Panel 1 | Funders and research supporting organisations - an extended panel discussion and Q&A

Speakers include:

Robert Kiley is Head of Open Research at the Wellcome Trust, where he is responsible for developing and implementing an open research strategy. The overarching aim is to help ensure that researchers are equipped, empowered and motivated to make research outputs findable, accessible and usable – and to use these outputs to accelerate research and improve health. Over the past decade, Robert has played a leading role in the implementation of Wellcome’s open-access policy and overseeing the development of the Europe PubMed Central repository. Robert also acts as the point of contact for eLife, the open-access research journal, launched in 2012 with the support of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust, and more recently championed the work to create a new open publishing platform for Wellcome researchers–Wellcome OpenResearch. Since March, he has also assumed an interim role as cOAlition S Coordinator. Robert is a qualified librarian and an Associate Member of CILIP. Robert also sits as a director on the ORCID Board.

Rachel Bruce is currently seconded to UKRI from Jisc to lead on open research (science) policy in the Strategy Directorate of UKRI. Currently, the main priority of policy development is for open access to scholarly publications, and Rachel is leading the UKRI Open Access review. UKRI has signalled support for “Plan S”, and so Rachel is involved in this development in terms of seeking international alignment where it can support UKRI OA ambitions. She is also engaged in other open science policy areas, for example, research data, research metrics and indicators and work in the G7 and Europe; she is the member state representative on the Governance Board for the European Open Science Cloud, and engaged in work with McGill University and the Wellcome Trust on success factors for Open Science. Rachel’s career has involved developing a range of digital infrastructure developments for research and education, from access and identity management to the interplay of digital content and enhanced pedagogic models, although her primary focus has been on infrastructure for research in the UK and internationally.

Colleen Campbell leads outreach and engagement in the Open Access 2020 Initiative, coordinated by the Max Planck Digital Library on behalf of researchand academic organizations worldwide. Passionate about the exciting changes underway in scholarly communication, she leads activities that help stakeholders implement strategies to shift their investments away from paywalls toward a fair and sustainable open access publishing paradigm. Previously European Director for Strategic Partnerships at JSTOR and the digital preservation service, Portico, she has over 20 years’experience across all areas of the academic information sector. She is a frequent speaker at international conferences, serves as an elected member of the UKSG Main Committee, and is part of the LIBER Open Access Working Group. Colleen has a background in the humanities and lives near Florence, Italy.

Ian Coltart is responsible for copyright, licensing and external publication at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva. He oversaw the launch and roll out of the WHO policy on openaccess in 2014 and the update to this policy in 2016. He is closely involved in the inter governmental organizations working group on open access, and contributed to the development of the Creative Commons IGO licence. In addition to open access, he is also the focal point for WHO’s data-sharing policy for routine and emergency data collection. WHO is the UN agency for health, working with 194 Member States, across six regions, and from more than 150 offices.

Alexander Kohls heads the CERN Scientific Information Service which includes the CERN Library, the CERN Historic Archive as well as CERN’s publishing activities. In collaboration with international partners, his team develops and operates some of the key digital repository solutions for particle physics. In his capacity as SCOAP3 Operations Manager, Alex supports the SCOAP3 collaboration toensure its financial and operational effectiveness. Alex and his team act as intermediaries between the 3,000 partner institutions of the initiative on the one side and the commercial and society publishers on the other side. Alex holds a degree in business administration and joined CERN with 20 years of experience from the financial industry where he worked in various senior roles primarily in operations, project management and business development.