David Lefer is an Industry Associate Professor at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, where he directs the Innovation and Technology Forum. His academic work focuses on invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Lefer also serves as an adjunct professor for the National Science Foundation’s Innovation-Corps program, teaching scientists, engineers, and inventors how to turn their ideas into viable startups using the Lean Startup method. A startup co-founder himself, he served as COO of Scigus, Inc., where he helped secure a multimillion-dollar defense contract to build high-powered, solid-state microwave emitters for the US Navy and oversaw the venture as Project Manager. Previously a journalist, he worked as a reporter for the New York Daily News, the China News in Taiwan, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Newsday and as a producer for the PBS talk show The Digital Age and CNBC’s Topic A with Tina Brown.
Lefer has also written two highly acclaimed books. He collaborated with Sir Harold Evans on They Made America, the bestselling book on American innovation which was made into a four-part PBS series and featured on the History Channel. Fortune magazine named the book one of the top 100 business books of the past 75 years. Lefer’s newest book, The Founding Conservatives, about the birth of the American right during the Revolutionary War, was published by Penguin in 2013 and was hailed by the Kirkus Reviews as “Groundbreaking history not to be missed—a book to quote and to keep, as the material is rich enough to merit rereading.”
Melanie Dolechek is the Executive Director of the Society for Scholarly Publishing.
She has been active in scholarly publishing since 2006, previously serving as the Director of Publishing and Marketing of Allen Press.
She plays an active role in the cross-organizational diversity initiative for scholarly communications and is an advisory board member of the Workplace Equity Project.
Melanie holds a Master of Science in Management from Baker University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Kansas State University.
Keith Collier is the Managing Director of Publisher Services for Clarivate Analytics, the global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics to accelerate the pace of innovation. In this role, he oversees all aspects of Clarivate’s publisher business and engagement within the publishing community.
Prior to joining Clarivate, Keith was Chief Operating Officer for Research Square. Keith has been in the scholarly research and communication industry for over 16 years and held various roles at ScholarOne and Thomson Reuters. He has a history of business development and product innovation within the editorial workflow and author services.
Keith spent the early part of his career at Accenture, consulting on various supply-chain and change management projects for Fortune 500 companies in Electronics and High Tech. Keith earned a BBA in Management from Baylor University and MEd in Instructional Technology from University of Virginia.
Martin Spencker is currently Managing Director at Thieme – Medical Sciences – and has a more than 30 years background in Scientific, Technical and Medical publishing. Based in Stuttgart, he is also Managing Director of Recom GmbH, a specialist publishing house for medicine and nursing.
Martin’s career reflects his passion for publishing in the digital age. He began his career in the 1980s with an apprenticeship at Georg Thieme Verlag, Stuttgart, followed by managerial positions in New York with MacMillan Professional Books and Oxford University Press. After volunteering in a Kibbutz in Israel, Martin went on to study philosophy at the Jesuitenkolleg in Munich. Returning to publishing in 1990, he became a publishing assistant to the CEO of Eugen Ulmer Publishers in Stuttgart. Since 1993 Martin has helped shaping Thieme’s transition into the digital age. After four years as Head of Marketing and Sales at Thieme’s division Ferdinand Enke Verlag, he accepted a position as Head of Publishing for the Medical Education Program at Thieme Publishers, Stuttgart, in 1999. Since then he has progressively taken greater roles within the company, also overseeing the acquisition of other publishing houses.
Martin’s vision is to drive the development of tools, products and services which are key to the completion of the digital transformation. During his career to date, Martin has actively taken part in the digital transformation process introducing various innovative business models and has been responsible for many award-winning projects.
Over the last few years Martin has also played a very active role within the German Publishers and Booksellers Association and the German RRO VG WORT. He sees supporting a strong copyright system and connecting the national and international representations as important challenges for international Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishing.
Karin Sora is currently Vice President STEM at De Gruyter in Berlin where she has the overall responsibility for growing a profitable international product portfolio. Karin has 28 years of experience in publishing (with Wiley-VCH, Wiley and Springer) both in Editorial, where she headed the areas Chemistry, Industrial Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Physics, Materials Sciences, Engineering, Computer Sciences, and in Sales for Wiley in charge of libraries, library suppliers and an e-learning platform WileyPLUS (area: GSALL). By training, she is a chemical engineer.
Essential steps in her career as product and program developer of various media were:
- Successful launch and strategy for the web product called SpringerMaterials – The Landolt Börnstein database (content and functionalities)
- Editor-in-Chief of Ullmann’s Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry, the world’s most comprehensive chemistry encyclopedia. Transformed the online product into a 40-volume printed resource (the biggest publishing enterprise worldwide) and found a new solution for the online and CD-ROM product. Received Wiley Pacesetter Award for this Achievement
Karin brings with her a broad knowledge, covering all aspects of STM publishing including journals, books and database products, and the associated technologies and strategies. Developing editorial strategies and conveying them into commercially successful editorial programs is one of her top skills. She is experienced in leading people also through significant structural changes.
As Senior Product Manager for Research Products, Andrew Smith is responsible for the management and strategic development of all of Emeralds online research database products. He is passionate about scholarly communication and how technology can improve the discoverability and dissemination of relevant research.
Andrew has over 10 years’ experience in publishing and began his career as a journal publisher in business and management, where he grew and developed a portfolio of journals. He has spent the last three years in products development.
Emerald Publishing was founded in 1967 to champion new ideas that would advance the research and practice of business and management. Today, Emerald continues to nurture fresh thinking in applied fields where we feel we can make a real difference, now also including health and social care, education and engineering. Emerald manages a portfolio of nearly 300 journals, more than 2,500 books and over 1,500 teaching cases.
Small publishers often struggle with marshalling resources to expand their reach in acquisitions and the marketplace, but small publishers also have advantages: greater flexibility to employ innovative responses to changes in the needs of customers and authors. Linda Mehta is committed to a diverse publishing enterprise so that voices are heard, ideas are not lost, and the art of curating information is employed.
Linda started her career in publishing after a couple of years as a research associate in cell biology at Yale. Since then, she has worked in both nonprofit and for-profit publishing enterprises, gaining experience in acquisitions, editorial development, budget management, revenue development, marketing, and relationship building with freelancers and vendors. She was also a principal participant in the design of a Webby Award–winning website at the New York Academy of Sciences.
Linda currently manages PMPH USA, a US-based subsidiary of PMPH (People’s Medical Publishing House) in Beijing. When she became General Manager, the company was struggling to maintain sufficient output with minimal staff. Keeping abreast of advancing technology has required a willingness to face a continuous learning curve and the capacity to be alert to opportunities and ideas. She has been able to re-engineer procedures and deploy staff to incorporate these new approaches. The dynamic engagement of its employees in the process has made a significant ramping up of publications and revenue possible.
Linda would bring her enthusiasm for sharing their successes with the publishing community and for learning from others’ ideas and achievements.
Zeger Karssen graduated in both philosophy and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam. Since then he has gained extended experience in scientific research, publishing and internet-technology.
Earlier occupations include work as senior researcher in Artificial Intelligence for the University of Amsterdam and for a private lab in Paris. Since 2000, he has worked as scientific publisher for Elsevier where he created new scientific journals and book series, and managed a portfolio of 15 internationally renowned journals in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
In 2006 he founded Atlantis Press, a full Open Access publisher, publishing journals and proceedings, all in Open Access, as well as academic books in collaboration with Springer. Atlantis Press operates from Paris and Amsterdam, with the large majority of its clients coming from emerging markets in Asia.
Zeger also regularly works as advisor to the European Commission regarding scientific publishing and the creation of electronic content in general. Zeger also works as associate professor in the field of digital publishing at the Université Libre in Brussels.
Steven is President, Research at Springer Nature. Previously he was Chief Publishing Officer and before that he was Head of House and CEO at Nature Publishing Group and Palgrave Macmillan.
Steven believes strongly in serving researchers and supporting the wider research ecosystem. He sees STM Publishers as a key enabler of today’s system, driving forward the move to Open Research and Open Access and as a positive force for change in the future. Steven has driven innovation, operational excellence, customer centric and commercial performance programmes during his 17 years in STM Publishing, initially at NPG and PM and more recently at SN, and is proud of what he and his teams have achieved over that time.
Prior to this Steven was UK Publisher for The Financial Times and led ft.com. From 1990 to 2000 he was at IDC where he held commercial, development, marketing and general management positions, ultimately responsible for group strategy and corporate development and the EMEA region. Steven was awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, where he read Physics specializing in atomic and solid-state physics and qualified as a chartered accountant with PWC in 1990.
Agnès Henri is the Managing Director of EDP Sciences, a not-for-profit publisher, established in 1920, belonging to learned societies with a mission to participate in the dissemination of important research that accelerates scientific progress and cross-fertilisation of ideas of the society in general.
She joined EDP Sciences after a Master of fundamental physics and a PhD in materials science from the University Paris 7 (Denis Diderot).
Before becoming Managing Director, she was responsible for the academic publishing branch of EDP Sciences. Agnès manages the team of publishing editors to develop, maintain and expand the portfolio of current journals, sustain their presence in the business and widen the range of products sold by EDPS (journals, books, conferences). She has 20 years of experience in editorial, acquisitions and business development within the scholarly publishing industry, especially with all aspects of the STM environment including submission and peer review, access models, publishing and hosting platforms, digital production, ethics, scholarly metrics, XML/Conversion, all related technology. Agnès is also part of the executive board of the International Year of Light in France, and a regular speaker and contributor at industry events, especially in France.
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