Invited Speakers

Nicholas Canny, a Member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council, chairs its Working Group on Open Access. As Professor of History at the National University of Ireland, Galway, 1979-2009, he became Founding Director of the Moore Institute for Research in Humanities and Social Studies. He was President of the Royal Academy 2008-11. He is a Member of Academia Europaea and of the American Philosophical Society and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and of the Royal Academy of History (Madrid).

An expert on early modern history broadly defined, he edited the first volume of The Oxford History of the British Empire (1998) and, with Philip D. Morgan, The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, c.1450-c.1850 (2011).  His major book is Making Ireland British, 1580-1650 (Oxford, 2001).

Sely Maria de Souza Costa - PhD in information science (Loughborough University, England) Senior Lecturer at the University of Brasilia, Brazil. Leader of the research group in electronic publishing in Brazil. A number of publications, including journal articles, conference papers, books and book chapters in scholarly communication, electronic publishing and also in information and knowledge management. Referee for national scholarly journals in Brazil and for national and international conferences.

Marin Dacos is the founding director of OpenEdition, a major european portal dedicated to digital publications in human and social sciences (HSS) funded by the French government, CNRS, University of Aix-Marseille, EHESS and University of Avignon. It includes Revues.org (journals), OpenEdition Books (books), Calenda (events), Hypotheses (blogs). OpenEdition is now a facility of excellence and has been granted twice by Google grant for Digital Humanities. Marin Dacos is involved in several national, European or international programmes dedicated to digital humanities and digital publishing, such as BSN (Bibliothèque scientifique numérique: Digital scientific library) and DARIAH (Digital research infrastructure for the arts and humanities). more

Robert Darnton was educated at Harvard University (A.B., 1960) and Oxford University (B.Phil., 1962; D. Phil., 1964), where he was a Rhodes scholar. After a brief stint as a reporter for The New York Times, he became a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard. He taught at Princeton from 1968 until 2007, when he became Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard. He has been a visiting professor or fellow at many universities and institutes for advanced study, and his outside activities include service as a trustee of the New York Public Library and the Oxford University Press (USA) and terms as president of the American Historical Association and the International Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies. Among his honors are a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award, election to the French Legion of Honor, and the National Humanities Medal conferred by President Obama in February 2012. He has written and edited many books, including The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie (1979, an early attempt to develop the history of books as a field of study), The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984, probably his most popular work, which has been translated into 18 languages), Berlin Journal, 1989-1990, (1991, an account of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of East Germany), and The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France (1995, a study of the underground book trade). His latest books are The Case for Books (2009), The Devil in the Holy Water, or The Art of Slander in France from Louis XIV to Napoleon (2010), and Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (2010).

Roger Genet is a biochemist and engineer from the prestigious National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts in Paris with a PhD from the University Paris-Sud. He joined the CEA (Atomic Energy and Alternative Energy Commission) in 1981 and has spent most of his scientific career there. In 2004, he was appointed Research Director at the CEA and Professor at the National Institute of Nuclear Sciences and Techniques (INSTN) where he taught from 1993 to 2007. In February 2005, he became an Advisor for Life Sciences, Health and Bioethics for the cabinet of the French Minister for Higher Education and Research, then in June 2005. In March 2007, he was appointed Deputy Director of the CEA Life Sciences division and Director of the Fontenay-aux-Roses Research Centre. In March 2009, Roger Genet was named Director General of IRSTEA (Cemagref), a french environmental research institute, then appointed executive President in 2012. He was also the first president of the National Alliance for Environmental Research (AllEnvi) created in February 2010, and named President of the Scientific Council for ADEME (Environment and Energy Management Agency) on 11 January 2012. In March 2012, Roger Genet was appointed Director General for Research and Innovation at the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research. more

Dr. Haim Gertner has been the Director of the Yad Vashem Archives Division since 2008. In this capacity, he leads an ambitious and extensive project to collect all historical and personal Holocaust-related documentation and to make it openly accessible to the public through an innovative amalgamation of content and technology. He also serves as a partner and consultant on projects aimed at providing access to Digital Humanities in Israel and around the world, and is among the leaders of EHRI (European Holocaust Research Infrastructure), a European Commission sponsored project comprising 20 institutions from 13 countries who are working to develop a common research infrastructure for Holocaust documentation. Prior to assuming the position at the Yad Vashem Archives, he held – beginning in 2001 – senior positions at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies, first as Director of Programs and Curricula Development and later as Director of the Teacher Training Department. With a Ph.D. in Modern Jewish History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University, Dr. Gertner has considerable experience in the academia. He has taught at the Department of Jewish History of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the Open University in Tel Aviv, and served as the Director General of an academic college in Jerusalem. He was a Member of the Editorial Board of the YIVO Encyclopedia, “Jews in Eastern Europe”. more

Peter Gruss was born in 1949 in Alsfeld in Germany. In 1968, he began his studies in biology at the Technical University in Darmstadt. After graduating, he went to the Institute for Virus Research at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg where he wrote his doctoral thesis. In 1977, he earned his Ph.D. in biology from the University of Heidelberg. The following year he went to the Laboratory of Molecular Virology of the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, (USA). In 1982, he was appointed to Professor in the Institute for Microbiology at the University of Heidelberg. One year later, he was designated to the Board of Directors of the Center for Molecular Biology in Heidelberg. In 1986, he was named to Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen and to Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society. Since 1990, Peter Gruss has held the status of honorary professor at the University of Göttingen. In 2001 the Senate of the Max Planck Society elected Peter Gruss for the 2002-2008 term of office and he assumed the office of President of the Max Planck Society in 2002. The Senate reelected Peter Gruss for a second term of office, from 2008 to 2014, on June 28th, 2007.

Among his Scientific Awards, Honors and Memberships are Bundesverdienstkreuz erster Klasse 2009, Lower Saxony State Prize 2004, Deutscher Zukunftspreis 1999 (German Prize for the Technology and Innovation awarded by the President of the Federal Republic of Germany), Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine 1995, Leibniz Prize 1994, Feldberg Prize 1992, Member of the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina. more

Heather Joseph has served as the Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) since 2005. In that capacity, she works to support broadening access to the results of scholarly research through enabling open access publishing, archiving and policies on a local, national and international level. Ms. Joseph is also the convener of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, a coalition of universities, libraries, patients advocacy groups, consumer groups, and student organizations who work to ensure that results of publicly funded research are openly accessible to the public. The group has been a leading voice on U.S. open access policies, including the landmark public access policy issued by the National Institutes of Health, and the recent White House Directive mandating public access to publicly funded reserach across all U.S. science agencies. Prior to coming to SPARC, she spent 15 years as a publisher in both commercial and not-for-profit publishing organizations. Ms. Joseph serves on the Board of Directors of numerous not-for-profit organizations, including the Public Library of Science. She is a frequent speaker and writer on scholarly communications in general, and on open access in particular.

Neelie Kroes, born on 19 July 1941 in Rotterdam, Zuid-Holland, is a Dutch politician and businessperson.

In 1971 she was elected to the Dutch lower house of parliament, where she became spokesperson for education. She remained a member of parliament until 1977, when she became junior minister of Transportation and Water Management in the First Van Agt Cabinet, responsible for Postal and Telephone Services and Transportation. In 1981 she briefly returned to the lower house of parliament, while her party, VVD, was in opposition. In 1982 she returned to office in the First and Second Lubbers Cabinets, as the minister for Transportation and Water Management, a post that she held until 1989. As a minister she was responsible for privatisation of the Post and Telephone Services, as well as commissioning the Betuwe Railway.

After her time as minister, Ms Kroes became a member of the Rotterdam Chamber of Commerce, and also served as a board member for Ballast Nedam (shipping), ABP-PGGM (a pension fund), NIB (an investment bank), McDonald's Netherlands, Nedlloyd, and Nederlandse Spoorwegen (the Dutch railway company).

In 1991 she became chairperson of Nyenrode University, a private business school. In 2004 Neelie Kroes was appointed European Commissioner for Competition. In February 2010 Neelie Kroes became Vice President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda. more

Prof. Manfred D. Laubichler is President’s professor of theoretical biology and history of biology at Arizona State University (ASU). Trained as a biologist, zoologist, philosopher, and historian of science at Vienna, Yale, and Princeton, his research field spans from theoretical and evolutionary developmental biology, complexity theory, and the cultural history of science to digital humanities and computational methods. At ASU, he serves as director of the Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity, associate director of the interdisciplinary “Origins Project” and director of the “Evolutionary Theory Core of Complex Adaptive Systems.” He is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research in Altenberg, Austria, an adjunct scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, and a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has been a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is on several editorial boards of publications such as Biological Theory and the Max Planck Research Library for the History and Development of Knowledge.

Glyn Moody is a journalist, blogger and speaker. He writes about digital rights, copyright and patents on Techdirt (http://www.techdirt.com), while his blog about open source, open data and open culture is at https://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com. After gaining two degrees in mathematics from Cambridge University, Moody entered business journalism before specialising in the field of computers in 1983. He started writing and lecturing about business use of the Internet in early 1994, and about open source in 1995. In 1997 he wrote the first mainstream feature about GNU/Linux and free software, which appeared in Wired magazine (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.08/linux_pr.html). His book, “Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution” – the only detailed history of free software written so far – was published in 2001. “Digital Code of Life: How Bioinformatics is Revolutionising Science, Medicine and Business” appeared in 2004, and explores the rise and importance of the digital genomics. He is active on Twitter and identi.ca, and can be followed at glynmoody@twitter.com and glynmoody@identi.ca. more

Daniel Mutonga is a final year student of Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery (MBChB) at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. He graduated with Bachelor of Science (BSc.) degree in Medical Physiology from the same university. He has had extensive experience in both clinical and basic science research, and also enjoys volunteering his time to educate Kenyan youth. His future goals include pursuing a career in Surgery and finding methods to offer affordable medical care in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially for the street children and HIV/AIDS patients living in the slums. He enjoys volunteering his time in student-led activities, cultural exchanges, traveling and playing drums. Daniel is currently involved in Open Access initiatives in Kenya in conjunction with Medical Students' Association of Kenya (MSAKE), Rights to Research Coalition (R2RC), Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL), University of Nairobi (UoN) Library Services, International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) and International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP). more

Neylon Cameron is Advocacy Director for the Public Library of Science, a research biophysicist and well known agitator for opening up the process of research. He speaks regularly on issues of Open Science including Open Access publication, Open Data, and Open Source as well as the wider technical and social issues of applying the opportunities the internet brings to the practice of science. He was named as a SPARC Innovator in July 2010 for work on the Panton Principles and is a proud recipient of the Blue Obelisk for contributions to open data. He writes regularly at his blog, Science in the Open.

Professor Dr. Hermann Parzinger was born in 1959 in Munich. He studied Prehistory, Archaeology and Medieval History from 1979 to 1984 at universities in Munich, Saarbrücken and Ljubljana (Slovenia). In 1985 he received his doctoral degree from the Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich, where he then worked as Associate Professor from 1986 to 1990. After completing his Habilitation he was appointed in 1990 to the position of Deputy Director of the Römisch-Germanische Kommission of the German Archaeological Institute in Frankfurt/Main; in this capacity he headed up excavations in Spain and Turkey. From 1995 to 2003 he acted as Director of the Eurasian Department of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin and led various archaeological research projects in Siberia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan and Iran. In 1996 he was appointed Honorary Professor for Pre-historic archaeology at the Free University in Berlin, where he continues to teach at present. From 2003 to 2008 he was appointed President of the German Archaeological Institute, and since March 2008 he is President of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation). In 1998 Hermann Parzinger received the highly distinguished Leibniz Award of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation). In 2009 President D. Medvedev of Russia bestowed upon him the “Medal of Friendship”, the highest Russian symbol of recognition for foreign citizens. In 2011 he was admitted into the highly selective Orden Pour le mérite for Arts and Sciences. In 2012 he received from the German president the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 2013 the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz awarded him the Sybille Kalkhof-Rose Academy Award for outstanding contribution in the Humanities.

He is a member of numerous academies in Russia, China, Spain, Great Britain, Romania, the United States of America and Germany such as amongst others the British Academy, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. In addition he is amongst other President of the German Association of Archaeology, Speaker in the German-Russian Museum Dialogue, Chairman of the Working Group Culture in the Petersburg Dialogue.

Ulrich Pöschl is director of the Multiphase Chemistry Department at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. His scientific research and teaching are focused on the effects of multiphase processes in the Earth system, climate & public health (http://www.researcherid.com/rid/A-6263-2010). He initiated interactive Open Access publishing with public peer review and interactive discussion (multi-stage open peer review) through the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP, http://www.atmospheric-chemistry-and-physics.net) and the European Geosciences Union (EGU, http://www.egu.eu). more

Bernard Rentier graduated as a Biologist from Liege University (ULg) in 1970 and obtained a doctorate degree in Experimental Biomedical Sciences also at ULg in 1976, working on the structure of the Influenza virus envelope. He took then a 5 years post-doctoral position at the NIH, Bethesda MD, where he worked on the latency of measles virus in nerve cells. In 1981, he returned to ULg where he worked on the latency of varicella-zoster virus. He became successively Professor, Vice-rector and Rector. Since 1997, as Vice-rector in charge of Research and Libraries, he undertook a vast reform, concentrating 28 libraries into 4 and modernizing considerably the equipment and management. Since 2005, as Rector, he decided to create an institutional repository (ORBi) with an immediate deposit/open access mandate launched in November 2009 that achieved one of the fastest growth rates worldwide. He has been a strong advocate of Open Access for many years and has created EOS (EnablingOpenScholarship), an organization supporting the implementation of Open Access in universities and research institutions worldwide.

Robert Schlögl studied chemistry and completed his PhD at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich (1982). After postdoctoral stays at Cambridge and Basel he carried out his habilitation under the supervision of Professor Ertl (Nobel Laureate) at Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin (1989). Later he accepted the call for a Full Professorship of Inorganic Chemistry at Frankfurt University. In 1994 he was appointed his current position as Director at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin. In addition, in 2011 he was appointed founding director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion, Mülheim a.d. Ruhr. Robert Schlögl's research focuses primarily on the investigation of heterogeneous catalysts with the aim to combine scientific with technical applicability as well as on the development of nanochemically-optimized materials for energy storage. The application of knowledge-based heterogeneous catalysis for large-scale chemical energy conversion summarizes his current research focus. He is author of about 900 publications and registered inventor of more than 20 patent families. He is a member of numerous international organizations. His research activities have been recognized with several national and international awards.

Georg Schütte studied journalism and media and communication studies at the University of Dortmund and City University of New York. Since December 2009, he has been State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Before that, Georg Schütte has been Secretary General at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Executive Director of the German-American Fulbright Commission in Berlin, where he was able to contribute to a better understanding between Germans and Americans. During this period, he was also a member of the EU Commission's expert group on 'Benchmarking Human Resources'. more

Nick Shockey is the director of student advocacy for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and founding director of the Right to Research Coalition (R2RC). Supported by SPARC, the R2RC is an international alliance of local, national, and international student organizations that advocate for researchers, universities, governments, and students themselves to adopt open scholarly publishing practices. Under Nick’s direction, the R2RC has grown to represent just under 7 million students in more than 100 countries around the world and has facilitated over one thousand advocacy meetings with policymakers.

Prior to joining SPARC, Nick was a student activist for the causes of Open Access and Open Educational Resources. He worked locally to make Trinity University the first small, liberal arts university in the United State to pass an institutional Open Access policy. He also worked nationally with SPARC in launching its student campaign. Nick was named a SPARC Innovator in 2007 for his work with students. more

After being Professor of Vegetative Physiology in Heidelberg from 1980–1983, Günter Stock joint Schering AG in 1983 and was appointed member of the board from 1989 to 2005 with responsibility for research and development. He was Vice-President and member of the Senate and Executive Committee of the Max Planck Society until 2011 and Chair of the Jury of the Deutscher Zukunftspreis of the Federal President of Germany until 2012. He is senator of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, senator and member of the Joint Committee of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech), member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and member of the Academia Europaea. Since January 2006 Günter Stock is President of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In January 2008 he took office as President of the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities. In April 2012 he was elected President of ALLEA (All European Academies). more

Mike Taylor is a mathematician by training (BSc, Warwick, 1989), a library software engineer by profession (job title: Software Guy, at Index Data) and a palaeontologist by avocation (Ph.D, Portsmouth, 2009). So he combines an unusual set of perspectives on academic publishing. In his day-job he designs and builds discovery systems for libraries, managing credentials and proxies to access paywalled journal articles. In his spare time he researches the palaeobiology of sauropod dinosaurs, struggling to access the subscription literature that he needs for this work. In what's left after his spare time is used up, he advocates for the destruction of the barriers that prevent access for himself and others. Mike has written about Open Access in venues including the Guardian, the Independent, the Scientist and Times Higher Education, but most extensively and forthrightly on his own blog, Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week. He is an Associate Researcher in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. Mike has described and named two new dinosaurs: the sauropods Xenoposeidon ('alien earthquake god') and Brontomerus ('thunder-thighs').

David Willetts is Minister for Universities and Science. He has been the Member of Parliament for Havant since 1992. He has worked at HM Treasury, the Number 10 Policy Unit, and served as Paymaster General in the last Conservative Government. 

He is a Governor of the Ditchly Foundation and a member of the Council of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He has written widely on economics and social policy. His book 'The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – And How They Can Give It Back' was published last year.

At the Biotechnology Industrial Organisation (BIO) conference in Boston this year, David was given their International Leadership Award for the public official who has made the greatest contribution to the BIO industry over the past year.

John Willinsky is Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University and Professor (Limited Term) of Publishing Studies at Simon Fraser University, where he directs the Public Knowledge Project, which conducts research and develops scholarly publishing software intended to extend the reach and effectiveness of scholarly communication. His books include the Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED (Princeton, 1994); Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End (Minnesota, 1998); Technologies of Knowing (Beacon 2000); and The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (MIT Press, 2006).

Dr. Xiaolin Zhang is the Director of the National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
With a Physics background, Dr. Zhang graduated from Columbian University in USA in 1992 with a Doctor of Library Science degree. He was a professor of Information Management in Sichuan University before moving to NSL/CAS in 2001. Serving CAS’ 100+ institutes across China, he led the NSL into a distributed digital information network and developed its embedded subject librarian service and information analysis service. He has been active in promoting Open Access, co-hosted the Berlin 8 Conference in Beijing and developed CAS IR GRID with 100+ IRs and 300,000+ open research articles. He has also been working hard in research informatics, trusted digital preservation, and copyright and access rights.

Professionally, Dr. Zhang was a Member of the Governing Board and Professional Committee of IFLA during 2005-2009, and is now a Vice President of Chinese Society of Library Science, and the President of Chinese Special Library Association. He has been the Primary Investigators of Chinese Digital Library Standards project, Chinese Scientific Digital Preservation Network Planning, among others.