STM People

Dr. Julia Kostova is the Vice President for Academic Partnerships for the Americas at Taylor & Francis. She oversees partnership strategy, institutional and community engagement, and advocacy, collaborating with research communities, institutions, libraries, funders and other stakeholders to create and disseminate transformative, cutting-edge research. Dr. Kostova brings nearly 20 years of experience in the publishing...

Chris Sibbons is a not-for-profit veteran. He has spent his career making things work and then making them better! Through Cambridge Assessment to Cambridge University Press and now with Canadian Science Publishing, his objective is always to set high targets and get as close to those targets as possible. At Cambridge, as Content Operations Director,...

Jackie Kelley is a Senior Publisher on the Open Access team at Oxford University Press (OUP), where she leads the strategic growth and development of a portfolio of leading STM journals, including JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, The Oncologist, and PNAS Nexus, published in partnership with editors and academic societies such as the...

Pat Hannah completed a PhD in Plant Biochemistry before joining CSIRO Publishing in 2023. Since transitioning into scholarly publishing, he has developed a strong interest in projects that place research communities at the centre of the publishing process, work that directly supports STM’s mission of building a more inclusive research and publishing ecosystem. His focus...

Liz Ferguson began her career in scientific publishing at Current Science, Thomson Science and Lippincott Williams & Wilkins before moving to Blackwell Publishing, acquired by Wiley in 2007. Wiley is where she has now spent almost two decades progressing through various roles in editorial, society management, and open research. Today, as Senior Vice President for...

Simran Kang is an early career publishing professional at BMJ Group, where she has spent the past four years working across scholarly publishing, progressing from Publishing Assistant to Content Development Specialist. During this time, she has developed a strong understanding of journal publishing and a keen interest in the evolving challenges and opportunities shaping the...

Stephan Kuster is the Director of External Affairs at Frontiers, where he works with governments, research funders, university leaders and policy makers around the world to advance open access to publications and data. He oversees a team of policy and advocacy experts located in the US, Europe and Asia. His work sits at the intersection...

Neil Hammond began his academic journals publishing career in 2024 as a Desk Editor and then Online Publishing Manager at Pion Ltd (later acquired by Sage). He moved into journal acquisitions and editorial development at Cambridge University Press in 2009, working with many learned societies across multiple STM disciplines. Since 2016 he has been at...

Aicha Hanna is a Publisher at Springer Nature, working within the Open Access journals group out of Heidelberg, Germany. Aicha started her publishing career at Springer Nature in 2021 as a Publishing Assistant, supporting a portfolio of hybrid Springer journals in Biomedicine, before managing a portfolio of Cell Biology journals from the same portfolio. Since...

As Chief Publishing Officer at Optica, Alison Taylor leads the organization’s publishing strategy and operations, building on more than 20 years of experience in scholarly publishing. Her career has been dedicated to mission-driven, nonprofit society publishers, beginning as a scientific editor for Physical Review B at the American Physical Society after earning a PhD in...