With over 23 years of experience in publishing, Arash has worked as a publisher at Nature and Royal Pharmaceutical Society, among other adventures.
He joined Wiley in 2016, and until 2019 he worked with institutions and society partners to devise strategies that would prepare the partners and their publications for a changing research publishing landscape.
Now he has a strategic role at Wiley leading on global Health Sciences and Physical Sciences portfolios and provides strategic analysis, tools and resources for portfolio and subject strategy, looking at Wiley’s portfolio strategies.
Arash has an MD in general Medicine and an MA in Publishing.
Valda Vinson is Editor (Research) at Science. She came to the United States as a Fulbright scholar and after completing a Ph.D and post-doctoral studies, returned to her birth country, South Africa, and spent 2 years as a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Western Cape.
She started her career in publishing when she once again moved to the US and joined the Science staff in 1999. Since then, she has handled research papers in the areas of structural biology, biochemistry, and biophysics as an Associate and Senior Editor.
In 2013 Dr. Vinson became Deputy Editor, overseeing research content in the areas of cellular and molecular biology and biomedicine, and in 2018 was named Editor, Research. As Editor she works with Life Science editors to attract and select exciting research papers and reviews, while following standards that support transparency and reproducibility.
She also works with others on the editorial management team on editorial policies at Science and is involved in initiatives that bring together stake-holders within the publishing industry to discuss policies.
Theodora Bloom is Executive Editor of The BMJ.
She has a PhD in developmental cell biology from the University of Cambridge and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, researching cell-cycle regulation.
She moved into publishing as an Assistant Editor on the Biology team at Nature, and in 1992 joined the fledgling journal Current Biology. After a number of years helping to develop Current Biology and its siblings Structure and Chemistry & Biology, first for Current Science Group and then for Elsevier, Theo joined the beginnings of the open access movement. As the founding editor of Genome Biology she was instrumental in the birth of the commercial open access publisher BioMed Central, where she remained for several years, ultimately as Editorial Director for Biology.
Theo joined the non-profit open access publisher Public Library of Science (PLOS) in 2008, first as Chief Editor of PLOS Biology and later as Biology Editorial Director with additional responsibility for PLOS Computational Biology and PLOS Genetics. She also took the lead for PLOS on issues around data access and availability, introducing PLOS’s pioneering data availability policy.
At The BMJ her responsibilities include publishing, business, platform and operations, as well as ethical and policy matters and dealing with complaints. She is a Co-Founder of the medRxiv preprint server, a collaboration between BMJ, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Yale University, and co-leads open access and open research initiatives at BMJ.
Theo chairs the scientific advisory board of EMBL-EBI Literature Services and is on the Board of Managers of AIP Publishing and the Advisory Board for DataSeer. She is European Coordinator for the Peer Review Congress.
Ian Roberts has worked for more than 25 years within International Organizations such as the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
He joined the World Health Organization in September 2000 as Information Technology Officer and is currently Head of the WHO Library and Digital Information Networks based in Geneva, Switzerland.
Sara Rouhi is the Director of Strategic Partnerships at PLOS focusing on developing new business models for sustainable, inclusive open access publishing.
She previously managed business development at Digital Science for both the Altmetric and Dimensions platforms.
She is a member of SSP’s Education Committee and ALPSP’s North American Steering Committee amongst others. She was the recipient of the SSP’s Emerging Leader award in 2015 and writes and speaks frequently on metrics, open access, and diversity in scholarly communications.
She’s a comedian and improviser in Washington DC and tweets all things politics, open science, improv, and #scholcomm on Twitter @RouhiRoo.
The Science Media Centre is an independent press office for the UK scientific community. It exists to help ensure that science and engineering in the UK national news is reported accurately and responsibly, particularly when a story has the potential for controversy. They give journalists the opportunity to speak to real experts, and actively encourage scientists to speak out when stories break. They also run regular press briefings, which allow scientists and engineers to set the news agenda on important subjects of public interest. Although independent, the SMC is unashamedly pro-science and has no public ‘brand’ to promote. This gives them the freedom to concentrate on what is important: keeping sound, evidence-based science at the top of the news agenda.
Tom Sheldon has degrees in Artificial Intelligence and Bioinformatics. He joined the Science Media Centre in April 2008. Fukushima, ‘climategate’, GM crops, electronic cigarettes, COVID-19 and the health effects of mobile phones have all been high profile media stories over the years; in every case it was vitally important that the voices of scientists and engineers were heard among the uproar. When these stories break the SMC provides a direct route between journalists and scientists, to their mutual benefit: ensuring that reporters have constant and immediate access to the best quality, up-to-date evidence, and that scientists have help communicating complex, nuanced research where it matters most: the national news media.
Melissa Close is an Associate Publisher at Emerald Publishing, with experience working in both journals and books.
She is also the Chair of ECPC’s Outreach sub-committee, which she joined in March, 2019. She is based in Boston, Massachusetts.
Hilaire Diarra is the co-founder of the The Journal Scientifique et Technique du Mali (JSTM), based in Mali, West Africa.
Hilaire will be speaking about the publishing work in Africa in general but specifically in Mali – he will share some of the challenges that African publishers face and how they perceive the global publishing industry in terms of diversity and inclusion. He has a few recommendations to make to improve the current situation.
The Journal Scientifique et Technique du Mali (JSTM) is a publishing company established in Mali in West Africa since August 2016. It specializes in collecting, editing and disseminating scientific information to the general public in Mali especially youth population. For this it uses a number of media consisting of printed and digital press, and short motivational videos (e.g. café scientifique).
Publications cover mainly Land and Natural resources, Health, Environment for now and is done through our website (www.jstm.org), a monthly magazine (printed and digital), and a number of science events. We aspire to use also radios and TV programs at a later stage. Revenue of the company is generated through sales of science articles, sponsorships and research grants.
Joy Owango is an experienced award winning Founding Director with a demonstrated history of working in capacity support for early career researchers. She is skilled in Management, Business Strategy and Research Metrics. She is experienced in matters relating to Research Capacity, Higher Education, Research Analytics, Donor and Government Relations.
Her strengths come in creating and building collaborations using the triple helix in industry, academia and government. She has created such collaborations with the set up of the Training Centre in Communication (private/ Non-Governmental Organization), with, the University of Nairobi (the leading university in East Africa). The objective of the collaboration was to create a support system to help researchers disseminate their research. The programme is celebrating its 14th year anniversary. She sits on the board of AfricArxiv- The free preprint service for African scientists
She is a firm believer in open science being a conduit to democratizing higher education and fulfilling SDG 4.
Emma is the EDI lead for Emerald Publishing and will be speaking about Emerald’s Global Inclusivity Report 2020 and the work that Emerald is doing to increase diversity within the publishing profession.
Emma is a lawyer by training, and has been a champion of EDI throughout her career, including as a founder member of the UK chapter of women@amazon.
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