Dr Janneke Adema (she/her) is a cultural and media theorist working in the fields of (book) publishing and digital culture. She is an Associate Professor in Digital Media at The Centre for Postdigital Cultures (Coventry University). In her research she explores the future of scholarly communications and experimental forms of knowledge production, where her work incorporates processual and performative publishing, radical open access, post-publishing, scholarly poethics, media studies, book history, cultural studies, and critical theory. She explores these issues in depth in her various publications, but also by supporting a variety of scholar-led, not-for-profit publishing projects, including the Radical Open Access Collective, Open Humanities Press, ScholarLed, and Post Office Press (POP), and the Research England and Arcadia funded Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, on which she is Co-PI. Her monograph Living Books. Experiments in the Posthumanities (MIT Press, 2021) is openly available.
Peter Barr
Peter Barr is Head of (Library) Content & Collections at the University of Sheffield. He was appointed in September 2019 to lead the development of the Library's Comprehensive Content Strategy (adopted 2021). Through this, and more broadly, he is interested in the role libraries can play in developing an ethical, community-owned alternative to commercialised academic publishing, and the limits to which this can be achieved from within marketised institutions.
Twitter: @tweeterbarr
Simon Bowie
Simon Bowie (he/him) is an Open Source Software Developer at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University. He is part of the COPIM project and is focused on the Experimental Publishing work package providing technical support for the work package’s pilot projects and developing the Experimental Publishing Compendium.
Ian Cooke
Ian (he/ him) is Head of Contemporary British and Irish Publications at the British Library, a role that focuses mainly on 21st century publications received under legal deposit regulations, including the UK Web Archive. He has worked in academic and research libraries for 25 years and is interested in changes in publishing and communications technology and behaviour, and how these impact on reading and readers. In 2023, Ian is co-curator for the British Library's Digital Storytelling exhibition, which opens on 2nd June.
Nicola is Senior Library Manager for research support at the Open University. Her role involves working in partnership across the University to develop products and services that support the University’s research activity. This includes responsibility for open access and research data management services and the management and development of the Open University’s publications and research data repositories. Nicola has been the Chair of the UK Council of Open Research and Repositories (UKCORR) since February 2019. UKCORR is the professional organisation for Open Access repository administrators and managers in the UK.
Twitter: @UKCORR
Judith Fathallah
Dr. Judith Fathallah is a Research and Outreach Associate at Lancaster University and Research Fellow at Coventry. She has worked with Work Package 2 of COPIM on the creation and launch of the Open Book Collective, and Work Package 4 on communal forms of governance. Her research interests include new media, media convergence, digital literacies and fan and subcultures in addition to Open Access publishing.
Twitter: @JudithFathallah
Phillipa Grand
Philippa Grand is Press Manager at University of Westminster Press, a non-profit diamond open access publisher founded in 2015 and based in London. After completing a PhD in Modern British History at the University of Manchester, Philippa has held roles at commercial academic publishers and university presses, focusing on humanities and social science publishing, and celebrates her 20th year in the industry this year.
Twitter: @UniWestPress
Gary Hall
Gary Hallis a media theorist and experimental writer, editor and publisher. He works (and makes) at the intersections of digital culture, politics and technology. He is Professor of Media at Coventry University, UK, where he directs the Centre for Postdigital Cultures. He is the author of a number of books including, most recently, A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works In Elitist Britain (Open Humanities Press, 2021), Pirate Philosophy(MIT Press, 2016) and The Uberfication of the University(Minnesota UP, 2016). In 1999 he co-founded the critical theory journal Culture Machine, an early champion of open access in the humanities. In 2006 he co-founded Open Humanities Press (OHP), the first open access publishing house explicitly dedicated to critical and cultural theory, which he co-directs.
Julien McHardy
Julien McHardy is a sociologist of technology, designer, dramaturge and publisher, working across disciplines and institutions. Julien co-founded the open-access publisher Mattering Press and ScholarLed, a collective of academic-led open-access presses. He runs a studio in Amsterdam and contributes to the COPIM project’s Experimental Publishing Group while also holding a position at the University of St. Gallen, where he follows a group of climate hackers.
William Kilbride is Executive Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), a dynamic sector-making charity that provides community engagement, advocacy, workforce development, capacity, good practice and standards in digital preservation. William started his career in archaeology in the 1990s with an unusual mix of qualifications in computing and archaeology when the discipline’s enthusiasm for new technology outstripped its capacity to manage the resulting data. In 2020 he was jointly named ‘Information Manager of the Year’ by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, and in 2022 appointed Honorary Professor in the College or Arts at the University of Glasgow.
Twitter:@williamkilbride
Caroline Mackay
Caroline Mackay is a licensing manager at Jisc where she has negotiated journal, database and book content agreements. Currently she is heavily involved in open access monographs including the implementation of UKRI policy, exploring Diamond OA models and Jisc’s Open Access Community Framework. Prior to working at Jisc, Caroline had a background working in subscription agencies.
Sam Moore
Dr. Samuel A. Moore is the Scholarly Communication Specialist at Cambridge University Library and a Research Associate at Homerton College, Cambridge. His research in library and information studies explores the ethics and politics of scholarly communication, particularly open access publishing. He has a Ph.D in Digital Humanities from King’s College London and is also one of the organisers of the Radical Open Access Collective.
Lucy Montgomery
Pronouns: She/Her
Lucy Montgomery is Professor of Knowledge Innovation at Curtin University and co-lead of the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI): a major strategic research project exploring how big data can help universities to understand their performance as Open Knowledge Institutions. Montgomery is also lead PI on the Book Analytics Dashboard (BAD) Project (2022-2025), which is creating a sustainable OA Book focused analytics service. This service is needed to safeguard and support diversity in the voices, perspectives, geographies, topics and languages made visible through OA Books. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the Book Analytics Dashboard project is building on an earlier Mellon-funded initiative: Developing a Pilot Data Trust for OA eBook Usage (2020 – 2022). In addition to scaling workflows, infrastructure and customer support, the Demonstration Project is developing a long-term plan for housing, maintenance and funding of the analytics service as a sustainable community infrastructure.
Jefferson Pooley is professor of media & communication at Muhlenberg College, USA, and director of mediastudies.press, a scholar-led open access publisher of books and journals.
Amanda Ramalho is a librarian and Master of Science degree from the University of São Paulo in Brazil. She is the coordinator of SciELO Books and a member of the SciELO/FAPESP Program Coordination. She also serves on the Advisory Board of COPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs). Her main focus is on the operational development of the SciELO Books collection, including eBook publishing, metadata indexing, interoperability, and promoting the adoption of open access.
Twitter: @amandasramalho
John Sherer
John Sherer was named the director of the University of North Carolina Press in 2012. Since his arrival the Press has published two New York Times bestsellers, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and has been the recipient of several major foundation grants including two grants of nearly $1 million each from the Mellon Foundation to support new scaled models for publishing high quality monographs.
He is also the President of Longleaf Services, which is owned by UNC Press and provides scaled publishing tools for university presses and other campus-based publishing initiatives.
He has served on numerous boards and working groups including, the Educopia Institute, the Next Generation Library Publishing pilot, the Triangle Scholarly Communications Institute Advisory Board, and he served as chair of the Open Access Committee of the Association of University Presses.
Previously, he was the publisher of Basic Books in New York and held the positions of Publisher of Nation Books, member of the AAP Trade Executive Committee, and adjunct professor at New York University’s School for Continuing and Professional Studies. He has held marketing positions at Henry Holt, the Brookings Institution and was a manager and buyer at Olsson’s Books and Records in Washington, DC. He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Paul has had a varied career in both the commercial sector and academia (and all points in-between). At present he leads on preservation for Jisc (and is currently referred to as a "Subject Matter expert – Digital Preservation"). He is a director of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and a director of the Open Preservation Foundation (OPF). He's been passionate about repositories, preservation and all things green for many decades and currently also has a number of bees in his bonnet regarding costs, value, sustainability, carbon costs, and storage.
Nina Tscheke
Nina Tscheke has been with ScienceOpen for more than six years, primarily responsible for partner and customer content integration and platform support. The daily routines offer a deep insight into the different flavours of content metadata throughout the lifecycle of various scientific content types, including best practises and systemic fits and misfits of metadata communication. Since 2020, Nina has also been the lead for OA-META, a project for the development of a free hub for academic publishers to create and enhance book metadata for distribution in digital environments funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (launched version: BookMetaHub).
John Willinsky is a professor at Simon Fraser University, Co-Scientific Director of the Public Knowledge Project, and Khosla Family Professor Emeritus, Stanford University, as well as the author of, most recently, the open access book Copyright's Broken Promise: How to Restore the Law's Ability to Promote the Progress of Science (MIT Press, 2023).
