Governance

Michele Avissar-Whiting is the Director of Open Science Strategy at HHMI, overseeing the Open Access Policy and initiatives focused on improving research communication. Prior to joining HHMI as a program officer in 2022, she held various roles at Research Square Company, serving as Editor in Chief of their preprint platform from 2020 to 2022. She earned a PhD in Medical Science from Brown University, where she studied the epigenetic mechanisms of carcinogenesis associated with environmental exposures.

Isabel Bernal manages the multidisciplinary open access repository of the CSIC, the leading national research performing organization in Spain. She advances a programme to enable and promote different types of open science services on top of DIGITAL.CSIC, including an open peer review and open annotations service, hosting of diamond open access journals and interoperability with external peer review services like PCI. Psicologica is one of the journals participating in its Diamond in Green service. She is chairperson of COAR Executive Board

Denis Bourguet is a senior scientist working on evolutionary ecology at the National Institute for Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Research (INRAE), France. He co-founded Peer Community In with Thomas Guillemaud in 2017 and Peer Community Journal in 2021.

Katie is the executive director of ASAPbio, a researcher-led nonprofit organization working toward greater transparency and rigor in life sciences research communication. Her research background is in psychology; prior to joining ASAPbio she was a faculty member for 12 years.

Ashley Farley is the Senior Officer of Knowledge & Research Services at the Gates Foundation. In this capacity she leads the foundation’s Open Access Policy’s implementation and associated initiatives. This includes leading the work of Gates Open Research, a transparent and revolutionary publishing platform. Much of her work advocates for knowledge to be a global good. She has a deep passion for open access, believing that freely accessible knowledge has the power to improve and save lives.

Nathalie Fargier is Director of the CCSD (Centre for Direct Scientific Communication). She leads HAL+, the French national researcher infrastructure dedicated to open scholarly communication. This ecosystem includes HAL, the national open repository; Episciences, an overlay journals platform; and Sciencesconf, a service for organizing scientific events. She is also a member of the COAR Board of Directors.

Thomas Guillemaud is a senior scientist working in evolutionary biology at the National Institute for Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Research (INRAE), France. He co-founded Peer Community In with Denis Bourguet in 2017 and Peer Community Journal in 2021.

Fiona Hutton leads the Publishing division of eLife, the innovative OA publisher in the life sciences. Fiona was responsible for directing eLife’s publishing to the publish, review, curate model, which launched in Jan 2023. She has been in publishing for 23 years, focusing on Open Access, Open Science and Innovation. She is a member of the OASPA Board of Directors and on the Steering Committee of DORA.

Robert Kiley is currently acting as Chair and Co-ordinator of the PRC Alliance Interim Working Group. Prior to this he served as Head of Strategy at cOAlition S. Robert also spent 25 years at the Wellcome, where as Head of Open Research he was responsible for developing and implementing their open research strategy.

Ross Mounce is Director of Open Access at Arcadia – a family philanthropy founded in 2002. He was previously a postdoc in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, a Software Sustainability Fellow, and a Panton Fellow for open data in science. Ross gained his doctorate at the University of Bath, where his thesis focused on the role of morphology in analyses of evolutionary relationships that include fossil species.

Omo Oaiya is WACREN’s Chief Strategy Officer (CSO). He leads the development, execution and sustenance of WACREN business plans and initiatives. He was the pioneer Chief Technology Officer of the organisation and continues to work with development partners and sister regional networks on the technical development of high-capacity Internet network infrastructure for research and education.

Pandelis Perakakis is Professor of Psychology at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) and founder of Open Scholar, an international team working to advance repository-based academic publishing. He led the transition of Psicológica, journal of the Spanish Society of Experimental Psychology, from commercial publishing to diamond OA on CSIC’s institutional repository, demonstrating the sustainability of the Repository as Publisher model. He coordinates UCM’s CoARA working group and advises the vice-rectorate of research on evaluation reform.

Stephen Pinfield is an Editor of MetaROR (MetaResearch Open Review). He has been involved in open access initiatives since 2001, and was founding director of Sherpa services (now Jisc Open Policy Finder). He carries out research on open access, open science, peer review, and research policy evaluation.

Eloy Rodrigues is the Director of the University of Minho Libraries. He was Chair of the Executive Board of the COAR between 2015 and 2021 and promoted the Next Generation Repositories initiative. Eloy is one of the Co-PIs of the COAR Notify project, Vice-chair of the Executive Board of OpenAIRE AMKE and member of the Advisory Committee of SciELO Portugal.

Daniela Saderi is the Co-founder and Executive Director of PREreview, a non-profit advancing open, community-centered peer review of early research objects by supporting researchers and experts—especially early-career and historically excluded scholars. She earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Oregon Health & Science University in 2019, studying auditory processing in mammals, and was a 2018–2019 Mozilla Fellow for Open Science. Daniela envisions a scholarly ecosystem grounded in trust, care, and collective wisdom, where knowledge flows freely as a shared inheritance rather than a commodity.

Kathleen Shearer is the Executive Director of COAR, an international association with over 150 members and partners from all five continents representing libraries, universities, research institutions, government funders and others. Since becoming the Executive Director in 2013, COAR has been proactive in raising the visibility of open access repositories and the development of new and innovative practices for repositories worldwide through the COAR’s Next Generation Repositories Work and the COAR Notify initiative, as well as helping the community effectively and strategically navigate the impacts of AI.

Bodo Stern became HHMI’s Chief of Strategic Initiatives in November 2018. As Chief of Strategic Initiatives, Stern works closely with HHMI’s President and senior leadership team to formulate strategic scientific and educational initiatives that apply across programmatic departments and takes a lead role in coordinating those initiatives.

Toma Tasovac is Director of the Belgrade Center for Digital Humanities (BCDH) and Director Emeritus of the pan-European Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH-EU). His areas of interest include lexicography, data modeling, digital editions and research infrastructures. He is also Editor in Chief of Transformations: A DARIAH Journal , which is an overlay journal hosted on Episciences.

Ludo is president of ASAPbio and editor-in-chief of MetaROR (MetaResearch Open Review), a PRC platform in the field of metaresearch. He is scientific director of Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) and co-chair of the Research on Research Institute (RoRI).