctoral training strategy. She is incoming chair of the Russell Group’s PVC-Research Group, and serves on the editorial board of The Conversation the N8 research partnership Senior Executive Group and the UUK/JISC Content Negotiating Strategy Group. She co-authored the British Academy’s 2016 report Crossing Paths: Interdisciplinary institutions, careers, education and applications. Colette’s research and policy impact focus is employment, working conditions and job quality; including gender inequalities and international comparative analysis. She is an elected Fellow of the UK’s Academy of Social Sciences in recognition of her research standing.

Liam Earney is the Executive Director of Digital resources at Jisc since August 2019. He is responsible for Jisc’s licensing, open research, content & discovery services for further and higher education and research. This includes services such as Jisc Collections, Chest, Library hub, JUSP and SHERPA which collectively save UK universities and colleges over £100 million per annum.
Liam is also the executive leadership team lead overseeing Jisc’s strategy to support members’ research and innovation activity.

Previously Director of licensing at Jisc, with a responsibility for the units undertaking the licensing and negotiation of agreements for digital content and software on behalf of UK universities and further education colleges. Overseeing the evolution of Jisc’s approach to the negotiation of open access agreements, in particular how Jisc could best support the sector achieve its aims around pure gold, hybrid and green open access.

Tasha Mellins-Cohen, Executive Director at COUNTER Metrics and Founder of Mellins-Cohen Consulting, joined the scholarly publishing industry in 2001. She has held roles within learned societies and commercial publishers across operations, technology, editorial and executive functions, while donating time to key industry initiatives and bodies such as UKSG, ALPSP and STM. In 2020 she started consulting in response to requests for help in developing and implementing OA business models in not-for-profit groups. In 2022 she stepped up from volunteer to Director at COUNTER Metrics, the standard for usage metrics, alongside her consulting work.

Ian Moss is CEO of STM, the global trade association for scholarly publishing that represents more than 140 members, including all the major commercial publishers, learned societies and university presses.  STM’s members are responsible for around two thirds of all published papers from the world of science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities.   

Ian was formally Director of Public Affairs at the BPI, the British Recorded Music Industry.  Before this, Ian spent twelve years in the UK Government and was a Senior Civil Servant in the Ministry of Justice as Director of Criminal Justice Strategy following roles as Head of Strategy in the Department for Work and Pensions, Principal Private Secretary at the Cabinet Office, Head of Technology and Innovation at HM Treasury and Head of Broadcasting Regulation at the Office of Telecommunications.   His full biography can be found here (link to: https://www.stm-assoc.org/about-stm/whos-who-at-stm/).

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.

Charles Watkinson is Associate University Librarian for Publishing at the University of Michigan Library and Director of University of Michigan Press. He previously worked at Purdue University and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. UMP is a leading publisher of OA books, which it presents through its open-source platform, Fulcrum. Find out more at fulcrum.org/michigan

Joanne is Research Data Manager at Lancaster University, UK, where she contributes to both the Research Data and Research Intelligence Services. She has delivered the Research Intelligence Service, which focuses on bibliometric analysis and researcher training, since its beginnings in 2019 and has recently re-launched Data Conversations, a pioneering Lancaster University programme of researcher training, in an online format. She graduated with an MSc Information Science from Northumbria University in 2019 and won Lancaster University’s International Impact Award 2020 for her work with world rankings.

Abel Packer co-founded the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) in 1998, a Brazilian research infrastructure program and international cooperation program committed to the advancement of scientific research and communication through the Open Access indexing and publication of a network of selected collection of quality peer-reviewed journals operating in 17 countries. Currently he is Director of SciELO. He is also Project Coordinator at the Foundation of the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP) and former Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences (BIREME/PAHO/WHO). Abel has a MLS with extensive experience in information science, librarianship, information technology, and information management.

Yang Pan is the Director of Marketing & Public Relation Department of CMAPH, and the Managing Director of the CMA Journal《Maternal-Fetal Medicine》. She started as the editor of Chinese Edition of BMJ in CMAPH since 2001, and devoted to the publishing industry for nearly 20 years. With rich experience, she had completed a series of funded programs of China Association for Science and Technology（CAST）, such as” Brand Building of Chinese Sci-Tech Periodicals”, ”International Influence Promotion Project”. During the COVID-19 pandemic, as the committee member, she took part in building up the “COVID-19 Academic Research Communication Platform” and publishing the special issue of COVID-19 in Chinese Medical Journal. Moreover, she has supported CAST to initiate Chinese Science Journals to join the COVID-19 database which is built by WHO, further Conducts Active International Cooperation

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.

Judy H. Brady is the IEEE Area Manager for Europe with primary responsibility for IEEE’s Institutional customers. Judy has been with IEEE for more than 25 years and in the marketing and public relations field for more than 35 years working primarily for not-for-profit companies and in the STM area. In her time with IEEE Judy has been responsible for the marketing of education and training resources, IEEE books, and since 1997, IEEE’s online collections with an ever-increasing emphasis on open access publishing. She holds a BA in Journalism and Communications from Rutgers University, NJ, USA.

Bethan works for Jisc, as part of the Library Hub and NBK team. She has particualr interest in bibliographic metdata.

Mark Greene is the Manager of Sales, Partnerships & Initiatives at Annual Reviews where he is responsible for the sales and distribution of Annual Reviews journals across Europe. Based in the UK, Mark joined Annual Reviews in 2017 to foster better collaboration with our European librarian colleagues. Most recently Mark has been involved in implementing the Subscribe to Open model for Annual Reviews across Europe

Matt Kibble is Director of Product Management for Gale’s academic databases, with responsibility for Gale Research Complete, the OneFile suite of aggregated periodical databases, specialist resources in Literature and Business Studies, and for areas such as Discovery and Usage. He has been working in this field for more than 20 years, primarily in specialist Arts and Humanities resources: prior to Gale, he helped set up and manage the Bloomsbury Digital Resources division, and before that managed Arts and Literature databases and historical archives at ProQuest.

Gwen Evans is VP of Global Library Relations at Elsevier. Previously, Gwen spent seven years as Executive Director of the state agency/library consortium OhioLINK. She held the position of Associate Professor and the Coordinator of Library Information Technologies at Bowling Green State University until 2012. She has extensive experience with all types of academic libraries including consortia. Her recent publications include an Ithaka S+R issue brief co-authored with Roger Schonfeld, It’s Not What Libraries Hold; It’s Who Libraries Serve: Seeking a User-Centered Future for Academic Libraries” and “Creating Diversity in Libraries: Management Perspectives” in Library Leadership & Management with Mihoko Hosoi and Nancy S. Kirkpatrick.

Andrew Barker has been Director of Library Services & Learning Development at Lancaster University since September 2019. Prior to that he held a number of senior roles within diverse university libraries, including the University of Liverpool and Liverpool John Moores University. Andrew was Chair of UKSG between 2018 and 2022, and has been Vice-Chair of SCONUL since December 2021.