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.

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.