Open Access Publishing Advocate
I have long been passionate about contributing to high-quality and accessible research (and research data) which is readily and easily available at the point of consumption to everyone, regardless of their circumstances.
During my PhD in Archaeology at the University of Leicester I regularly attended the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference and was part of a local team that hosted the conference in 2015. I was heavily involved in the editing of the conference proceedings and I am still proud of that volume. However, it struck me that this physical collection of essays - mostly authored by brilliant early career researchers - would likely only reach university libraries with archaeological departments. The TRAC Standing Committee, under the leadership of Darrell Rohl, had already tracked down and digitised all of the previous content and there were plans to perhaps consider different publication methods for the annual conference.
In 2016, at RAC/TRAC (every two years they are held together) at La Sapienza University, Rome, I joined the TRAC Standing Committee myself. Early on in my tenure, we sought publishers that could publish our papers in an open-access online format, and that would do so with very little cost (or none) to the authors. The Open Library of Humanities was our chosen provider and their library consortia model allows papers to be published gold open-access free of any APCs/APFs.
I stood down from my role with TRAC after my three-year term had elapsed in 2019, but am thrilled to see the work that has continued at TRAC and within the journal - despite the interruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, Giacomo Savani and I launched a Call for Papers for the very first Special Issue of TRAJ, and we expect it to publish its first papers in 2023.
Away from my work with TRAC and TRAJ, from early-2020 to mid-2022 worked at JMIR Publications in Toronto, Canada. In this role, I greatly enriched my understanding of academic publishing from the other side. I managed a portfolio of large and growing academic journals focused on digital health and medicine.