Future of scientific publishing conference

Roger C. Schonfeld is the managing director for JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services. Launched in 2025, JSTOR Stewardship is a service through which libraries can manage, preserve, and provide access to their archives and special collections, with transformative opportunities to accelerate their collections processing productivity and to increase their collections’ usage and impact. Roger is also responsible for ITHAKA’s overall organizational strategy.

Alex Freeman is the creator of Octopus – a not-for-profit alternative publishing platform designed to change the incentive structure for researchers and reward best research practice. Alex came up with the concept after returning to academia as Executive Director of the Winton Centre for Risk & Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge, after a career in documentary-making. She saw how communication of research was being encouraged to fit a ‘persuasive’ model based on ‘good storytelling’ more akin to that common in the media, rather than an ‘informative’ one needed to reward communication of everything necessary to assess research quality and build on it in the future. She is now a cross-bench peer in the House of Lords.

Richard Sever is Chief Science and Strategy Officer at openRxiv, the non-profit organization that runs the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv, which he co-founded. After receiving a degree in Biochemistry from Oxford University, Richard obtained his PhD at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. He then moved into editorial work, first as an editor at Current Opinion in Cell Biology and later Trends in Biochemical Sciences. Richard subsequently served as Executive Editor of Journal of Cell Science, before moving to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2008. He launched and edited the journals Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology and Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine and was appointed Assistant Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press in 2012. Richard co-founded bioRxiv in 2013 and medRxiv in 2019. In 2022, he was awarded an honorary DSc from Cold Spring Harbor School of Biological Sciences in recognition of his work to promote scientific communication. In 2025, he was recognized by Time magazine in their Time100 list of the hundred most influential people in health.

Dr. Ijad Madisch is the co-founder and CEO of ResearchGate, a professional network that connects the world of science. Frustrated by his own experiences as an isolated researcher, Ijad founded ResearchGate in 2008 with two friends. Since then, ResearchGate has grown to include more than 26 million scientists worldwide, becoming the largest network of its kind. Madisch's network has secured over $100 million in funding from renowned investors such as Benchmark Capital, Founders Fund, and Bill Gates.

Ludo Waltman is scientific director and professor of Quantitative Science Studies at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University. He is co-chair of the Research on Research Institute (RoRI). Ludo’s work focuses on studying and developing infrastructures, algorithms, and tools to support research assessment, science policy, and scholarly communication. Ludo is open science ambassador of Leiden University, president of ASAPbio, and one of the initiators of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information. Together with his colleague Nees Jan van Eck, Ludo has developed the well-known VOSviewer software for bibliometric visualization. Ludo serves as Editor-in-Chief of the MetaROR (MetaResearch Open Review) platform. Previously he was Editor-in-Chief of the journal Quantitative Science Studies.

Philip Campbell has spent most of his career as a professional editor in science publishing. After post-doctoral research in upper-atmospheric physics at the University of Leicester, he became Physical Sciences Editor at Nature, and then the founding Editor-in-Chief of Physics World at the UK's Institute of Physics. In 1995 he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of Nature. From 2018 he was the Editor-in-Chief of Nature's publisher Springer Nature. He retired from science publishing in 2023.

While at Nature, alongside his proactive interests within the natural and social sciences, he spearheaded editorial content and new multidisciplinary journals dedicated to research directly addressing societal challenges. He also championed scientific mentoring and good lab management. He has been awarded honorary degrees, is an Honorary Fellow of Clare Hall Cambridge University, and was knighted for services to science in 2015. In 2019 he was given the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association of British Science Writers.

Since his retirement, his work in the UK and international research landscapes has included advising about research assessment, and advocacy for mental health research and policy, especially in the context of climate change.

Henk Kummeling (1961) is professor at Utrecht University and has been Rector Magnificus from 1 June 2018 to 27 March 2025. He studied law in Nijmegen and obtained his doctorate there in 1988. This was followed by an appointment as a Professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law at Tilburg University. Henk Kummeling has been a Professor of Comparative Constitutional Law at Utrecht University since 1995. Between 2008 and 2014, he was Dean of the Faculty of Law, Economics, Governance and Organisation (LEG). He was also President of the Dutch Electoral Council from 2005 to 2017.

In 2015, the Executive Board appointed him as a distinguished professor. This appointment is a recognition of his great scientific track record. Education and research form the connecting thread in his career, which he has pursued both within and outside the academic world.

In September 2024 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Western Cape, South Africa.

Michele is the Director of Open Science Strategy at HHMI, overseeing the Open Access Policy and an initiative focused on improving research communication. Prior to joining HHMI as a program officer in 2022, she held various roles at Research Square Company, serving as Editor in Chief of their preprint platform from 2020 to 2022. She earned a PhD in Medical Science from Brown University, where she studied the epigenetic mechanisms of carcinogenesis associated with environmental exposures.

Rebecca Lawrence is Managing Director of the open research publisher, F1000, now part of Taylor & Francis. She was responsible for the launch of F1000Research in 2013 and has subsequently led the initiative behind the launches of many funder- and institution-based publishing platforms partnering with the European Commission, Gates Foundation, Wellcome and others, that aim to provide a new trajectory in the way scientific findings and data are communicated.

She is currently Vice-Chair of DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and has co-authored the Practical Guide to Implementing Responsible Research Assessment at Research Performing Organizations that launched in May 2025. She was a member of the European Commission’s Open Science Policy Platform, chairing their work on next-generation indicators and their summary advice: OSPP-REC, and was Editor of their final report. She was also a member of the US National Academies (NASEM) Committee on Advanced and Automated Workflows. She has been co-Chair of many working groups on data and peer review, including for Research Data Alliance (RDA) and ORCID, and has been a non-Executive Board Member of Open Research Central (ORC). She has worked in STM publishing for over 25 years, is an Associate of the Royal College of Music, qualified as a pharmacist, and holds a PhD in Pharmacology.

Dr Danny Kingsley is an Australian-based thought leader in the international scholarly communication space. She is Director of Library Services (Information) at Deakin University and an Ambassador for the OAPEN Library of open access books. She has consulted for multiple Australian universities since returning from the UK where she was Deputy Director of Cambridge University Libraries. She is a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science. Her research centres on scholarly communication including the academic reward structure, scholarly infrastructure and open access advocacy. She established Open Access Australasia in 2013. She sits on multiple committees, including the Royal Society Advisory Committee on the Future of Research Publishing, the Australian National Open Science Taskforce and the FORCE11 Board of Directors.

Abel L. Packer is Co-founder and Director of the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) Program and Project Coordinator at the Foundation of the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP), Brazil, since June 2010. Previously, he was Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences (BIREME) of the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization for 11 years. Packer has a bachelor's degree in Business Management and a Master of Library Science with extensive experience in information science, librarianship, information technology, and information management. Packer participated pro-actively in the conception, management, operation and dissemination of major Latin American and Caribbean multilingual scientific information networks, such as the Latin American Population Documentation System (DOCPAL), the Virtual Health Library (VHL) and the Scientific Electronic Library Online network that currently publishes over 1300 journals through national collections from 17 countries most from Latin American in addition to Portugal, Spain and South Africa. In Brazil, SciELO is maintained by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and the São Paulo Research Foundation.

Jinghai Li is professor at the Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He was president of the National Natural Science Foundation of China from 2018 to 2023, vice president of the CAS From 2004 to 2016. He established the Energy-Minimization Multi-Scale (EMMS) model for gas-solid systems. The model has been extended to many different complex systems, and generalized into the EMMS paradigm of computation featuring the logical and structural similarity between problem, modeling, software and hardware, which has been implemented by constructing a supercomputer with capacity of 1 Pflops and has been used widely in chemical and energy industries. He is promoting Mesoscience based on the EMMS principle of compromise in competition as an interdisciplinary science. He was vice president of International Science Council from 2018 to 2021, vice president of International Council for Science from 2014 to 2018, president of the Asian Association of Science Academics from 2007 to 2010, vice chairman of China Association for Science and Technology from 2011 to 2021. He holds memberships from CAS, TWAS, SATW, RAEng, ATSE and RS.

Valda Vinson is the Executive Editor for the Science journals. In this role she oversees research content strategy and editorial policy, at Science, Science Signaling, Science Translational Medicine, Science Immunology and Science Robotics. She started her career in publishing when she joined the Science staff in 1999 as an Associate Editor handling research papers in the areas of structural biology, biochemistry, and biophysics. In 2013 she became Deputy Editor, overseeing research content in the areas of cellular and molecular biology and biomedicine, and in 2018 was appointed Editor, overseeing research content in the life sciences and social sciences at Science. She earned an M.Sc. in Chemistry from the University of Natal, South Africa, in 1987 and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1992. Her postdoctoral studies were also undertaken at Johns Hopkins University, where she focused on structural and biochemical studies of cytoskeletal proteins. Before joining Science, she spent two years as a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa.

From an academic background of Development Economics and previous Non Profit training organisation work experience, Susan Murray has been the Executive Director of African Journals OnLine (AJOL) since 2010, and its Manager for three years before that. She has grown AJOL from a short online list of journals' tables of contents into a large full-text platform (using Free and Open Source software) rigorously assessing, supporting and hosting many hundreds of Africa-based research journals. AJOL now provides various services to millions of people within the continent and around the world each month. Murray is and has been an Advisory Committee Member and Board Director of several regional and global scholarly initiatives, is an experienced workshop facilitator, and a frequent conference speaker. She considers herself extremely fortunate to work with a wonderful group of dedicated, expert, and light-hearted colleagues who consistently strive to bring important African research outputs and African scholarly voices to global prominence.

Professor Alison Noble CBE FREng FRS is currently the Technikos Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Oxford and a Vice President and Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society.

Alison has worked in industry and academia. Her academic research interests are at the inter-disciplinary interface of artificial intelligence (computer vision) and healthcare imaging. She is a current recipient of a UKRI Turing AI World-Leader Researcher Fellowship themed around human-AI collaboration in healthcare imaging. Alison has worked with clinical partners in the UK, India, and Kenya on translational AI-based imaging science, and commercialised some of her group’s research via a spinout company which is now used in clinics worldwide.

Alison is a Fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering and of the Royal Society. She has worked closely with the Royal Society data science policy team for a number of years including chairing  working groups leading to policy reports on "Protecting privacy in practice" (2019), “From privacy to partnership” (2023) and most recently and relevant to this meeting  “Science in the age of AI” (May 2024).

Alison received an OBE in 2013 and was awarded her CBE for services to engineering and biomedical imaging in the 2023 King’s Birthday Honours List.

Liam Earney is Managing Director for Higher Education and Research at Jisc where his portfolio includes Licensing, Research Management, Content & Discovery, Digital transformation, Consultancy and Jisc’s strategic response to the needs of higher education and research. Liam has worked at Jisc since 2003, mainly in the licensing side of Jisc’s work, which has enabled him to work across areas such as research management, open access, copyright and increasingly infrastructure. He was responsible for the development, negotiation and implementation of Jisc's initial program of large scale open access agreements with publishers. More recently his work has focused on how collaboration within and across institutions can improve outcomes – something he has observed in practice in the negotiation space – and help address the challenges facing universities at the present time.

Tommaso Valletti is Professor of Economics at Imperial College London, and Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian School of Economics. He is a Non-Executive Director to the board of the UK’s Payment Systems Regulator. He is the Director of the CEPR Research and Policy Network on Competition Policy. He was the Chief Competition Economist of the European Commission between 2016 and 2019.

Richard Gallagher is the President and Editor-in-Chief of Annual Reviews, based in San Mateo, California. Since joining the organization in 2015, he has overseen the launch of new journals, launched the online publication Knowable Magazine, and helped develop the Subscribe to Open initiative for publishing. Richard graduated with a doctoral degree in immunology from the University of Glasgow and was a researcher at Trinity College Dublin before moving to publishing. He has held senior editorial positions at Science and Nature.

Mikael Laakso is an Associate Professor in Information Studies at Tampere University, Finland. His research interests relate to scholarly information and communication very broadly, where one of the consistent themes has been research related open access publishing and open science practices. Having conducted research in this space for over 15 years, Mikael is experienced in a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods to apply to create new knowledge within the space of scholarly information, ranging from policy/document analysis, bibliometrics & web metrics, surveys, interviews and beyond. Economic aspects of scholarly publishing have been a persistent theme in Mikael´s research, where the shift towards openness has introduced new crossroads and potential paths to take for all actors in the landscape.

Professor Alison Noble CBE FREng FRS is currently the Technikos Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Oxford and a Vice President and Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society.

Alison has worked in industry and academia. Her academic research interests are at the inter-disciplinary interface of artificial intelligence (computer vision) and healthcare imaging. She is a current recipient of a UKRI Turing AI World-Leader Researcher Fellowship themed around human-AI collaboration in healthcare imaging. Alison has worked with clinical partners in the UK, India, and Kenya on translational AI-based imaging science, and commercialised some of her group’s research via a spinout company which is now used in clinics worldwide.

Alison is a Fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering and of the Royal Society. She has worked closely with the Royal Society data science policy team for a number of years including chairing  working groups leading to policy reports on "Protecting privacy in practice" (2019), “From privacy to partnership” (2023) and most recently and relevant to this meeting  “Science in the age of AI” (May 2024).

Alison received an OBE in 2013 and was awarded her CBE for services to engineering and biomedical imaging in the 2023 King’s Birthday Honours List.

Professor Sir Aziz Sheikh OBE is Nuffield Professor of Primary Care Health Sciences and Head of the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford. He is Professorial Fellow at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford and Honorary Consultant with the UK Health Security Agency and Public Health Scotland.

He was previously Chair of Primary Care Research and Development, Director of the Usher Institute and Dean of Data at the University of Edinburgh. He has played important advisory roles to a number of governments, inter-governmental bodies, including the World Bank, World Health Organization and the World Innovation Summit for Health, and leading scientific bodies including the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Royal Society.

Aziz has worked for over 20 years on digitising health systems, securely linking health and cross-sectoral data and then using these data to inform and influence health policy, improve the safety and quality of care, and develop personalised risk assessments. This work recently culminated in the world’s first 67-million-person study in which the entire UK population was turned into a linked, near real-time longitudinal cohort.

He is a highly cited author, is a fellow of 10 learned societies and he has been awarded numerous UK and international awards for his work. He has previously served as Visiting Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and is currently Visiting Professor at LKC Medicine, Nanyang Technical University, Singapore and UNSW Sydney, Australia.

Aziz is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Quality in Health Care and has editorial roles with a number of international journals, including Lancet Regional Health – Europe, Medical Care and PLOS Medicine.

Aziz was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for ‘Services to Medicine and Health Care’ in 2014 and a Knight Bachelor in 2022 for ‘Services to COVID-19 Research and Policy’.

Marta Kwiatkowska is Professor of Computing Systems in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, and Fellow of Trinity College. She is Subject Editor for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence section of the Royal Society Open Access journal. She was awarded the title of Professor by the President of Poland and holds part-time Professorship at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Her research is concerned with developing modelling and analysis methods for complex systems, such as those arising in computer networks, electronic devices and biological organisms. She is known for fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of model checking for probabilistic systems, and is currently focusing on safety and robustness of automated decision-making in artificial intelligence. She led the development of the PRISM model checker, winner of the 2024 ETAPS Test-of-Time Tool Award. PRISM has been adopted in diverse fields, including wireless networks, security, robotics, healthcare and DNA computing, with genuine flaws found and corrected in real-world protocols. Her research has been supported by two ERC Advanced Grants, VERIWARE and FUN2MODEL.

Marta Kwiatkowska won the Royal Society Milner Award, the BCS Lovelace Medal and the Van Wijngaarden Award. She received an honorary doctorate from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and is a Fellow of ACM, Member of Academia Europea and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

John Clarkson joined the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering in 1995 as a Lecturer in Engineering Design, was promoted to Reader in 2001 and to Professor in 2004. In 1997 he was appointed Director of the Cambridge Engineering Design Centre, an internationally leading research group with a focus on improving the design process. He has held numerous major research grants and published over 900 papers, book chapters and reports. His research falls into four categories: Healthcare Design; Inclusive Design; Process Management; and Change Management. He received the UK Royal Academy of Engineering President’s Medal in 2023 for his work on developing a Systems Approach to Engineering Better Care, the Sir Misha Black Medal in 2019 for services to design education and a CBE in 2024 for services to engineering and design.

André Gaul is the Managing Director at EMS Press, the publishing house of the European Mathematical Society, where he is leading the Press’ transformation to modern and inclusive publishing with an emphasis on fairness, sustainability, and accessibility. André holds a PhD in applied mathematics and co-founded the scholarly communications startup PaperHive. André currently also serves on the Publishing Board of the Royal Society.

Since June 2017 Alison has been Chief Executive Officer of the Public Library of Science (PLOS), an organization on a mission to drive open science forward with measurable, meaningful change in research publishing, policy, and practice. Prior to PLOS, Alison served as Director of the University of California Press and as Executive Vice President at Sage Publications. Alison serves on the MIT Libraries Visiting Committee and the American Chemical Society’s Governing Board for Publishing. A regular speaker at industry meetings, Alison also writes for the Scholarly Kitchen blog. Her more than 30 years in the publishing industry also include leadership positions at Taylor & Francis and Blackwell Publishers.

Claire has worked for over 20 years in the academic publishing sector and since 2016 has served as Executive Director of OASPA: a diverse community of organisations engaged in open scholarship, with a membership that includes publishers of open access books and journals of all types and sizes from across geographies and disciplines, as well as infrastructures and other services that directly support open access publishing. Claire is Chair of the OA Switchboard and sits on a number of working groups and committees, serving in an advisory capacity and representing the views of the open access publishing community.

Dr Emma Wilson is the Director of Publishing at the Royal Society of Chemistry. She has over 20 years’ experience working in the scholarly publishing sector and has worked for both commercial and not for profit publishers in a variety of editorial, business development and strategic roles, joining the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2006. In her current role she has strategic responsibility for the Royal Society of Chemistry’s portfolio of journals, books and chemistry databases. This includes ensuring that the publishing portfolio delivers against the Society’s purpose to help the chemical science community make the world a better place. Prior to her career in publishing, Emma was the recipient of an EMBO research fellowship after obtaining her PhD in biochemistry from Cambridge University.

Heather Joseph is a widely respected expert on national and international open research policies, practices, and implementation strategies; she has worked on initiatives and consultations promoting the open sharing of research outputs from the United Nations to the World Bank. Through SPARC’s global network of affiliates in Europe, Asia and Africa, she is an active collaborator on projects that support community-developed and controlled solutions for knowledge sharing.

Prior to joining SPARC, she spent 15 years as a publisher in both commercial and not-for-profit journal publishing organizations. She is deeply engaged in the global knowledge-sharing community and serves on the Board of Directors of organizations ranging from the Public Resource to Our Research. She is a frequent speaker and writer on scholarly communications and higher education issues and open access to research in particular.

Johan Rooryck has been involved in various Open Access organisations and projects, from cOAlition S to the EU-funded DIAMAS, CRAFT-OA, and PALOMERA projects. He is a co-coordinator of the European Diamond Capacity Hub alongside Pierre Mounier, and a PI on the EU-funded ALMASI project that aims to build a non-profit, Diamond Open Access (OA) ecosystem across Europe, Africa and Latin America. Since 2016, he is co-editor-in-chief of the Diamond OA journal Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, a journal that transitioned to Diamond OA when its Editorial Team and Board, as well as its reader and author community, decided to abandon the Elsevier-owned journal Lingua to found Diamond OA Glossa. He is a member of the Academia Europaea, a doctor honoris causa of UiT – The Arctic University of Norway, and a visiting professor at Leiden University, where he held the chair of French linguistics from 1993 to 2020.