Archives: People

Leila Jones serves as STM’s Director of Strategic Programmes — facilitating the delivery of STM’s strategy by overseeing, coordinating, and tracking projects and initiatives across STM’s core strategic pillars. Prior to STM, Leila spent over a decade working for Taylor & Francis, where she held various Editorial and Operational roles — using her continuous improvement and project management skills to drive operational efficiencies and successfully launch and lead a new team. Leila has more than 20 years of experience in the scholarly publishing industry and has also held positions at Blackwell Publishing, Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group, and Wiley.

Dr. Anna Abalkina is a research fellow at Freie Universität Berlin (Germany). She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Perugia (Italy) with a background in international economics. However, she later shifted her research focus to corruption in higher education, academic misconduct, plagiarism, paper mills, and predatory and hijacked journals. Her research not only involves detecting and analyzing scientific misconduct but also explaining its costs and consequences.

Since 2013, Anna Abalkina has been actively serving as an expert for Dissernet, a grassroots initiative aimed at detecting plagiarism in Ph.D. theses and scientific papers in the Russian language. Since 2021, she has successfully detected and investigated several paper mills, identifying more than 1000 papers with potential authorship fraud and/or violations of peer review. In 2022, Anna Abalkina in collaboration with Retraction Watch created “The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker,” a regularly updated list of hijacked journals.

Rachel Burley has been a leader in the research communications and open science space for more than 20 years. She is currently the Chief Publications Officer for the American Physical Society, publisher of the prestigious Physical Review family of journals. Her background in publishing and product development has pushed leading-edge trends in scientific, technical, and medical publishing and developing new products, platforms, services, and business models. 

Prior to joining the APS, Rachel was President of Research Square, a company developing innovative software and high-quality services for the global research community. Before Research Square, she was with Springer Nature, where she was VP and Publishing Director for the BMC Group of more than 500 open-access journals, which included the Springer Open portfolio. Rachel was also VP and Director of Open Access at Wiley, where she led the strategic planning and development of Wiley’s first open access initiatives.

Carrie has worked in open access for 20 years. Starting her publishing career at BioMed Central in 2003, she was involved in the early growth of the OA movement. Carrie joined Macmillan Science & Education in 2012 where she developed OA policies and products, launched their open access monograph program, and was also involved in the flip of Nature Communications and rise of Scientific Reports, two of the world’s leading open access titles.

As VP Open Access, Carrie is responsible for open access and transition across Springer Nature, including the performance of the OA journals portfolio and transformative business models, as well as the development of OA policy and compliance.  As part of her role, Carrie is closely involved in Springer Nature’s transformative agreements, including Projekt DEAL in Germany and the innovative multi payer agreement reached with University of California.

Lauren Flintoft is a Research Integrity Officer at the Institute of Physics (IOP) Publishing, and is responsible for helping manage the growth of the ethics case load, identifying and implementing preventative measures, supporting projects across the business to ensure compliance with industry guidelines and manages IOPP’s plagiarism software. Her role covers IOPP’s full subject portfolio and spans across journals, eBooks and conference series.

She started her career at Emerald Publishing in their legal team as a Rights Executive. In this role, she advised on areas including research integrity, copyright, licensing, permissions and corrections.

She is currently a Chair of the Crossref Similarity Check working group and ISMTE’s Education and Standards Committee. Lauren is committed to improving key stakeholders understanding of research integrity, and to ensure Publisher’s act responsibly. She graduated from the University of Hull with a BA in History, and the University of Leeds with an MA in Modern History.

Monica joined the Nature family in 2011 as a Senior Editor at Nature Climate Change, where she handled original research and review articles across the entire breadth of social sciences, and interdisciplinary articles integrating natural and social science disciplines in the context of climate and global environmental change.

She became the launching Chief Editor of Nature Sustainability in 2016. Monica completed her doctoral studies in environmental and development economics at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy; she then held a visiting professor position at University Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico, and subsequently joined the sustainable consumption team at WWF-UK where she gained invaluable experience about the challenges of bridging the gap between research and policy domains. Monica is based in Berlin.

Dr. Liying Yang got her Ph.D. degree in Scientometrics field. She is the Director of Department for Scientometrics and Research evaluation, National Science Library, CAS.

The research of Dr. Yang focuses on quantitative analysis to provide decision making support. She has published more than 120 research articles in international journals of scientometrics area and research management field. In addition, she has been conducted abundant projects supported by Ministry of Science and Technology of the People´s Republic of China (MOST), National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), and CAS.

Dr. Liying Yang was awarded guest professor of Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI, Karlsruhe, Germany. She is the co-editors in chief of Journal of Data and Information Science (JDIS).

ZHANG Tieming, editor in chief, Journal Publishing Department of Beijing Forestry University; President of Society of China University Journals; Board member of China Journal Association; Member of the 8th Science and Technology Commission under the Ministry of Education， P.R. CHINA.

ZHANG has nearly 20 years of experience in the editing and publishing of scientific journals. He has led a number of research projects for the Chinese Association for Science and Technology (CAST), Beijing Municipal Education Commission, and the Science and Technology Department of China’s Ministry of Education. As the project team leader, he and his colleagues compiled the joint Report by CAST and STM: Open Access Publishing in China (2022). He also participated in some consulting reports and research programs on the development and reform of China’s scientific journals.

Amanda Sulicz is the Publishing Ethics Specialist for IEEE. In this role, Amanda is responsible for upholding the integrity of the scholarly record by assisting with investigations and working with IEEE’s volunteers to resolve ethics and plagiarism allegations.

Prior to joining IEEE in 2023, Amanda started her publishing career in 2019 at AIP Publishing. Initially, she was as an Associate Editor where she made first editorial decisions and handled the peer review process for manuscripts submitted to AIPP’s flagship journal, Applied Physics Reviews. While serving as an Associate Editor, Amanda was involved in expanding the journal portfolio through the launch of two new titles, Biophysics Reviews and Chemical Physics Reviews. In 2021, Amanda transitioned into the role of Journal Manager for AIP Advances where she was responsible for the journal’s strategic and financial success. Simultaneously, Amanda worked to support the expansion of AIPP’s Open Access portfolio by helping to launch 3 new Gold Open Access journals.

Amanda is passionate about contributing to the scientific and publishing communities through DEI initiatives and serving as a mentor and guest speaker at her undergraduate and graduate universities. She was one of the founding members of AIP Publishing’s DEI Committee and has continued to serve on the DEI Committee at IEEE as one of the Publications representatives. Before starting her career in publishing, Amanda worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the lab of Dr. Kirk S. Schanze upon the completion of her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Case Western Reserve University in 2017.

Jennie is the External Communications Director for the publisher, Taylor & Francis.

She has worked in publishing for over 20 years in a variety of marketing, marcomms, and corporate communications roles. Her work has also encompassed supporting the wider publishing industry through committees supporting the work of STM, Research4Life, and SNSI.

She is passionate about the role research publishing has to play in progressing a fairer world for all.