The Speakers

Dominique Walker

Dominique Walker is the Publishing Officer for the Scottish Universities Press (SUP).  Her role is hosted by the Library and Learning Centre LLC at the University of Dundee.  Dominique is working with 18 SCURL member institutions to set up and establish a not-for-profit open access press that is owned and managed by the participating institutions.  Prior to this role Dominique worked at the University of Glasgow Library for over 10 years, in the Acquisitions and Access department, focusing on e-resources and open access agreements.

Rebecca Wojturska

Rebecca Wojturska (she/her) is the Open Access Publishing Officer at the University of Edinburgh, functioning within Library and University Collections on the Scholarly Communications Team.  She is responsible for managing Edinburgh Diamond: a library-based open access hosting service which offers hosting, technical support, preservation, indexing, and publishing guidance to staff and students who wish to publish diamond open access books and journals.  Rebecca is also the Statistician/Bibliometrician for the Journal of Information Literacy and is on the board of the DOAJs & OASPAs Open Access Journal Toolkit.  In her spare time, she loves nothing more than reading Gothic literature, watching horror films and crushing her enemies at board games.

Reggie Raju

Reggie Raju, PhD, is the Director (Research & Learning Services) at the University of Cape Town Libraries.  He has been in academic libraries for more than 35 years and is the author of more than 85 publications in peer-reviewed national and international journals, chapters in books, and a book publication.  His research focus is on research librarianship with an emphasis on open access and library publishing.  He has delivered a number of keynote addresses on the issue of open publishing.  Reggie is a National Research Foundation (C2) rated researcher with the research focus of open access.  He is currently a member of the Academic and Research Libraries Standing Committee of IFLA and was previously co-convenor of the Special Interest Group: Library Publishing.  Reggie is currently the Chair of SPARC Africa, which is driving the social justice agenda of open access for Africa.  He also serves on international boards such as OBC and Redalyc/AmeliCA.  He served on the editorial board of Journal of librarianship and scholarly communication and South African journal of libraries and information science.

Sonya Betz

Sonya Betz is the Head, Open Publishing and Digitization Services at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, which supports more than 60 diamond Open Access journals through its non-commercial, scholar-led publishing program.  Sonya has worked in academic libraries for more than 15 years and is deeply interested in seeking ways to promote and sustain not-for-profit approaches to scholarly publishing and open access.  She has served with the Library Publishing Coalition in a number of roles, including as a member and Chair of the Program Committee, as a partner on the Library Publishing Workflows Project, and as the current chair of the Canadian Community Development Working Group.  She’s also a member of the Public Knowledge Project's Technical Committee, the Coalition for Canadian Digital Heritage, and the Advisory Board of the Irish Open Access Publishers.

Jeanette Hatherill

Jeanette Hatherill is a Strategic Community Engagement Consultant with Coalition Publica, which supports sustainable open access by developing a non-commercial, open source national infrastructure for digital scholarly publishing, dissemination, and research.  Prior to her work with Coalition Publica, she worked for 10 years at the University of Ottawa Library in Ottawa, Canada, as a scholarly communication librarian supporting open access initiatives, including the library’s journal publishing services, the institutional repository, and managing the University’s financial support for open access.

Kate Petherbridge

As White Rose Libraries Executive Manager, Kate Petherbridge works across the University libraries of Leeds, Sheffield and York on areas of collaboration between these three partners. Her role includes responsibility for White Rose University Press as Press Manager.  Kate is also very active in the wider OA publishing community, working with Jisc on the New University Press Toolkit and a series of workshops on OA Monograph publishing, and is one of the founders of the new Open Institutional Publishing Association.  She sees delivering OA publishing as a service to the wider community as part of the scholarly comms support that University libraries offer.  Before moving to WRL, Kate was Reader Services Librarian at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Justin Gonder

Justin’s focus is on strategically managing the eScholarship Publishing portfolio of open access publishing and dissemination services that include eScholarship, UC’s institutional repository and open access publishing platform, as well as the systemwide UC Publication Management System.  Working closely with service managers, campus stakeholders, and external partners, he seeks to grow CDL’s ability to provide transformative scholarly communications solutions, while ensuring the reliable, daily operations of existing services.

Charlotte Roh

As the eScholarship Publications Manager, Charlotte Roh collaborates with librarians and researchers across the 10-campus UC system to help manage a well-established journals publishing program and to cultivate new publishing projects with a particular focus on the humanities, social sciences, as well as other fields and researchers who are underserved by the traditional publishing marketplace.  As part of the larger publishing team at CDL, she engages in outreach and engagement programming to support best practices among our existing eScholarship publications, including a list of over 90 actively publishing journals.

Pamela Grieman

Pamela Grieman received her PhD in English literature in 2010 and has taught and worked in publishing for several years. A longtime managing editor and intermittent acting editor of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Pamela has steered AICRJ through its many permutations throughout the past 20 years, including its transition to eScholarship’s open-access platform.

David Delgado Shorter

Dr. David Shorter was raised in New Mexico and attended both Arizona State University and the University of California Santa Cruz.  He has a Bachelor’s degree in Religious Studies with a minor in Women's Studies and a Master’s degree in Religious Studies.  After receiving his Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness, he went on to teach at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and then at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.  Dr. Shorter is currently Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California Los Angeles.  He teaches both undergraduate and graduate students in the Culture and Performance MA and PhD programs.  In 2013, Dr. Shorter received the University's Distinguished Teaching Award.  He is the Director of the Wiki for Indigenous Languages and the Director of the Archive of Healing.

Geoffrey Little

Geoffrey Little is Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Communications at Concordia University and Director of Concordia University Press.  Scholarly Communications duties include digital preservation; copyright; open educational resources; the university's institutional repository; publishing; and interlibrary loans.  Press duties include responsibility for the operations and editorial program of a non-profit publisher of peer-reviewed books that cross disciplinary boundaries and propel scholarship into new areas.  Geoffrey came to Concordia in 2010 from Yale University.  His research interests are varied, centering around books and publishing.  He has written numerous articles and chapters and is professionally active in book-related areas.  In 2020, he was awarded the Bibliographical Society of Canada's Bernard Amtmann Fellowship.  In 2022-23, he is the Patricia Fleming Visiting Fellow in Bibliography and Book History at the University of Toronto and a Visiting Scholar at Massey College.

Regine Tobias

Regine Tobias studied Economics and Library Science at the University of Tübingen and since 1988 has served as department head in the area of research and publication services at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.  She counts this as "24 years of experience in science, in management of research institutions and in digital research and teaching services of academic libraries; 24 years of learning through best practices in interdisciplinary teams and in national and international working groups; 24 years of active knowledge transfer for researchers and co-creation of research cultures -- always with curiosity, a sense of responsibility and a desire to engage.

Luis Ezra D. Cruz

Luis Ezra D. Cruz is an Academic Service Faculty member of the De La Salle University Libraries and is currently the Media Librarian assigned at the Media and Systems Services Section.  He has more than a decade of experience working as a professional librarian in various areas such as library acquisitions, user services, library systems, digital institutional repositories, and library media technology in different academic library settings.  He has presented  research papers at conferences locally and abroad and is likewise active in research works focusing on applications of digital technologies in libraries.  He finished both his bachelor’s and master’s degree in Library and Information Science at the University of the Philippines Diliman.

Roana Marie Flores

Roana Marie Flores is an academic service faculty member at De La Salle University libraries and is currently working as an Associate American Corner Librarian.  She has been a dynamic library and information science (LIS) practitioner for over seven years with experience in school, academic, and the National Library of the Philippines.  Her work experience comprises event management, information literacy, public relations and marketing, community outreach, and social and cultural services aimed at people from all walks of life, especially the under-served population.  She has presented to various local and international conferences and has been actively publishing research works in reputable journals.  Her research interests include library programming, inclusivity and diversity, and library management.  Recently, she received the 2022 Philippine Association of Academic/Research Librarians (PAARL)’s Best Research Award; International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) Academic and Research Libraries Section’s Travel Grant to attend the 2022 World Library and Information Congress (WLIC) at Dublin, Ireland; and the 2022 IFLA WLIC WOW award which provides free registration to attend the 2023 Congress in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Janice D.C. Peñaflor

Janice D.C. Peñaflor is currently the Assistant Director for Support Services at the De La Salle University Libraries - overseeing the Archives, Special Collections, Public Programs, and Media and System Services.  She has dedicated over 15 years to the practice of library and information science, earning both a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Philippine Normal University Manila.  She has shared multiple works at conferences both locally and abroad.  Her research interests encompass a range of areas, including but not limited to evidence-based practice, collection assessment, bibliometrics, user services, and library marketing, particularly in the topic of social media in libraries.

Mennie Ruth A. Viray

Mennie Ruth A. Viray completed both her Bachelor and Master's Degree in Library and Information Science from the University of the Philippines School of Library and Information Studies.  She became a registered librarian in 2009 and spent her formative years as a junior high school librarian at Colegio San Agustin Makati.  In 2017, She ventured into digital archival management and pursued archival research and digitization projects in the US.  She returned to the Philippines and started her new journey as a Readers' Services Librarian at De La Salle University Manila in 2019.  As a librarian, her interests include promotion of literacies and lifelong learning through instruction and collaborative events, enhancement of user experience, and strengthening of reference services.

Nicole Brune

Nicole Brune is an Open Access Publication Manager at PUBLISSO, the Publication Portal for Life Sciences of ZB MED – Information Centre for Life Sciences in Cologne, Germany.  There, she is responsible for the coordination of the technical development of the Open Access publication platform PUBLISSO Gold.  Most recently, she has been increasingly involved in the project “OAPEnz – Open Access Publication of Encyclopaedic Handbooks”.  Previous to her current position, she has worked on the migration of legacy data in the project “The MAK Collection of Occupational Health and Safety.

Lai Ma

Dr Lai Ma is Assistant Professor at the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin, Ireland.  Her research is in the area of scholarly communication, open research, and research policy.  She has published on topics including research metrics, societal impact, and the political economy of information in academic and professional journals such as Journal of Association for Information Science and Technology, Journal of Documentation, Learned Publishing, UKSG Insights, and LIBER Quarterly.

Marie O' Neill

Marie O' Neill is a PhD student in Library Publishing at University College Dublin and EDI Officer at CCT College Dublin. She has 25 years experience of working in libraries including the Technological University Dublin, University College Dublin and Dublin Business School. Marie is the originator and co-founder of the MSc in Information and Library Management at Dublin Business School. Marie is a member of the Library Association of Ireland's Library Publishing Group and is active in IFLA's Special Interest Group in Library Publishing. Marie was a member of WLIC's 2022 National Organising Committee.

Erin Sheedy

Erin is a Master in Library and Information Studies Candidate and Research Associate at the School of Information and Communication Studies, University College Dublin.

Monica Berger

Monica Berger has published and presented on various topics related to scholarly communications, including the institutional repository and open access, with a particular focus on predatory (questionable) publishing.  Berger’s recent article in Development and Change argues that bibliodiversity and non-commercial open access are necessary for the Global South to decolonize and reclaim open access.  Berger has two forthcoming publications, a chapter on the role of librarians in mitigating predatory publishing by promoting scholarly information literacy (Routledge) and a scholarly monograph on (Association of Research and College Libraries, Publications in Librarianship series).  Berger supports faculty scholarship by teaching scholarly communications-related workshops as well as providing consultations.  An ardent proponent of open access, she manages her campus institutional repository, CUNY Academic Works; she also enjoys providing workshops for undergraduate researchers.  A leader in her local chapter of ACRL, ACRL/NY, Berger co-chairs the Open Access Discussion Group. She also serves on CUNY’s Scholarly Communications Committee.

Devin Soper

Devin Soper is the Director of the Office of Digital Research & Scholarship at Florida State University Libraries. In that role, he oversees several initiatives related to academic publishing, digital humanities projects and pedagogy, and digital cultural heritage technologies.  Devin came to FSU from the University of British Columbia, where he served both as an Intellectual Property & Copyright Librarian and as Managing Librarian of the Chapman Learning Commons.  Devin has an MA in English Literature and Theory from the University of Victoria, Canada, and an MLIS from the University of British Columbia.  His research focuses on the intersections of copyright and digital publishing in higher education.

Ursula Arning 

Ursula Arning is Professor of Open Access and Management of digital Resources at University of Applied Sciences Cologne (TH Cologne) and Head of the Open Science Department at ZB MED - Information Centre of Life Sciences.  She worked during eight years as head of the library at the Goethe Institut in Córdoba/ Argentina and is now a member of the IFLA Section ARL and the SIG Library Publishing Group.

Joanna Ball

Joanna Ball is Managing Director of the Directory of Open Access Journals.  Previously, she spent her career in library roles in the UK and in Denmark, most recently as Head of Roskilde University Library, where she led the development of an Open Science vision for the University. An active member of UKSG since 2016, she is currently Chair of its Board of Trustees.

Emma Molls

Emma Molls is the Director of Open Research & Publishing at the University of Minnesota, leading a department that includes publishing, research data services, research information management, and is home to the Data Curation Network.  Emma serves as President of The Library Publishing Coalition and is a member of the DOAJ Advisory Board.

Margreet Nieborg 

Margreet is an educationalist, coordinator of the University of Groningen Press (UGP) and board member of the Association of European University Presses (AEUP).  UGP is an example of a new university press that currently hosts open access journals, books and series.  Margreet thinks that with the rise of new university presses new publishing models will rise and can, in a modest way, actively support open access.

NIels Stern

Niels Stern is director of OAPEN and co-director of DOAB. He has worked in scholarly publishing for more than twenty years. Since 2014 he has also acted as an independent expert for the European Commission on open science and e-infrastructures. He is a member of the OPERAS Executive Assembly and the Open Book Collective Board of Stewards.

Iva Zlodi

Iva Melinščak Zlodi is a scholarly communication librarian at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, where she leads the development of the institutional OA book platform FF Open Press.  She has experience with initiating and developing the Croatian national journals platform Hrčak and repository network Dabar, and is currently preoccupied with launching the Croatian initiative for open scholarly books.  She is a member of the Board of Directors of SPARC Europe.