Meet the Mavericks

Martin Marlow

Principal and President

Martin Marlow is the President and Principal of Maverick Publishing Specialists. He coordinates the Associate teams alongside working as the lead analyst on a number of key assignments. With over 30 years senior management experience in publishing and electronic information, Martin specializes in strategic and operational sales and marketing; product development and management; and publisher/partner relations.

He has delivered and supported a wide range of services including e-journal and e-book aggregation platforms; cross format e-content retrieval systems and numerous online datasets and communities. His customer and market development activities have been deliberately crafted across all main content types, market sectors and steps in the supply chain.

Martin has been a frequent speaker at Industry events in Europe, the United States and Asia Pacific and is a regular reviewer and contributor in the industry press – commenting on sales, marketing and market development strategies, new product innovation and developing industry trends. He was viewed as one of 5 “key thought leaders” in the information industry in the UKSG’s E-Resources Management Handbook on the future of electronic publishing, where he was asked to provide his views and opinions

Prior to launching Maverick, Martin was Vice President of Publisher Business Development + Marketing for Ingram Digital (the digital media arm of the Ingram Content Group) where he was responsible for overseeing the worldwide sales and marketing activities of Ingram Digital solutions to publishers from all sectors, as well as conceiving and directing all their solution and corporate brand marketing. Previous to that, Martin was Vice President for Sales and Marketing for the e-content system development and hosting company, Atypon Systems Inc. Other past positions also include Director of Strategic Marketing for ProQuest Information and Learning, Director of E-Commerce for Blackwell Ltd and Sales and Marketing Director (Academic Division) for SilverPlatter Information.

Rebecca Rinehart

CEO and Head, US Operations

Rebecca is a publishing professional who has over 40 years of experience in all aspects of scientific, technical, and medical publishing—book, journals, periodicals, and online. She is the former Publisher of American Psychiatric Publishing, a division of the American Psychiatric Association, and the world’s leading publisher of books, journals, periodicals, and online resources on psychiatry, mental health, and behavioral science. In this position, she managed acquisitions and new product development, peer review, marketing, editorial, production, rights, and distribution for print and online products, most notably the international publication of the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Psychiatric Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5).

Previously Rebecca served as Senior Director and Publisher at The Endocrine Society overseeing the publication of its four scientific journals, three periodicals, books and CME programs, and Endocrine News. In this position she launched a book program and two new periodicals as well as an online news feature.

Rebecca started her career at Harper & Row Publishers, where she held various production, editorial, and management positions before serving as Senior Medical Editor for acquisitions. She then joined The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to develop a publishing program of books, periodicals, and consumer literature that included the journal, Obstetrics & Gynecology.

Lisa Cumming

Director of Finance

Lisa is CIMA qualified accountant with over ten years UK and international publishing industry experience.

She has recently returned to the UK from Australia where she worked for a number of years as a Financial Controller for Warner Chappell; the music publishing arm of Warner Music Group. She’s well versed in all facets of accounting having been the sole finance employee at the Australia office of this multinational conglomerate.

Prior to this she held senior accountant roles in an events management company and a residential home builder in between exploring Australia and New Zealand in a campervan.

Before leaving the UK in 2010 she qualified as a Management Accountant working for Imagine Publishing; the specialist videogames and lifestyle publisher.

Rebecca Moakes

Head of Business Development EMEA, Senior Associate, Content & Technology

Rebecca is an accomplished senior publishing professional specialising in developing cutting-edge digital resources and delivering B2B and B2C products and services. With over 16 years’ experience working for and with publishers, she offers a combination of strategic, commercial and technical insights to deliver measurable business goals.

She has a proven track record of facilitating collaborative relationships between technical and business teams; informing product development through marketing intelligence and web analytics; and translating business requirements into user stories. As a champion of agile, and UCD, she has engaged extensively with end users through focus groups, interviews and usability testing to ensure a seamless experience which supports the product vision.

During her role at Taylor & Francis, as a Senior Digital Product Manager, she drove forward the digital collections product portfolio, designing and launching new primary archive resources for the global research market. She also implemented key enhancements to the journals platform such as delivering article metrics, automated open access, e-commerce support for ANZ dollars and enabled alternative publishing models.

Prior to this role she worked at Atypon as an Account Manager and Blackwell Publishers as the Electronic Production Editor. In both of these companies Rebecca managed major content migration projects for both books and journals, including transforming 381 journals into a fully XML workflow, and moving content onto new hosting environments. She was instrumental in optimizing content processes, establishing new quality standards, providing extensive technical support and online publishing expertise.

Nancy Roberts

Senior Associate, Head of Content & Technology Division
Nancy has worked in a variety of production and operations roles across publishing for the last 20 years, following on from the completion of her postgraduate publishing diploma at West Herts College. Her experience encompasses a wide spectrum of sectors, from children’s to trade to academic, culminating in her most recent role as Academic Global Operations Director at Cambridge University Press, during which time she spent time working out of the Hong Kong office and travelling extensively in Asia, Europe and the US. She therefore has a global view of the publishing industry and brings a uniquely broad perspective gained from across the different sectors in which she has worked.

Nancy is passionate about helping businesses to solve problems and deliver sustainable profitability and process efficiency. She specializes in operations strategy and execution; process design and improvement; delivering operational efficiency and profitability; digital workflows; metadata and content enrichment and dissemination; organizational design; supply chain management; outsourcing and offshoring strategies; project management; and knowledge management. She also enjoys providing personal coaching and support to first time managers and leaders. She has a PhD in Postcolonial Feminist Literary Theory and is currently an EMBA student at Cranfield University.

Jayne Marks

Senior Associate

Jayne brings over 40 years of scholarly publishing experience to Maverick.  She has worked at senior levels in a variety of companies helping to devise and deliver on business strategies tailored for different markets.  Throughout her career Jayne has responded to ever changing market environments by developing new product, sales or content strategies to maximize new opportunities.

Jayne has worked on all aspects of journal publishing focusing particularly on journal development and strategy.  More recently her focus has been on helping journals and societies to respond to the new requirements from funders for more open publications linked to data sets.  Jayne has worked with a wide variety of society and association partners to help craft publications that meet the needs of their specific markets and members, spanning disciplines from the basic sciences to social sciences and most recently to the unique challenges of clinical medicine.

Starting as a copy editor and proof-reader, Jayne spent a number of years as a managing editor, helping to managing the peer review process.  She then moved to Macmillan, where she worked in a variety of roles on journals and books.  In the 1990’s Jayne was a director of the newly formed Nature Publishing Group and managed a range of Nature journals in both the UK and US.  She then spent three years as the founding director of MPS Technologies – an off shoot of Macmillan Production in India – developing new services to meet the needs of book and journal publishers.

Jayne then moved to the US to work for SAGE Publishing as VP Journals.  Here she helped to expand their journal portfolio and introduce open access journals to the group.  For the last 10 years, Jayne worked as Vice President for Wolters Kluwer Health Learning, Research and Practice, overseeing a broad portfolio of journals, working with medical society partners and introducing new product options to help diversify traditional revenue streams.

Jayne’s primary focus has been on understanding the needs of the customers and markets that her products serve and ensuring they evolve to meet changing needs.

 

Amanda Weaver

Senior Associate

Amanda is an experienced, MBA educated, strategically aware senior publishing industry professional. With over 35 years in B2B, STM and Professional Association publishing, before joining Maverick her latest role was Director – Professional Publishing and e-Learning at the IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology), and previously held both Publisher and Publishing Director positions with Elsevier.

Amanda possesses an excellent track record of growing existing businesses and launching new ones. Her wide-ranging experience includes establishing and overseeing an e-learning academy for the IET; standards and good practice publishing; managing journal and books programmes; launching magazines; and developing conferences. Additionally, Amanda has in-depth expertise in winning society publishing contracts; developing and launching e-products; running RFP and tender exercises; and specifying and implementing new publishing systems.

 

Kate Wood

Senior Associate, Head of Marketing & Market Research

Kate Wood joins Maverick with over 20 years in publishing with experience spanning academic, STM and trade as well as business-to-business magazine publishing. She has held a number of senior roles as a Director of Publicity for Robson Books, followed by positions as Group PR Director and Director of Marketing at Chrysalis Books Group. Kate was an Associate Marketing Director in STM at Wiley, where she led global teams and ran high impact campaigns resulting in product launches generating seven figure revenues, top 10 bestselling titles and high double-digit revenue growth for portfolios across digital STM products. While at Wiley, she was awarded the prestigious Pacesetter award for her work on digital product launch. After leaving Wiley, she was a finalist in the LEAP Entrepreneur of the Year award 2017. With nearly 10 years’ experience in trade and over 10 years’ experience in academic publishing, she is a true publishing all-rounder.

Her wide background in publishing began with publishing research reports in the civil service, moving to Chadwyck-Healey where she worked as an editor on some of the first digital products to go to market, this was followed by 2 years in magazine publishing and by 20 years as a publicity and marketing specialist. The skills Kate brings to Maverick range from marketing strategy and market research, competitor analysis and audits to the nuts and bolts of marketing communications such as campaign management and planning, copywriting, digital and social media marketing, content creation, PR and publicity campaigns and modern marketing methods such as email automation and CRM systems. She has considerable expertise in all sides of product marketing for a wide range of content –  books, journals, references and data and workflow tools – and in product launches. At Wiley, she was a marketing specialist in chemistry, molecular life sciences, physical sciences and pharma. Her wide experience of many different parts of the industry allows her to see across discipline and from trade to academic and vice versa.

Kate is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin and a fully qualified CIM marketer. She speaks four languages at various levels of fluency.

Gareth Dyke

Senior Associate

Dr Gareth Dyke is a prolific scientific author, researcher, content creator, and journal manager who has published more than 320 peer-reviewed articles over the last 25 years, as well as numerous other pieces (Scientific American) and books. His publications include articles in Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy (USA) and other high-profile outlets. Gareth has worked for more than 18 years as an Editor-in-Chief at the Taylor & Francis journal Historical Biology. He led this journal from zero articles to become one of the leading titles in palaeontology, including its first impact factor (growing each year).

Gareth has a PhD in geology and biology from the University of Bristol, worked as a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and was an Associate Professor at University College Dublin (Ireland) and at the University of Southampton (UK). He is an active teacher and researcher affiliated with universities in Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Kazakhstan, and China.

Gareth provides an unique overview of author-facing products and services having worked as a professional editor, as Head of Content at Charlesworth Author Services, as an Education Manager at Edanz and TopEdit, and as Director of Global Content at Research Square Company (fully acquired by Springer Nature in 2022). Gareth is also a Director at Bentham Science Publishers and ReviewerCredits, responsible for academic relationships and business development. He has well developed networks across academia and the scholarly publishing industry.

Gareth brings to Maverick his deep experience at the interface between research and publishing, helping non-native English speakers – especially in China and Central Asia where he has well developed networks – publish their work and understand scholarly publishing processes. Gareth has conducted thousands of online and face-to-face training sessions and is accredited by the UK and Irish Higher Education Authorities.

Rick Naylor

Senior Associate (USA)

Rick brings to Maverick product and brand marketing knowledge and expertise acquired from over two decades of helping companies in several industries achieve ambitious business goals by building successful marketing organizations from the ground up. With a creative flair and passion for innovative initiatives that push the creative envelope, he has held senior-level marketing roles ranging from start-ups to multibillion-dollar entities.

In Academic Publishing, he managed the marketing of hundreds of electronic, reference databases serving libraries, physicians and the legal profession.

In other sectors, his in-depth marketing expertise also includes software, financial technology, consumer apps and digital entertainment.

In the rapidly changing financial technology sector, Rick renamed and re-positioned a digital payments company, establishing them as an industry thought leader and contributing to record growth. And in digital entertainment publishing, he was responsible for managing many well-known global brands with his dynamic, integrated campaigns resulting in some of the highest grossing industry product launches of all time.

Having served on green-light committees for product development, Rick knows that research, testing, and feedback are critical to successful product marketing. His strengths in messaging, publicity, scripting, content, digital, CRM, advertising, social media and other tactics make for consistently robust and cohesive marketing plans and “high-return” campaign execution.

George Farina

Senior Associate (USA)

George Farina has demonstrated his business development and leadership acumen across executive level positions of substantial scope and responsibility both for major global STM publishers as well as distributors. His corporate experience includes senior level sales/marketing and business development positions with iGroup (Asia Pacific) Ltd (marketing and distribution to academic libraries throughout Asia, E-book licensing, US start-up publishing operations and finance support); Joint Commission Resources (healthcare accreditation and patient safety publishing, e-learning and training); Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (clinical medicine/nursing publishing); Thomson International Publishing (university textbooks/professional reference publishing) as well as eight years living in Tokyo and working with Longman/Pearson (ELT publishing).

With a keen understanding of key market and business drivers, George has risen to the level of complete P&L responsibility for business units in excess of $100 million. He is skilled in strategic planning and in developing and executing growth strategies yielding significant increases in revenues and profits.

He has extensive global experience, is well versed in the details of international expansion, distributor networks and global partnering, and is recognized for cost-effective sales expansion into new markets, restructuring and building sales organizations that achieve targets, hands-on development of senior level, high profile customer relationships and excellence in customer service.

Nicholas Weir-Williams

Senior Associate (USA)

Nick Weir-Williams has been in publishing for over 45 years, with experience in the UK, Australia, and in the US since 1992. Most recently he was Senior Vice President of Business Development at Ingenta (formerly Vista and Publishing Technology), overseeing Sales, Marketing and Account Management. In his 18 years at Ingenta he also worked as Project Manager on major implementations at Pearson, HarperCollins, McGraw-Hill, Thieme and Rosen Publishers; as well as with the product development team, particularly in regard to product and rights management.

Previously, Nick worked in many senior management roles including publisher at Continuum (US) and Reed Press (part of RBI); and eight years as Director and Publisher at Northwestern University Press, developing an award-winning list in Literature in Translation and Poetry (Nobel Prize and National Book Award), as well as tripling the sales and bringing the Press to break-even. In the US he also served for four years on the Board of PMA, the largest publisher trade organization in the world (now IBPA), for two years as President.

Nick started his career in the late 70’s as a sales rep and Linguistics editor for Croom Helm in the UK, subsequently opening an Australian subsidiary for them until their takeover by ABP. He was Publishing Manager for Methuen Australia, and then Thomson, where he worked on all aspects of the merger including warehouse and accounts consolidation. He was then the Academic Publishing Director of Weidenfeld and Nicolson in the UK, including the revamping of the Everyman’s Library paperback list and publishing, among others, George Soros.

He has consulted in a wide range of areas for a number of publishers including Routledge, Gower, Columbia University, and as an editor and Rights agent.

Stephen Laverick

Senior Associate

Stephen has over 20 years’ experience in scholarly publishing with time spent working in both the UK and China.

Primarily focused on digital publishing solutions, during his time as Technical Director at The Charlesworth Group, Stephen was instrumental in overseeing the development of robust, scalable and efficient XML-first workflows for OA megajournals for the likes of PLOS, Nature and RSC as well as tailoring solutions around specific publisher requirements. He was also heavily involved in the growth of the Charlesworth China subsidiary through the migration of production work and accompanying training of local staff, to the creation and subsequent management of a dedicated technical development team consisting of Beijing, China and UK based programming support teams.

Stephen later moved on to work with Edanz Editing, again based in Beijing, as Integration Manager. Here, his main role was to ensure that the companies “publication process” based suite of author services met the needs of the publishing community by forming and managing collaborative partnerships with a wide range of both publishers and third-parties to create efficient workflows. Stephen was also able to make use of his experience in XML-first publishing workflow integration, advising on technical infrastructure and feature requirements for the development of an online authoring eco-system aimed at simplifying the publication process for authors who have English as a second-language.

More recently Stephen was a key figure in the setup of the Alliance for Scientific Editing in China, an industry response to the growth in unethical practices in author services in China. He is a member of the Society of Scholarly Publishers, volunteering on the Membership Committee, and is involved in the JATS4R initiative to introduce standardisation in the use of JATS XML. Stephen is also well versed in budget management, cross-departmental reporting and has had ongoing regular involvement in strategic planning initiatives for business development within his organisations.

Stephen has been a regular conference speaker and attendee at industry events such as SSP, ISMTE and ALPSP. He is now based in North Yorkshire, UK offering advice on XML and digital publishing workflows.

Martin Davies

Senior Associate

Martin has over 30 years’ experience of working in the publishing industry. He has worked in a range of sectors including professional, academic, medical, and educational publishing. Before joining Maverick, his latest role was Head of Digital Learning Products at the IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology) and has previously held e-Learning Director and Publisher roles at Wiley and Editorial Director and Publisher roles at Hodder Education.

Martin has wide-ranging experience from researching and launching e-commerce enabled digital learning platforms, developing textbook programmes for the school, FE and HE sectors in both domestic and international markets as well as the development of professional health sciences book and journal products for global consumption. Additionally, Martin has in-depth knowledge of working collaboratively with membership organisations, digital learning platforms and authoring tools, agile product development, running RFP and tendering exercises and market research projects both in the UK and internationally.

Alison Maclean

Senior Associate

Alison is a publishing operations executive with international experience in concept-to-market editorial and content management in trade, education, reference and professional publishing. She has shaped publishing programs, directed content operations, and marshalled complex project portfolios to deliver significant benefits. Her focus is on bridging from stakeholder priorities to execution, leveraging organizational design, technology solutions and process optimization for scalable results.

Most recently, Alison held the position VP Content Enablement at Wiley. Her brief included defining and executing strategic initiatives to control cost and to make colleagues’ work more meaningful. She led the global team responsible for process design, content technology, editorial standards, accessibility initiatives, data governance, KPI design and reporting, and vendor management. Prior to that, she was a tenured professor and program director of Creative Book Publishing at Humber College (Ontario), guiding graduate students to best practices in book publishing.

With a proven ability to forge successful partnerships, Alison is adept at productive collaboration. Her experience and passion is working with teams to commission, shape and deliver content with clarity and impact.

 

Emma Thomas

Senior Associate

Emma has worked in a variety of editorial, strategy, production and operations roles in academic publishing for the last 27 years. Her experience includes working at major publishers like OUP, Wiley, Emerald and Springer Nature, as well as managing production and peer review for the British Psychological Society.

She specializes in operations strategy and execution; systems and workflows that support Open Access; organizational change management; process design and improvement; delivering operational efficiency and profitability; digital workflows; project management, and business development (journals editorial). She is a qualified coach, experienced facilitator, Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, and ProSci Change Manager.

Lynsey Haire

Senior Associate

Lynsey Haire is a skilled operations leader with almost two decades experience in the publishing industry. An expert in all things peer review, she has deep expertise in manuscript submission, author services, content assessment processing, editor & reviewer engagement programs and procurement of associated technologies and services.

Lynsey headed up peer review systems and services internationally for Taylor & Francis from 2012 to 2023, ultimately as Global Peer Review Director. In this role she led the implementation of online submission systems across the estate as well as roll-out of outsourced journal editorial office services; both programs which required continuous scaling, improvement and iteration to keep pace with a rapidly evolving landscape. She conceptualised, commissioned and scaled key new content assessment capabilities including reviewer selection services, in-house subject matter expert services, roll-out of T&F’s bespoke author-facing Submission Portal and the reviewer recruitment and training program.

A proven process improvement specialist, Lynsey believes strongly in the power of peer review to filter and improve modern scholarship. However, increasing content volumes, fatigued reviewers and bad actors such as papermills put this ~350-year-old trust-based process under significant pressure. With a demonstrated ability to support partners in countering the challenges facing peer review, Lynsey is passionate about harnessing the opportunities and benefits of technology. Her experience and passion is working with teams to optimise journal editorial office efficiency via system change, task sequencing and appropriate automation, whilst supporting staff to keep pace with emerging research integrity best practice.

With close to two decades experience in the field, she is uniquely qualified to support your organisation in balancing the often-competing needs of author customers and volunteer editors to meet your commercial goals.

Michael Geelan

Senior Associate

Michael is an experienced Executive Chairman, CEO and Managing Director with over 45 years’ book industry experience, primarily in the academic, scholarly and STM sectors.

With an early career in marketing at Pergamon Press, working across scholarly monographs and journals, textbooks, reference books and professional medical publications, Michael is best known as Chairman of the Board and majority shareholder at Eurospan Group, where he oversaw its transformation from a specialist sales agency, focussing primarily on UK and Europe, into a class-leading global sales, marketing and distribution agency. During this expansion, Michael established branch offices in India, Singapore and Australia, each backed by sales agents, local stockholding and country-specific marketing, which were further enhanced by later regional entities in both Latin and North America.

A seasoned publishing professional, and skilled in sales and marketing, leadership, business strategy / development and Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A), for publishers looking to expand internationally, Michael’s extensive knowledge of the processes and pitfalls in doing so is second to none. His experience in identifying and working with regional sales agents and representatives, local customer engagement and marketing techniques, alongside pricing and stock availability, is invaluable to those he assists.

His M&A expertise is in no small part enhanced by the prominent part he played in the acquisition by Eurospan of Electronica Books & Media Ltd, Turpin Distribution Services Ltd and, most recently, Transatlantic Publishers Group Ltd. Subsequently, he was also lead negotiator on the sale of first Turpin, then Eurospan, to United Independent Distributors (UID) in 2020 (whom he then joined as Vice-Chair and Non-Executive Director to support the Board and the Chairman during the transition).

Michael brings to Maverick not just a safe pair of hands in marketing and sales, but also solid experience at planning and delivering profitable revenue growth in international markets.

Gavin Jamieson

Senior Associate

Gavin has over 30 years’ experience working in the publishing industry, primarily in the academic and STM sectors. After graduating with a BA in Publishing from Edinburgh Napier University, he originally started his career in medical journals with Churchill Livingstone. Subsequently he had a variety of senior management roles including Journals and Electronic Publisher with Greenwich Medical Media, Commissioning Editor for books and journals at Cambridge University Press and Hodder Education. Before joining up with Maverick, and establishing his own consultancy company, Gavin was Senior Commissioning Editor with the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE Publishing).

Gavin has extensive experience at list building, commissioning new titles and acquiring journals, managing online resources, strategy planning and working with international editors and authors. He has most recently been working with international societies to project manage the publication of conference proceedings, and creating a strategy for journal inclusion in major abstracting/indexing services.

Gavin has been an invited guest speaker on STM publishing at University College London, University of Strathclyde and Edinbrugh Napier University. He is a Director of the annual Cuckfield Book Festival, working with high profile fiction and non-fiction authors, and his Lapwing Publishing Services imprint provides a hybrid publishing route for authors.

Rob McPherson

Senior Associate

Rob adds over 30 years of highly-technical experience in the STM / Scholarly publishing and Distribution industries – together with a track record of calm, pragmatic and incisive lateral thinking – to the Maverick team

From his early career in IT Development at Blackwell Science and then Marston Book Services, Rob quickly moved into project management, business analysis and then senior management with Ingenta, before setting up his own consultancy company and subsequently working with United Independent Distributors.

Rob has worked internationally in India, Sri Lanka, China and Australia; relocating to Sri Lanka for a number of years to set up and run an offshore development centre. He is also the author of white papers on prospective market expansion, third-party representation and M&A projects in China and Australia.

His project management experience includes the end-to-end implementation of ERP solutions, warehouse management systems, B2B/BC2 e-commerce systems, data warehouses, third-party logistics integration and inventory transition projects.

A highly experienced business consultant and corporate trouble-shooter, his areas of expertise include: RFP generation, feasibility studies, lost-revenue recovery, cost-saving projects and post-implementation reviews. Rob also has significant product management experience and has created numerous third-party integrations, reseller agreements and associated legal contracts.

Chris Humphrey

Senior Associate

Chris has spent 10 years running operations for Cambridge Scholars Publishing, working on streamlining activities right through the publication process, including management and oversight of an in-house print production environment, a semi-automated pre-press and author liaison system through the use of a bespoke database system, and a warehousing and fulfilment department. As a result of CSP’s initiative to offer production and fulfilment services to other academic and non-academic publishers, he has a wide range of experience with the challenges publishers typically face and enjoys thinking creatively about the best ways to approach them. Having also worked extensively and directly with authors for many years, he also has a solid understanding of the need to balance efficiency and optimisation, with traditional publishing values, and how to present modernisation efforts in a positive way.

Chris is a passionate problem solver, with a particular keenness for data analysis driven decision making and process improvement. He specialises in improving operational efficiency and profitability, organisational design, supply chain management, data analysis, internal technical systems and database development oversight, distribution channel development and streamlining, project management and author liaison/publishing specific challenges (rights, production, legal, etc), and product pricing analysis and strategic review. He studied Chinese at university and has an EMBA (distinction grade) from Durham University. He is currently also learning the programming language python, having worked with it extensively as a manager for many years.

Monika Lee

Senior Associate

Monika is a senior publishing professional with 19 years’ experience in academic and professional publishing, with a strong track record of delivering revenue growth and profitability across both digital and print portfolios. She is highly experienced in all aspects of new digital product development from concept to launch. Monika is skilled at developing publishing strategy, leading commissioning and content development at scale, setting up scalable workflows, defining business models, as well as overseeing product roadmap development.

As Director of Content at the STEM start-up Proprep, Monika has led global publishing strategy and content development for their new video-learning platform for universities, Boost. Prior to that, she was an Associate Director at Sage where she built the flagship digital library product suite, Sage Research Methods (SRM), into one of the highest revenue generators in the division. As SRM global strategic lead, she developed and executed long-term product strategy, managed the editorial department and led a global cross-departmental product team. Under Monika’s leadership, revenue doubled in two years. Her new publishing strategy of innovative multimedia and video collections continued to fuel multimillion pound growth and cemented SRM’s position as the unrivalled market leader in research methods.

Previously, Monika was Senior Commissioning Editor at McGraw-Hill Education where she led the publishing strategy for Open University Press and managed diverse social science academic book lists, publishing some of the imprint’s top sellers and delivering year-on-year growth. She was also responsible for setting up revenue enhancing strategic partnerships with external organisations and spearheading the launch of McGraw-Hill Professional UK Consumer & Business list.

A published author, Monika has a PhD in English Literature. She is also an experienced, professionally accredited executive coach and leadership mentor.

Gary Bowman

Senior Associate

Gary has over 30 years’ experience working in the publishing industry. He originally started his career at Butterworths (now part of Reed Elsevier) and subsequently had a variety of senior management roles including Customer Service Director, Development Director, and Implementation Services Director. Before joining up with Maverick, alongside establishing his own consultancy company, Gary’s his most recent roles were with Vista/Ingenta, where he progressed through various senior positions during his time with the company.

Gary is an accomplished Project & Team Manager, with practical experience of many system implementations across different publishing sectors in both the UK and Europe, as well as North America. He has extensive knowledge of Order Management, WMS, Rights & Royalty, CRM, Product Manager, Production and Permission systems – and he was also directly responsible for leading the team that built and implemented the original, widely used, global PubEasy system over 20 years ago.

Equally happy working as part of a team, or directly managing teams or people, Gary’s significant and wide-ranging knowledge and expertise enables him to provide business consultancy and project management across a variety of areas. These include system implementations and upgrades; business process and operational reviews; business system requirements; definition and design; system integrations; and data migration projects.

Gareth Jarrett

Senior Associate

Gareth brings 28 years of experience working within the print and electronic supply chains of trade and academic publishers, most recently as the Director of Book Publishing Services at Taylor & Francis. A keen believer that the best publishing is for nothing if customers can neither find, access, or use it, he has made it his mission to ensure that books can get to customers when they want it, wherever they want it, in the format they want it, in a manner that is both financially and environmentally sustainable.

With responsibilities in areas including inventory management, procurement, and supplier management (including RFPs) on a global basis, Gareth has led projects including major distributor changes as well as driving broader supply chain transformation, with its supporting process re-engineering, as well as mass backlist digitisation (across print and e-products), and ongoing content and metadata enhancement. He has been involved in business systems selection and implementation and has handled numerous publisher acquisitions, integrations and divestments. With a clear sense of the pressures facing the industry, he is a strong believer in the power of teams working together to forge solutions to those challenges, and of the importance of quick tactical, as well as longer term strategic solutions. He is a Director at Book Industry Communications.

Ruth King

Affiliate Senior Associate, Open Science and Open Access

Ruth is a publishing professional with deep experience of open science, change management and process development. She has worked in open access publishing since its inception and brings experience from a breadth of business types, from a start-up company using a new business model to global corporate environments.

Ruth has a special interest in in open scholarly infrastructure and how open principles can strengthen research. She has worked closely with the World’s largest professional societies and NGOs to support them to transition to open science. Including open research data strategy, transitioning a journal portfolio to open access, preparing an organization for an open science future, and convening stakeholders from across the research landscape to explore the relationship between open access and the development of research in low- and middle-income countries.

Before becoming a consultant, Ruth was Editorial Director for Springer Nature’s open access journals in Health Sciences, at BioMed Central. A lot of her career has been about looking ahead and enabling change. Ruth has a collaborative and progressive outlook. She brings a great mix of insight, logical thought process and creativity to her work.

Howard Blythe

Senior Associate, Marketing and Market Research

Howard provides Maverick with nearly two decades of experience in corporate, graphic, exhibition and website design. He works in consultation with our clients in the conception, design and production of online and offline marketing and market research activities – including brand development, pricing and product placement, physical market presence (point of use; point of presence) and marketing materials. His team have experience across all traditional and digital marketing and market feedback/interaction channels (including online surveying and analysis, SEO, Social Networking and multimedia marketing) and have worked with the widest range of specific market requirements and available budgets.

Howard’s clients include leading information industry intermediaries and publishers. Howard’s background includes the establishment and ownership of 212Design – a full marketing services company that he ran for 11 years. Howard and his team have in-depth experience of working as strategic or operational marketing consultants, for large corporations as well as “start-ups” and specialist niche suppliers.

Minty Colquhoun

Senior Associate

An award winning, service-driven and commercially minded professional, Minty holds a sound track record in producing strategic marketing initiatives which deliver value to both clients and their customers. With an emphasis on delivering clear and measurable results, maximising ROI and improving performance profitability, her areas of expertise include: Branding, Marketing Strategies, Business Plans and Feasibility Studies, Market Research, New Product Development, Copy Writing, PR and Design.

With over 25 years of professional marketing expertise, Minty assists a wide variety of national and multi-national companies as well as SME organisations in both private and public industries.  Minty began her career with Blackwell’s Information Services where she earned a Spotlight award for outstanding service, before going on to gain wider experience within the Life Sciences and IT sectors.  As Marketing Manager for a software start-up she successfully grew the department’s activities within two years to win Oracle’s prestigious Award for Innovation in 2009.

Until recently Minty was a long-time active committee member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing where she chaired the Hampshire & Isle of Wight regional branch.

Jenny Drey

Senior Associate

Jenny Drey comes to Maverick with 25 years’ experience of marketing within the publishing industry, from books and journals to e-publishing.

For the past 12 years Jenny has worked on a consultancy basis, providing marketing and PR expertise to a range of clients both in the publishing industry and in other industry sectors including legal and entertainment. She has carried out many market research programmes for clients in the UK and the US, reaching into Europe with her fluent French and German. Amongst her other projects she has been called upon to establish and run the marketing of a books programme for a major UK publisher, and head the PR for several scientific communities and publishers.

Jenny has extensive experience of marketing journals, newsletters, and books, both academic and professional and fiction/non-fiction. Prior to her consultancy work, Jenny was Product Development Manager for Chapman & Hall’s electronic publishing division, working across a range of subjects and platforms. This followed a marketing career with other publishers including Elsevier Science, Dorling Kindersley, and PJB Publications. Early on she spent several years at Robert Maxwell’s trade publisher Macdonald, where she marketed fiction and non-fiction books to the book trade and to the general public. Jenny is an ideas person and continues to enjoy the creative aspects of writing, research and translation, as well as generating and working on sound commercial propositions.

Megan Toogood

Senior Associate

With over 14 years’ experience in academic publishing beginning at software provider Semantico Megan specializes in strategic marketing and communications, content development, and training. A Maverick since 2011 she joined The Royal Society in 2018 for three years where she was involved with a major new platform implementation and the development of backfiles that go back over 350 years.

Her skills include messaging, copywriting in all its forms, email marketing, the production of video and audio content for e-learning, go-to-market strategy, and growth strategy. What ties these skills and interests together is an emphasis on communicating with people, be they customers, partners, colleagues or stakeholders.

A long-term interest in the life chances of disadvantaged young people led her to train as a teacher in 2021 and she now also works with teenagers developing their writing skills. As a creative writer she has had plays staged in London and is the writer and director of fiction podcast; The Grove. Megan brings a particular drive to convert communications strategies into practical brand exposure and revenue generating results.

Jen O’Shaughnessy-Beal

Senior Associate

With over 17 years in scholarly publishing at Wiley, Jen has a focus on setting up and developing successful communications, engagement, and content marketing programs. She is an audience-focused, enterprising leader with a natural ability for strategic planning, project management, and translating audience and market insights into creative, compelling cross-channel campaigns. Having held leadership positions in Wiley’s PR, Corporate Comms and Marketing, and Editor Engagement teams, she brings experience of internal and external communication and engagement strategy, event management (online and in-person), content marketing strategy, audience and brand perception research, marketing communications, change management, and training development.

Jen set the strategy, researched and negotiated with providers, and project managed the launch of several web platforms covering content marketing sites, press rooms, eLearning, and community hubs. During her time in PR, she designed and led Wiley’s global STM publicity team including personal oversight of the media outreach for The Cochrane Library and many high-profile journal brands achieving significant front-page and broadcast coverage. Jen has a track record of improving the efficiency and enjoyment of teams and improving the effectiveness of outreach. With strong analytical skills and a focus on data-driven decisions, she excels in setting objectives and creating dashboards to measure communication and marketing goals.

Jen has a degree in Broadcast Journalism and a Diploma in Public Relations and is an accredited member of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.

Ken Heideman

Senior Associate

As Director of Publications at the American Meteorological Society (AMS) for over 20 years, Ken managed a large team of publication assistants, technical editors, and copy editors, collectively responsible for the timely publication of 11 scholarly peer-reviewed journals. He also supervised all aspects of the AMS Book Program. In addition, he was Senior Editor of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the society’s flagship magazine.  Ken’s management philosophy focused on each individual’s unique needs and strengths while forging a close-knit team ethic. This resulted in exemplary performance by the group as a cohesive whole and led to his development of a Publication Management course, which he has presented at many professional conferences.

Ken became a liaison from AMS to the greater publishing community, primarily via his involvement with the Council of Science Editors (CSE), an international membership organization for publishing professionals.  Prior to being elected President of CSE, he served the organization as an executive board member, instructor, a regular columnist in the quarterly journal Science Editor, and a mentor for early-career professionals.   CSE provided Ken with invaluable experience interfacing and working with leaders of other scholarly societies.

Ken is a wordsmith and communicator —an editor, writer, content developer, management consultant, and public speaker —who specializes in adapting complex and technical concepts to any target audience. His skill set and interests extend well beyond the scientific realm to a wide variety of technical and creative genres. By way of background, Ken holds an advanced degree in meteorology. However, he learned early on in his career that his literary talents superseded his forecasting abilities. He thus wisely chose to spend his career in service to the written and spoken word rather than in anticipation of precipitation.

Simon Crump

Senior Associate

Simon has worked for over 25 years for various publishers, mainly in production related roles. He started his career learning all about production from author manuscript to bound book. Since then he has worked for Academic Publishers and as his career has progressed moved further down the production process to be an expert in printing and binding, and supply chain activities. He has also worked in the USA, and has a global view of publishing process as a result of this. His most recent role was as Head of Supply Chain Operations at Cambridge University Press.

Simon is passionate about producing beautiful books in all formats and technologies to the appropriate quality. He expertise covers product management; operations management, supply chain management; strategic planning; budgeting and forecasting; project management; change management; process redesign; problem solving and team leadership. He has run a number of RFPs during his time at Cambridge University Press. Simon is regarded as a strong and supportive leader who actively promotes a coaching environment of continual improvement and best practice. He enjoys working with people to help them develop their careers.

Anjali Chadha

Senior Associate

Anjali is a publishing professional with over 23 years of experience spread over academic and scholarly publishing and content development. Before joining Maverick, her latest role was as Publisher and head of publishing program at Wiley India, an Indian subsidiary of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. She has established credentials in acquiring, developing and delivering content across higher education domains, both in print and digital formats; development and delivery of differentiated versions of global bestsellers for international markets; and design of new product series and innovative learning solutions based on market intelligence and customer requirement. She has been closely involved in the planning and implementation of dynamic publishing strategies for business growth, cost rationalization, improved profitability and smooth operations across business functions.

After completing her PhD in Chemistry from IIT Delhi, she has worked on government fellowships with two of the leading research organizations in India – Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), in the area of scientific information and documentation. This built additional expertise for retrieving, interpreting and analyzing scientific information from a range of sources, and its collation and dissemination in specified format; compilation and editing of monographs; and in abstracting and indexing scientific research papers.

Aengus Carroll

Senior Associate

Aengus has been working on the editorial and production end of print and digital publishing since 1990­, initially with Oxford University Press in journal production. Working on a freelance basis since 1993, and based in Ireland, he has managed numerous reference, educational and humanities titles from concept/proposal through to delivery of bound copy, overseeing standards for the commissioning publisher and their authors. Similarly, he has produced many documents, reports and various ephemeral materials for both marketing and advocacy contexts. Such work frequently has an editorial developmental element, prior to substantive or technical processes. In concert with the client, Aengus oversees the format and design of the material (the look and organisation); its editorial process to ensure quality (copy editing, proofing); and its translation to specified audiences (targeted, academic or general reader, language).

Aengus has also maintained editorial consultancies with several state agencies and institutions in Ireland (such as the National Educational Welfare Board [now TUSLA] and the Irish Human Rights Commission, amongst others – assisting them in both planning and executing their publishing programs, and in delivering their content. Aengus holds a Masters degree in international human rights law. Over the past decade, he has researched and compiled materials for organisations working with the UN and EU systems, and written for international development agencies such as USAID, SIDA and others. Aengus also has much experience in delivering contemporary sensitive content to a variety of audiences, including in professional and business contexts. He brings substantial editorial and production management skills to Maverick’s Technology and Content division.

Bryan Davies

Affiliate Senior Associate

Bryan is a seasoned Senior Product, Program, Transformation and people leader with deep ‘hands on’ experience in innovation and technology, from the military as an engineering leader, to online SaaS information product and service delivery through global, matrixed, cross-functional stakeholders.

He has successfully led large strategic change programs in various roles (product, program, operational, editorial, general management, senior management) in his 23 years at Elsevier to deliver improved customer and business outcomes by focusing on customer needs, innovation, coaching, and creating ‘psychologically safe’ organisational cultures to drive engagement, alignment, and cross-functional collaboration – at all levels of the organisation and at every stage of the program lifecycle.

Bryan brings an integrated and pragmatic, ‘system level’, data-driven and agile approach to strategy, planning, problem-solving – and technical, process, and commercial execution. As well as leading Elsevier’s online books program by transforming a print-based, transactional, books business into a $60M+ online reference business, he has delivered turnaround performance leading Elsevier’s Engineering information business as General Manager, to deliver two years of market-beating growth following 10 previous years of flat growth in a low-growth market by challenging and changing perceptions about customer value creation and focusing on operational effectiveness, Go-to-Market (GTM) execution and high-growth new use cases, digital innovation, and adjacent market opportunities. Bryan also significantly improved the team’s employee satisfaction scores over the same period.

Bryan is a passionate people leader with an authentic, transparent, collaborative, style who builds inclusive and engaging environments for individuals and teams to test, learn, grow, and deliver successful outcomes.

Will Awad

Affiliate Senior Associate

Will is a digital accessibility expert and experienced publishing professional with a background in the academic publishing, information technology and publishing services industries. He has in-depth expertise of, and advised on, digital accessibility compliance (per W3C/WCAG guidelines) for organisations of many types and market sectors. He has overseen access audits as well as remediation projects for digital documents (i.e., EPUBs and PDFs), ensuring they meet the legal requirements of both the US Disabilities Act (ADA) as well as the European Accessibility Act (EAA) and PDF/UA.

He is recognised as a thought leader in the industry, and has spoken at numerous conferences, industry events, and webinars. These include the Access High Ground conference in Denver USA, addressing the “Certified Accessible eBook ecosystem from vendor to publisher to student”, and the Association of University Presses virtual event in 2023 on “Extending our reach: How making our books accessible makes them equitable”. Will also holds a master’s degree focused on international law.

John Lavender

Affiliate Senior Associate (USA)

John has over 40 years’ experience in STM publishing, mainly at senior executive level. He lives in the USA having moved from the UK in 2001. His experience of working in both major English language publishing markets and his career covering almost all the major roles in publishing gives him an unrivalled view of the industry.

His corporate experience includes senior vice president of publishing (books and journals), online development, marketing, web development and international sales with Taylor & Francis and director of marketing, international sales and business development and electronic publishing with the Thomson Corporation. John was an early adopter of electronic publishing, creating the first journal to use PDFs to distribute content in 1997 and the first virtual e-book library in 1999.

John specializes in marketing strategy and internet marketing; market research and creating advisory panels; publishing strategy for books and journals; list development; online platforms and packaging of content online; selling online products; and international sales expansion. He has a keen understanding of the financial needs of a business and how to ensure that financial goals are met. He has also had wide experience in the acquisition of both publishing companies and lists, having handled over 20 successful acquisitions during his career. He can assist with any size of acquisition at any or all stages: from planning and developing an acquisition proposal, negotiating the acquisition and valuation, through to integration once acquired.

Marie Hooper

Affiliate Senior Associate

Marie has over 20 years’ experience in academic and professional STM publishing and information analytics as well as non-profit and consulting tenure. During her time at Elsevier, she held international leadership roles across book acquisitions, project management, strategy, and operations. Most recently, as VP of Health Customer Services at Elsevier, Marie drove effective cross-matrix collaboration to implement a SaaS customer experience / customer success model.

Marie’s skills range from: customer experience / success; operations management; strategy planning; project management; change management; process, workflow and organisational analysis and redesign; data driven problem solving; continuous improvement; book acquisitions; coaching, mentoring and team leadership.

A passionate problem solver, self-starter, and “best practice” advocate, Marie has a particular keenness for data driven decision making and process improvement to deliver impact and insight. Via a “can-do”, results driven attitude combined with a collaborative approach, she specialises in improving operational efficiency and embedding a customer experience focus across organisations.

Marie is a driven and impassioned customer-focused consultant available for project level consulting and interim management. She is energised by resolving complex issues and delivering measurable impact to drive profitable service improvement and sustainable customer success.

Julia Brockley

Affiliate Senior Associate

Julia combines content development and list building expertise with partner relationship management skills acquired from over 25 years of experience in academic and scholarly publishing. With creativity, market insight and a flair for anticipating emerging disciplinary trends, Julia has held senior-level publisher/commissioning roles in at a number of companies including, Palgrave Macmillan, (Springer-Nature), Routledge, (Taylor & Francis), Chadwyck Healey, (ProQuest), SAGE Publishing, and Berg Publications, (Bloomsbury Academic).

During her career, Julia has commissioned and managed journals, (including society-owned ones), digital resources and books, spanning all product categories, (textbooks, major reference works, and monographs). She approaches the process of content development with creativity and commercial judgement, and a keen eye to strategic list development. Many of her textbooks are now in their fourth or fifth edition, and a number of her launch journals including New Media & Society, (1999), and The Journal of Visual Culture, (2002), helped define their respective disciplines and continue so to do.

Julia believes passionately in the social value of publishing and is inspired and excited by the pace of change in the industry. In professional terms this translates into the pursuit of a sustainable Open Access model for HSS book publishing.

Julia’s skills span all the content development functions including pre-commissioning research, competitor and market analysis, author/editor selection, advisory panels and peer review, business case development, financial and investment appraisal. In addition, she can offer a board range of team management experience developed both within publishing as well as outside the industry.

Jigisha Patel

Affiliate Senior Associate, Research Integrity Consultant

Formerly a medical doctor and academic, Jigisha has spent the last 13 years in scholarly publishing developing my expertise in research integrity. She led the first Research Integrity Group, a team dedicated to maintaining research integrity standards, at BioMed Central and helped to establish the research integrity group at Springer Nature before becoming an independent research integrity consultant.

Jigisha’s skills range from manuscript handling and decision making through to training, policy formulation, project management, research, writing and strategic thinking.

She uses her experience to create and deliver strategies that help to manage, prevent and detect research and publication misconduct and that adapt as challenges to research integrity change.

Jigisha has a particular expertise in medical research and publication manipulation.

David Saracco

Affiliate Senior Associate (USA)

David started his career in publishing as the first hire at Harcourt Health Sciences (now Elsevier) to help W.B Saunders, Churchill Livingstone, and Mosby medical publishing imprints to strategize and implement their transformation from a print-centric to an electronically focused publishing group. David worked with editors and authors to conceptualize, design, and implement electronic programs including shepherding them through production. At Elsevier, David built a team of 40 producers, product managers, and technologists who were responsible for the global development of over 500 new electronic publishing products per year across all main segments including medicine, medical research, nursing, and allied health. These products included all types of electronic assessment programs, educational interactive CD/DVD ROM programs, websites, custom portals and platforms, Learning Management Systems courseware, PDA and eBooks, PowerPoint presentations, and a multitude of custom-built programs.

After Elsevier, David switched sides of the table to focus on the vendor side of publishing. David joined a start-up company, Impelsys, which helped publishers outsource their electronic development to a group of engineers, content experts, and production teams based in Bangalore, India. David was responsible for global publishing relationships, strategy, sales, and client services to publishers across the entire publishing industry including STM, Trade, PreK-12, Higher Education, and Reference.

Through the years David has set company and product strategy, helped develop and sell a multitude of electronic platforms including Artificial Intelligence for Publishers, white-labelled, SaaS eBook platforms, Digital Asset Management and Distribution systems and Component Content Management Systems for publishers. David has held senior and vice president positions with such publishing vendor companies as Impelsys, CodeMantra, RSI Publishing Solutions, and Vantage Labs AI. Prior to starting his publishing career, David was co-owner of a successful multimedia start-up called Target Media, Inc. Target Media built electronic profiles of high technology companies such as Oracle, Peoplesoft, SAP, Cognos and more and distributed those creative CD-ROM programs throughout the Big Six consulting firms of Anderson Consulting, PriceWaterhouse, Deloitte Touche, etc.

Emilie McDermott

Affiliate Senior Associate

Emilie provides Editorial Management Solutions to Publishers, Editors and Journal owners. She has a broad range of expertise within academic publishing and has managed Book projects as well as academic Journals. She has a wealth of knowledge around Rights and Permissions, advising customers about copyright and attribution.  Acting as a Senior Content Editor within an Editorial team, she has expertise in managing Editorial Boards, peer review management and is familiar with systems such as ScholarOne and Editorial Manager.

Within the Production department Emilie managed an overseas team to ensure regular copy flow was maintained for her portfolio and identify any potential issues and provide solutions. Ensuring schedules were adhered to and that journals were typeset to standard were also amongst her responsibilities. Emilie’s main passion lies within publication ethics, having worked as a Research Integrity Manager handling cases of ethical misconduct and conducting investigations in accordance with industry standards. As a Community Advisor for UKRIO, Emilie is constantly developing her knowledge of this area, as it continually challenges academic publishing and the scholarly community.

Emilie has worked at Clarivate as an Editor at Web of Science, conducting evaluations and providing feedback and guidance on journals around best practice and offering Editorial recommendations for Publishers. Emilie offers a multifaceted end-to-end skillset and is familiar with the systems, operating practices and challenges that Publishers and Editorial boards are managing.

Maria Machado, PhD

Affiliate Senior Associate

Maria Machado is a writer, reviewer, analyst, and blogger. Throughout her scientific career, she published on microcirculation and vascular physiology. At Bio-protocol, she edited papers, produced research article templates, and streamlined peer review processes. Now, she specializes in reviewing scientific papers (over 400), FAIR research design, and science communication. She can be regularly seen volunteering in events such as Pint of Science or European Researcher’s Night, attempting to bring scientists and society closer via clear communication (https://stories4sci.blogspot.com/). She hopes to standardize peer review practices through training, and is the co-chair of Peer Review Week 2024. Her passion for multiculturalism and open science is rooted in her experience as a nomadic scientist living and working in many different places. She advocates for transparent practices, equity, and effective training.

Steve O’Connor

Affiliate Senior Associate

Steve is a seasoned international speaker, workshop presenter, editor, writer, consultant, and, of course, librarian.  He wrote the book on scenario planning for libraries and other information organizations (“Imagining Your Library’s Future” [Chandos], which has also been published in the Chinese language by the National Library of China). He has also written “Library Management in Disruptive Times [published by Facet] and “Repositories for Print: Strategies for Access, Preservation and Democracy” [De Gruyter]. Steve is a long-standing journal editor (Library Management) and the author of over 70 articles. He is also a frequent presenter at international conferences and workshops and taught at Chiang Mai University.

Most recently, he has been engaged developing on a Masters for Information Leadership at Charles Sturt University where he is an Adjunct Professor. Steve’s passion is to foster creative and dynamic imaginative communities, that deliver positive and measurable results for their Library’s customers. His key strength is understanding that there are many paths to the Future, thus allowing us to pause, reflect, and to really think differently rather than have our futures determined for us.

Mark Berthelemy

Affiliate Senior Associate

Mark Berthelemy is an experienced consultant working at the intersection of business, learning and technology – helping translate between technical and non-technical audiences.

With his deep knowledge of digital media and a solid understanding of the technologies underpinning modern online learning and content management systems, he is able to help organisations to review their existing provision and design and procure new solutions.

Mark has worked within large and small corporations, in public sector bodies and in international non-governmental organisations. He is able to work and communicate at all organisational levels – facilitating change and offering hands-on support where necessary.

Eloisa Viggiani

Affiliate Senior Associate, Latin and South America

Eloisa brings to Maverick knowledge and expertise in bibliographic databases and research evaluation. Her career in the publishing industry began 15 years ago, when she joined Elsevier as a consultant for research intelligence. In this role, she engaged with journal editors and scholarly publishing associations in Latin America and with Scopus´ Content Selection and Advisory Board to expand the regional coverage of the database with the most relevant local journals. She became a specialist in bibliographic databases and science evaluation, providing analysis, insights and recommendations around science evaluations and the responsible use of indicators for the assessment of journals, researchers, institutions, and research proposals.  Eloisa also had the opportunity to deliver consulting services to government organizations, research funding agencies, and leading universities in Latin America around the assessment and evaluation of teaching, research and third mission, and around topics of special interest, such as globalization, academic mobility/Brain Drain, regional inequalities, and gender gaps. Her experience also includes capacity development and the management of international cooperation projects. Prior to Elsevier, she worked as an engineer and project manager with IBM and Lucent Technologies for nearly 10 years.

Eloisa has a PhD in Education in Sciences from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. She is a member of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics – ISSI and of the Brazilian Association for Research in Science Education – ABRAPEC. She is fluent in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Ana Heredia

Affiliate Senior Associate, Latin America

Ana is a former researcher who moved first into STEM editorial and publishing, and more recently into open science infrastructure.

After more than 15 years in research, Ana joined Elsevier as a Research Advisor for Latin America, developing extensive relationships and partnerships within the research community: universities and research institutions, learned societies, government agencies and funding agencies. At Elsevier Brazil, Ana joined the Journal’s Department, managing acquisitions, the daily editorial and production workflow, and acting as a strategic consultant for societies journals in their strategy and indexing challenges. She then worked as a consultant for the Research Intelligence team, providing insights and solutions for research institutions and agencies.

After Elsevier, Anna then changed from commercial publishing to the non-profit space as Regional Director for Latin America for ORCID. here she was responsible for driving the community engagement and membership strategy in the region.

Ana is a Biologist by training, and has a PhD in Science (Université Libre de Bruxelles) and a Msc in Neuroscience (Université Toulouse III), two post-doctorates fellowships and a few papers published on Eco-ethology of ants. She is an active member of SSP – Society for Scholarly Publishing, NISO and C4DISC, and is particularly committed to open research and equity, inclusion and diversity in scholarly communication. She is fluent in English and French, and native in Portuguese and Spanish.

Rachael McDiarmid

Affiliate Senior Associate (ANZ)

Rachael McDiarmid has been in the book industry for over 30 years in a variety of product, sales, marketing and senior management roles. She has spent time on both sides of the fence — working primarily in academic and professional publishing, as well as a long stint in library supply where she managed publisher relations for the print, digital and multimedia supply chain as well as a trade distribution business. Rachael was the face of the James Bennett/Nielsen Bookdata joint venture for many years in the mid-2000s and has worked with Blackwell Book Services and Baker & Taylor/YBP on their retail and digital projects in the ANZ region.

Rachael now provides outsourcing solutions for publishers (predominantly in sales and marketing), as well as consulting services for publishers (including university presses, small presses and multinational organisations), distributors and library vendors locally and internationally. Through her business, she is also the ANZ contact for publishers for ProQuest’s Ebook Central.

Angela Keil-Zippermayr

Affiliate Associate, SEO, ONIX & Metadata

Angela boasts an extensive professional background as the Head of Publisher and Supplier Data for Australia’s largest book retailer: Booktopia, where she has excelled in this role for over 13 years. In her capacity overseeing importer systems, managing diverse inbound data feeds, and ensuring the quality and strategic alignment of product data presented on the retailer’s platform, Angela has concurrently served as a consultant for trade and academic publishers and wholesalers. Her expertise spans all facets of print, e-book and audiobook bibliographic data, along with addressing ONIX feeds-related challenges.

Committed to remaining informed about industry developments, Angela remains current with ONIX updates, BIC, THEMA, and BISAC classification schemas. She maintains active communication channels with key industry players such as Editeur and collaborates with renowned book data aggregators like Nielsen, Titlepage and Thorpe-Bowker, facilitating a continuous exchange of ideas and insights.

Before assuming her role as a data quality specialist in the book industry, Angela contributed her skills as an SEO and SEM consultant across diverse sectors, ranging from online learning course providers to rental car companies. Armed with a profound understanding of the pivotal role that targeted keywords and strategic data placement play in the ecommerce landscape, Angela seamlessly integrates her SEO and SEM mindset into her overarching data and business strategies, ensuring a comprehensive and cohesive approach to her work.

Matthew Salter

Affiliate Senior Associate

Matthew Salter is the founder and CEO of Akabana Consulting LLC and is a multi-lingual publishing executive with over 20 years of experience in scholarly publishing and research communications. Following a successful career in academic research at leading institutions in the UK and Japan, he transitioned into STEM publishing and science communication and has worked in senior roles at leading commercial and learned society publishers. These include NPG Nature Asia-Pacific (now part of SpringerNature) where he headed up MacMillan Science Communication, the custom-publishing arm of Nature Publishing Group, and IOP Publishing where he led partner publishing and business development in the Asia-Pacific region and managed the Tokyo and Beijing offices. In 2016, Matthew moved from Japan to the east coast of the US as the first ever Publisher of the American Physical Society (APS), a position he held until the end of 2021. On leaving APS, Matthew founded Akabana Consulting to deliver strategic  scholarly publishing editorial and language services to the international research community.

Matthew’s work is driven by a passion for research and scholarship, and a focus on delivering innovative and client-focused publishing and research dissemination solutions with compelling value propositions. His experience spans publishing and business strategy, new journal launches and portfolio design, editorial services, and content creation, as well as marketing and social media strategy.

In his publishing career Matthew has launched multiple journals and has a proven track record of creating innovative science communication tools, growing high-quality journal content, driving open access and open science, and increasing publishing revenues. He also has extensive experience working with non-profit organizations and is a former Board member of STM and CHORUS.

Matthew holds a BSc and PhD in chemistry (Imperial College). He is a former Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Research Fellow (Tohoku University), Lecturer in Organic chemistry (King’s College London) and a JST ERATO staff member at the University of Tokyo. He is fluent in Japanese, proficient in Mandarin Chinese, and has extensive experience of Asian business cultures.

Katharine Szamuely

Affiliate Senior Associate

Katharine is a senior finance business partner and CIMA qualified accountant with 20 years’ experience providing commercial financial support and working with Board-level management in academic publishing, financial information services and media. Most recently she spent 10 years at Springer Nature covering institutional subscriptions, open access, trade sales and eCommerce across journals, books, databases and author services. She has developed strong skills in modelling, analysis, planning and communicating, comfortably moving from detailed financials to broader management and strategy.

Her area of particular focus is open access publishing, including fully open access journals, Transformative Agreements and hybrid journals, and strategic planning for the transition to open access. Her work on fully open access journals has included enhancing understanding of the growth drivers of open access journals, improving forecasting and decision making, developing criteria for starting and developing journals, improving pipeline management for large journals and portfolios, and supporting Managing Directors in P&L management of these high growth businesses.

Her work on Transformative Agreements began in Europe with the first agreements over 8 years ago. This has included many deals, moving from Europe to the US, Asia and the rest of the world, e.g. analysing publication patterns, developing the ongoing methodology to support sales pitches, reporting to existing customers, providing financial and strategic guidance for new deals and renewals. It has also included strategic analysis, e.g. financial modelling of the long-term impact of the growth of Transformative Agreements and of Plan S proposals and evaluating scenarios and developing new business models for the ongoing transition to open access.

Stefan Kendzierskyj

Affiliate Senior Associate

Stefan Kendzierskyj has an extensive background in commercial, consulting, and strategic leadership, holding senior and executive-level positions with technology solution-led companies servicing the publishing, fintech, government, and cybersecurity sectors.

After working a number of years as senior business development in financial accountancy software and database systems industries, he moved into the publishing sector. There he managed government clients and grew new business as a risk publisher for The Stationery Office (part of Williams Lea), leading high-profile projects for the Home Office, Foreign Office, MoD, and large bid tenders. He deployed a number of successful digital initiatives at TSO. Subsequently, Stefan moved to the software vendor side of the industry as Executive Vice President for Sales with the digital transformation company, Impelsys Inc. Over the next 10 years, he built and managed the EMEA/APAC regional sales team, executing P&L, forecasting and budget, responsibilities alongside achieving high revenue growth, extensive regional development, and winning/implementing multi-million Euro digital transformation deals.

Post Impelsys, Stefan has undertaken publishing and Web3 projects including iGaming, blockchain, and cybersecurity – and led (as a senior consultant) many publishing discovery phases, market research/analysis, and strategic selling initiatives.

He holds a master’s degree in Cybersecurity and is an accomplished author in emerging technology subjects, such as blockchain, self-sovereign identity, AI, cyber warfare, and cyberattacks/threats – with published works through Springer, Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, IGI, and World Scientific.

Jason De Boer

Affiliate Senior Associate

With 30 years’ experience in a diverse range of roles and sectors within publishing and information services, Jason works with clients to support their business growth, strategy delivery, customer outreach and product development.

During his career, Jason has held senior commercial and client-facing business development roles with Kriyadocs, Aries Systems, Elsevier, The Charlesworth Group, OCLC, Thomson Learning (now Cengage) and the British Standards Institution (BSI). In these roles, he has worked with a broad range of institutional and corporate customers. In recent years, Jason has helped publishers to optimise their editorial and production processes, focussing on technology and services to improve author experience, support peer review, implement XML-first workflows, and integrating AI tools to support editorial decision making. He is also a CIPD qualified trainer, with experience of recruiting, leading and coaching sales teams.

Since late 2020 Jason has been living in the rural tranquillity of the Creuse region of France.

Lisa McCarthy

Affiliate Senior Associate

Lisa consults across transformation, strategy, sales enablement, and training. She has 20+ years of experience successfully leading end-to-end business transformation programmes and operational improvements in Academic publishing from ideation to cultural integration, utilising coaching, training and leadership practices to steer teams towards shared goals and outcomes. She has also worked on technology enabling change, strategic planning, facilitating culture shifts, sustainable change adoption and process design.

Lisa has extensive expertise in sales enablement and training and feels passionate about creating the best possible environment for sales teams to thrive in a digital selling landscape. She specialises in driving real behavioural change across regional and global teams, with a strong track record of leading global cross-cultural teams across diverse operational levels and functions.

Jason Cooper

Affiliate Senior Associate

Jason is a highly regarded, cross-functional consultant with over 20 years’ experience in all aspects of publishing. He has conceived of and led several innovative D2C ventures from ideas to thriving operations in corporate and entrepreneurial settings. As a result, he has a particular specialism in opportunity based commercial analysis and the financial modelling, operational design, strategic marketing and growth of new businesses. He was also for a time an IP development and licensing sales specialist, working across all media and global markets.

As Chief Operating and Commercial Officer of innovative publishing start-up Unbound, he provided the practical strategy and support to grow an early-stage concept into an award-winning team able to raise several million in investment and deliver a profitable business model. This involved the hands-on leadership of the finance, marketing, editorial, HR, product development, editorial, sales, marketing, production and distribution functions. He has been identified with a period of growth and innovation at the literary publishing house, Faber and Faber, where, as Digital and New Business Director, he contributed substantially to record results through the development of several award-winning digital products, new D2C services, strategic partnerships and through the growth of their licensing activities. This is where he first became involved in Academic publishing, working with Bloomsbury to build Drama Onlineand scoping Faber’s own entry into this sector.  During this time he also secured an executive MBA with merit at Warwick Business School, where he focused on publishing and media strategy and practice.

Prior to this, Jason was a senior commissioning editor at Pan Macmillan where he published non-fiction and fiction for the Macmillan and Picador imprints. His list included several New York Times bestsellers and included the first book published on Google, trade works by respected academics, pop-culture and ground-breaking literary fiction. “Jason worked with us at Bonnier Books UK as a consultant on our digital business strategy. Throughout the process, he was an invaluable advisor and trusted member of our team. During each stage of the project, Jason collaborating in unison with our team, whilst demonstrating his meticulous approach to research and data-gathering. The reporting he delivered was brilliant – clear and articulate – and an invaluable resource for us as a business as we look forwards to our next stage of growth.” – Perminder Mann, CEO Bonnier UK, 2020

Jon Williamson

Affiliate Associate

Jon has spent nearly 30 years working in the publishing and digital content market with experience in educational, professional, and magazine publishing.  He has spent the last 20 years focussing on K12 publishing and assessment globally.

Jon was Global Product Strategy Director for Cambridge University Press and Assessment where he led digital product strategy and other key projects for the global K12 teams.  He was responsible for rolling out a consistent digital strategy across the global branches, and product management and UX for the platforms and services delivering the strategy. He also led on various key projects (including acquisition support) for EDU and across Cambridge. Key achievements included increasing digital usage by over 100%, consolidating education digital delivery onto three key platforms (down from c10), building a data strategy for education, and setting up a global product management and UX function.

Prior to CUP&A Jon has worked as a consultant both independently and with Maverick, Cognizant and KPMG.  Other roles Jon has held include Managing Director of i-nfer Assessment Limited, a commercial subsidiary of the National Foundation for Educational Research, Business Development Director for Collins Education, looking after Collins’ substantial investments in the digital learning sphere, and as List Development Manager with Butterworths Tolley, the UK’s premier Legal and Tax Information Publisher.

Jon has significant experience working with publishers as a consultant. He has worked with major international groups, not-for profits, and start-up companies. His areas of expertise include customer-centric digital product design – supporting digital product strategy delivery; market entry support – helping organisations turn their portfolios into propositions that are fit for market and identify routes for taking those propositions to customers; building commercial strategies – helping an organisation review its current approach to market and prioritize activity; and due diligence support and interim management.

Clare Wratten

Affiliate Associate, Marketing and Communications

Clare Wratten is an industry professional with over 25 years’ experience in marketing and communications. She approaches projects with a combination of curiosity, confidence, and creativity while still retaining a can-do attitude and a practical approach. Her expertise covers the following areas: strategic planning and tactical delivery of marketing campaigns; PR – all aspects; content creation and writing; project and account management; events (a huge area this one); and ideas generation.

Through her extensive work experience, Clare has delivered projects for a diverse client-base including advertising agencies, local authorities, global commercial enterprises, and publishing companies. Her work in these areas has covered projects ranging from international events through to award-winning PR campaigns via television ads and theatre productions. She is currently managing the marketing and social media for several clients.

Outside of work, Clare is involved with several local charities, including a mental health charity providing counselling to primary and secondary school-age children. For this charity, Clare has devised their communications strategy and the corporate donations programme. On a personal level, Clare is currently in her final year of a Humanities degree, specializing in Literature.

Jane Anderson

Affiliate Senior Associate

Jane’s experience has been built on a strong production and operational background, with a reputation, focus and drive to ‘make things happen’.

Before joining Maverick, Jane was Operations Director at Group GTI, an Ed-Tech based group of companies delivering products and service solutions that currently connect over 1.6 million students and recent graduates, 80 higher education institutions and 100,000 employers across the UK and Ireland. Whist there, she was involved in the planning and launch of numerous new products and services across the Group, working closely with a variety of teams including product, content, design, commercial, marketing, events and research. Her areas of expertise include cross-functional team development, managing change, and embedding new technologies and workflow ‘best practice’ to improve efficiency and quality control. Jane was instrumental in the development of GTI during rapid growth, European expansion and transition to become a leader in the ‘Ed-Tech’ sector.

Jane also has background and experience in tackling complex brand hierarchy strategy / guideline creation and execution; Corporate and product level messaging, positioning and ‘Go To Market’ planning and channel choice; and target customer / end user persona research and tone of voice development. She is adept at providing guidelines, tools, frameworks and strategy for consistent brand and market recognition across all touch points.

Working in the early careers sector has given Jane an in-depth knowledge of the UK and Irish higher education sector(s) and has worked with many professional bodies on bespoke contract projects.

Joe Schick

Affiliate Senior Associate

Joe is a business development and marketing executive in the global publishing and educational technology industries. He specializes in turning complex initiatives into successful partnerships and complicated ideas into straightforward messages and content.

Joe began his publishing career in 2001 at Pearson, where he managed a rights-acquisition team before moving into business development. There, he managed digital content licensing partnerships and negotiated new relationships with retail and library platforms in the nascent world of eBooks and digital audiobooks. In 2008, Joe moved to the Ingram Content Group, where he worked primarily with educational publishers who were beginning to create digital textbooks. He then successfully acquired multilingual eBook and audiobook content from the major trade and academic publishers in the UK, Europe, Canada, ANZ, and beyond for Baker & Taylor. He expanded his work into product development at library technology provider Bibliotheca, where he led the design and launch of the Opus eBook lending platform.

Since 2016, Joe has been working as an independent consultant to technology companies and nonprofits, including Stockholm-based Plotagon, where he launched and ran their animation software product for corporate and academic e-learning. Today, he is the Principal & Co-Founder of Schick Creative, a boutique marketing agency for businesses and nonprofits, where he combines his business development experience with creative content creation. Joe holds a B.A. in History from Brandeis University and lives in the Boston area.

Jo Havemann

Affiliate Associate, Global Research & Publishing Equity

Dr. Johanna Havemann (commonly referred to as ‘Jo’) brings enthusiasm for new ideas, projects, and viewpoints to the Mavericks team. Her aspiration is to share the tools, strategies and workflows developed over years, encouraging scholarly publishing with a global perspective in dedicated service for the dissemination of research accomplishments to enable their unfolding to societal and environmental benefits.

Jo is a certified trainer recognized by the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce with over a decade of experience in Open Science Communication. Her biological research background culminated in a PhD in Molecular Biology specialized in Evolution and Developmental Research (EvoDevo).

Driven by a passion for Open Science, Jo embarked on a journey with Access 2 Perspectives to alleviate the challenges faced by researchers and to facilitate enjoyable research practices, alleviate publication pressures, and dispel myths surrounding Open Science and Open Access. This commitment stems from personal experiences during her PhD journey, and the realization that research practices should be purpose-oriented, fostering collaboration on a global scale.

Grounded in values such as transparency, accountability, cooperation, and diversity, Jo’s expertise lies in Open Science; Scholarly Reading, Writing and Publishing; Research Integrity; and Global Research Equity. At Access 2 Perspectives, Jo collaborates with institution-independent consultants to provide comprehensive comparisons of scholarly services by both commercial and non-commercial providers, enabling researchers, librarians and publishers across disciplines to streamline their digital workflows efficiently.

A notable achievement for Jo is her work with AfricArXiv – the African Open Access portal, leveraging the discoverability of African research primarily through the adoption of Persistent Identifiers.

Dedicated to life-long learning, Jo currently engages in brainstorming and sharing of best practices as a member of the OpenAIRE Training Coordinators – Community of Practice, the Subscribe to Open (S2O) Community of Practice, and the SDG Publishers Compact Fellows.

Andrea Eastman-Mullins

Affiliate Senior Associate

Andrea is a digital publishing and e-learning professional with over 25 years of experience in all aspects of aggregated collections for teaching and research. In executive and product management roles for ProQuest, Alexander Street Press, Chadwyck-Healey, and SIRS, she developed over 300 library databases including the first streaming video and audio collections for academic libraries. Most recently, Andrea launched West End Learning, a new business providing services and products to accelerate the adoption of OER and affordable learning resources.

Andrea is interested in improving access to education through open pedagogy, libraries, and archives. She holds a Master’s degree from the University of Michigan in Higher Education Administration with a focus on Instructional Design. Her graduate work included research on the peer review process of MERLOT.org, one of the first aggregations of digital learning objects. Andrea also led faculty development initiatives statewide with the University of North Carolina’s Teaching and Learning with Technology Collaborative.

At ProQuest, Andrea was Vice President, Product Management for an $80M product line used globally in K-12, higher education, and public libraries. Prior to her work with ProQuest, Andrea was COO with Alexander Street, leading strategic planning and execution of all publishing plans. Andrea oversaw the Production, Software Development, and Human Resources departments including a staff of 50+ and all product budgets. She was a key member of the Executive Team that grew the business from $5M to $30M before it sold to ProQuest.

Andrea has been a speaker at Charleston, ER&L, UKSG, MLA, and EDUCAUSE and was interviewed for articles on OER in Against the Grain and Research Information.

Sarah Bartlett

Affiliate Senior Associate

Sarah is self-employed and works in the areas of content strategy, copywriting and proofreading. She specialises in libraries and technology, but offers experience across a range of business-to-business sectors.

Sarah produces full content strategies as well as standalone recommendations in areas such as tone of voice and persona research. She writes a range of materials, both online and print, and her regular clients include OCLC. She is also a freelance medical editor and proofreader for McCann Health.

Sarah’s career started in IT, before she made a career change into librarianship. She spent five years managing special libraries in the metals industry. Following this, Sarah moved to Talis, then a UK library software vendor. There she combined her library and IT skills in business analysis, product management and content marketing roles.

In 2011 she left Talis to set up her freelance copywriting and content marketing business. Between 2015 and 2017, she worked as a Senior Editorial Manager for Tomorrow People, an award-winning business-to-business digital marketing agency. She produced content strategies for global and national B2B brands in a range of sectors. She also devised editorial calendars and managed the outsourcing of content production to a team of freelance writers.

Mark Purvis

Affiliate Senior Associate, Publishing and Open Access

Mark has spent the last 30 years in scholarly and b2b publishing, specialising in delivering product and portfolio growth in challenging and changing markets. Most recently, he has been focused on finding solutions to the challenges of open access in the scholarly publishing market. He was the OA lead at IOP Publishing where he was responsible for bringing open access right into the heart of the organisation. He has experience in a very broad range of open access business models, including consortial models like SCOAP3 and transformative agreements. He launched a new portfolio of fully gold OA journals at IOP and also played a major role in developing IOP’s open access and open data policies.

He started his career at Elsevier editing scientific journals and managing peer review before spending more than 15 years helping to build Elsevier’s magazine and newsletter publishing division during the transition to digital publication. His expertise lies in enabling teams to produce high quality and profitable editorial products that meet the needs of their customers, whether those customers are researchers, readers, editors, societies, librarians or funders. He relishes finding practical solutions to challenging problems and has worked with staff, customers and partners from every corner of the world.

Mark Styles

Affiliate Associate, Higher Education Textbooks and Online Digital Learning

Mark has over 10 years’ experience in the Higher Education textbook and digital solutions market, gained in a variety of editorial, advisory and management roles with John Wiley & Sons Ltd, combining both hands-on project experience with strategic level planning.

Acquiring, developing, and delivering content across a range of subject areas in both print and digital formats, Mark has a proven track record in conceptualising and producing innovative products and solutions aligned to exacting individual customer and broader market requirements.

Having managed Wiley’s custom publishing programme for the EMEA market, Mark has worked closely with sales and business development teams to create content strategies and deliver solutions for international as well as UK clients. Success has come through Mark’s capacity to control margins and ensure timely delivery of complex projects by managing effectively and building strong relationships across locations, vendors and stakeholders.

Working in high-growth markets such as the Middle East and Asia, and by significantly increasing market share for new products, Mark has demonstrated and received awards for his ability to adapt to new and challenging conditions within publishing.

Dr Neeraj Mehta

Affiliate Senior Associate

Dr Neeraj Mehta is a Publishing and Life Sciences solution expert, having over 17 years of cumulative experience at various levels in Consulting, Solution Selling in Pharma & Publishing, Market Research, Teaching, Drug Discovery and Preclinical Evaluation, Pharmaceutical Research and Development. He has served organizations such as WILEY, SmartAnalyst, Panjab University, Punjab Technical University, Council of Scientific an Industrial Research, University Grants Commission and Panacea Biotech. Neeraj has been involved in leading strategy development, delivering profitable outcomes, incorporation of rationalizing, cost saving initiatives and resolving of significant operational matters. He has built highly profitable businesses from scratch by creating high performance collaborative sales & project teams. He is currently engaged in global consulting assignments related to discoverability enhancement solutions for publishers/societies/associations, while also acting as advisor to companies offering technology solutions to life sciences companies.

Neeraj is M.Pharm., Ph.D. in Drug Discovery and PGDM in Marketing and International Business. He has been an Author with Elsevier & Springer, and, Reviewer with Bentham Sciences He has 6 Patents, 4 Research Papers in International Journals, 3 Poster Presentations in International Conferences and 35+ Poster Presentations in National Conferences (including 4 Best Poster Awards) to his credit. He is a “foodie”, who loves to travel, cook and play chess in his free time!!

Rachel Middlewick

Affiliate Senior Associate

Rachel has worked in publishing since 2000. After initially specialising in subscriptions marketing and international trade marketing at Haymarket Media Group, she moved into central publishing roles, eventually running a portfolio of B2C and B2B brands in the outdoor leisure market. In 2018 she was responsible for driving a digital product development strategy to improve relevance for new audiences and to deliver new revenue streams.

Alongside the path in owned media Rachel has also spent 10 years in content marketing running and retaining high value accounts and delivering multimedia content strategies for brands across the retail, sport, automotive, education and membership body sectors. She developed go to market positioning and marketing strategy for a leading Agency and focused on future proofing and optimising agency services, alongside driving new business, in her position as Strategy Director.

Most recently she has focused on business transformation. First at PA Media as Chief Commercial Officer where she led a £30m portfolio and developed and implemented an end to end data strategy which allowed the business to understand the different trading conditions and behaviour of each customer segment for the first time. She restructured sales teams accordingly, aligned marketing strategy – auditing and refreshing the customer journey and launching new go to market positioning – delivering budget busting revenues along the way.

She is currently working as a consultant including a project to support the largest East African news media publisher integrate its TV, print and digital newsrooms and adopt digital-first working practices. She has used her organisational design and leadership experience to full capacity!

Peter Harden

Affiliate Senior Associate

Peter is a multi-talented publishing professional who has over 30 years of experience in educational and trade publishing.

For the last ten years, Peter served as the Managing Director of York Press, known in the UK for its leading series of Study Guides for GCSE and A Level; and internationally for a number of school courses in ELT, Maths & Science for MENA Ministries of Education. From 2018, in partnership with Pearson, Peter sat on the management board of Project Sphinx in Egypt: Pearson’s largest single online assessment project. Peter also managed the development of York-E: a school-focused LMS now installed in hundreds of Egyptian schools.

Founded in 1991, Peter’s original publishing project – Harden’s – was one of the first UK businesses to use the collation of User Generated Content to source content and remains a leading brand amongst UK restaurant guides today. Over its thirty years in operation, it has had marketing partnerships with many top consumer brands – Rémy Martin, Champagne Mumm, Spa Natural Mineral Water – and content partnerships with media brands such as The Sunday Times, The Observer and the Evening Standard. The business has evolved in recent times to incorporate an innovative subscription-driven loyalty scheme.

The skills Peter brings to Maverick from positions in senior management to early-stage start-up range from strategic consultancy and financial modelling to the nitty gritty of project management, digital development and print production to the nuts and bolts of marketing, PR and social media management

Mert Köse

Affiliate Senior Associate

Mert Köse is an academic publishing professional and a lecturer at Istanbul Bilgi University’s media communication department. With over five years of experience in open-access publishing, he has a deep understanding of various aspects of the publishing industry.

He has previously worked as a Research & Development manager at Turkey’s largest publishing house, Galenos, where he played a pivotal role in establishing their dominance of the Turkish academic journal market. He has full command of index applications, journal management, and academic guidelines, ensuring the quality and integrity of scholarly publications. He possesses a unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities facing academic publishing in Turkey and beyond. Additionally, He has presented a conference on predatory journals at the interdisciplinary Ph.D. communication conference at İstanbul Bilgi University in 2021, demonstrating his active involvement in the academic community.

His varied background and expertise make him a valuable asset to any academic publishing team, and he looks forward to contributing to the growth and success of the industry.

Nicholas Cop

Affiliate Senior Associate, Territorial Specialist

Nicholas Cop has extensive international senior level experience in sales, marketing, and project management in the information industry, with particular emphasis on Latin America and the Caribbean. He is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, and has a working knowledge of French and an understanding of Slovenian.

He was the Founding Director of OCLC’s Division for Latin America and the Caribbean and was responsible for all of OCLC’s sales and marketing activities in the region. He worked in that position for 10 years until 2005. During that time he also established the subsidiary of OCLC Mexico in Mexico City to more directly address the large, growing market in the country. He later founded Nicholas Cop Consulting, LLC, a consulting company specialized in advising academic libraries, national and regional information networks, publishers and information vendors in the areas of sales and marketing, strategic partnerships, digital libraries, e-journals and ebooks, mobile devices, Open Access initiatives and digital formats and standards. The company was also an authorized distributor in Latin America of the citation management software Mendeley Institutional Edition. Consultancies undertaken by Nicholas Cop Consulting include market and competitive analyses and content development for information vendors, and studies and analyses for national science councils and national academic library networks.

Nicholas also writes on information issues and is an author and editor of the ebook “SciELO: 15 Years of Open Access” about the SciELO Open Access network. He is well known for his lucid and dynamic multi-media presentations on trends and technologies in information and as such is contracted by information vendors, library consortia and national science councils to deliver keynotes at national and regional meetings in Latin America

Giles Grant

Affiliate Senior Associate

Giles brings over 34 years’ experience in the global information industry, with extensive knowledge of driving transformational strategic change across B2B, B2C, STM, and Learned Societies in the Information, SaaS, and Solution sectors. Giles is passionate about the transformative impact of data, content and AI, with over 25 years’ experience of digitizing businesses and leveraging technology for strategic advantage as well as internal efficiencies across multiple businesses.

Formerly the Executive Director of the IET’s Knowledge Services & Solutions, he transformed the business, from initiating the largest journal flip to Open Access in partnership with Wiley, to an award-winning entry into the analytics and intelligence market.

His previous roles include VP Global Marketing for the Nature Research Unit at Springer Nature, reshaping marketing to become digitally driven and attribution focused; SVP for Pearson’s £200M English Language Teaching business, building and delivering eLearning and Assessment solutions & services to learners (primary, secondary/K12 and tertiary) and English language teachers globally- and VP of Strategy & Corporate Development at Thomson Reuters, where he drove corporate development, business unit management and expansion globally across both the Legal, and the Tax & Accounting Divisions.

Earlier in his career Giles was, Group Managing Director for Digital Strategy & Development, and Managing Director for the Interactive Marketing Division at Incisive Media. He also spent six years, as Managing Director at BSI, creating the Information business (centered on standards), part of an innovative digital/online joint venture with HIS (tripling the business globally over 5 years). He began his career at Reed Elsevier, holding senior general management positions in the UK, Americas and Asia Pacific.

Giles’ key skills include transformational growth, business turnarounds (from strategy creation and implementation development & corporate development) to digitisation via both organic growth, partnerships, and acquisitions. Over his career he has either led or been part of over 40+ M&A transactions with end-to-end oversight from strategic identification to investment and integration. He is also skilled in establishing global strategic partnerships, including JVs and outsourcing agreements across software, workflow solutions, and consultancy providers such as Deloitte, EY, Wiley, Clarivate, and Reed Elsevier.

Giles has been for many years part of the Outsell Executive Leadership Council. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Directors, a Fellow of Chartered Institute of Marketing and has an MBA from Bradford University Business School & NIMBAS/Utrecht.

Duncan Enright

Affiliate Senior Associate

Duncan has spent more than 30 years in STM and professional publishing, delivering growth as a publishing and marketing director in both large multinational and professional society settings.

Most recently, Duncan has led Evidence-based Networks Ltd, a specialist publisher in healthcare, delivering major World Bank projects in Central Asia and winning multiple awards for books in the field of oncology. Previously he was the Publishing Director at the British National Formulary (BNF), the leading healthcare reference in the world and a joint venture between the BMJ Group, Royal Pharmaceutical Society and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. His responsibilities included the migration to digital forms, a new contract with the UK NHS, and international growth including the launch of the New Zealand Formulary.

Duncan has published in a wide range of academic and professional markets including medicine, engineering, business and management, science and technology. In all of these he has championed the development of publishing strategies that put the professional community at the heart, using their expertise to sift key evidence and decide on best practice; then using the best publishing tools to bring the right information to the appropriate point in the professional workflow to allow better decisions.

As a marketing director at Elsevier for many years Duncan oversaw the growth of digital marketing and championed the role of sales and channel promotions, as well as developing direct and non-traditional ways to reach readers. At the BNF he worked closely with sales colleagues to develop licensing options using XML as the basis for apps and embedded content use.

Duncan’s expertise lies in spotting opportunities for growth, working with stakeholders in a profession to create a new offering, finding and working with the right authors and organisations, deciding on the right way to bring the information to the professional workflow, moving from print to digital forms by using the best new publishing technologies, and winning professionals over to new knowledge products.

Anna Drage

Senior Associate, Technology and Content

Anna has spent the last 20 years working in the academic publishing industry, specializing in the editorial and production side of electronic publishing. Her broad-based experience of both e-book and e-journal production, and her understanding of how editorial processes feed into this process, has supported publishers as diverse as OUP, Walter de Gruyter, and Woodhead Publishing, via online hosts such as Highwire, Atypon, and MetaPress. Working both for and with publishers, Anna has gained a valuable insight into the production workflow of journals and e-books, the use of electronic data in online publishing, and working with third party online hosts.

After an early career as assistant editor for a specialist publisher, Anna worked for Oxford University Press in editorial and print production for their Science and Medical Books as well as their Journals Division, where she specialized in electronic production and online hosting. As their Online Project Manager, she managed the transition of OUP hosted journals to a third party host (Highwire) and acted as the main contact between in house editorial/production staff and Highwire.

In 2003 she moved to OUP Pakistan as Design Manager for Educational Books before returning to the UK as production manager at Medic to Medic, a company providing software solutions to the NHS. In 2006, Anna moved back into the academic publishing, firstly an Account manager for Atypon Systems Inc, and then Senior Client Manager at Publishing Technology. In both these roles she acted as the day-to-day liaison with Publishers, as well as helping them develop their online products and product strategies. Anna’s current assignments include working as the ‘E-Project Manager’ for a UK based publisher, working with their in-house teams to establish a new e-book platform using a third-party vendor.

Rebecca Erskine

Associate

Rebecca has over 20 years of experience in the digital funding world, having started her career at Grantfinder Ltd and further developing her career at global software and publishing group Idox Software Ltd. Her final role at Idox was as Director of the Grants business unit where she led a team of 40 people in the UK and mainland Europe to develop and deliver highly profitable grants & policy products and services. This included leading new research funding product RESEARCHconnect through inception to delivery and international growth.

Rebecca is well versed in orchestrating activity across multiple business functions including Commercial, Content, Product Development and Marketing. Her expertise spans a number of key areas including go-to-market strategies for the academic sector in mainland Europe and beyond, strategic planning, delivery of focus groups, end-to-end marketing campaigns, content writing, client workshop delivery, development of bid writing courses and sales recruitment.

In her spare time she writes for a regional lifestyle magazine on topics ranging from industrial heritage to restaurant reviews.

Manish Singh

Affiliate Senior Associate, India + South Asia

Manish is a respected sales and marketing professional with over 18 years’ experience in the publishing industry and an in-depth knowledge of the South Asian market.  He started his career in 2002 at Informatics, Bangalore, where he headed the Wolters Kluwer- Ovid and ProQuest business for South Asia when Informatics was their exclusive distributor. He also managed Informatics’ own products business lines alongside all other international publisher partners for Delhi and the adjoining NCR (National Capital Region). In his role, Manish led all key national level consortia agreements for e-resources in India, whilst working with the who’s who of the state/provincial and central/federal government departments/ministries/academic and research institutes across most of the subject disciplines.Over 7 years at Informatics, Manish and his team achieved a multi-million-dollar business – initially in Bangalore and later (for the larger part) in Delhi.

Subsequently, Manish joined CABI’s publishing division to establish their sales office and direct sales operations for the South Asia region. Over 11 years at CABI, he not only recruited and mentored a result-oriented team of sales & marketing professionals, but also substantially grew the CABI business and client base for both e-products/eBooks/databases as well as printed books. In his role as General Manager – Sales for South Asia, Manish introduced CABI’s flagship database to the ICAR’s (Indian Council of Agricultural Research) CeRA (Consortium for e-Resources in Agriculture), resulting in the highest ever value deal for 102 Research Institutes/Universities alongside the biggest ever deal for printed books. Manish has an undergraduate degree in Physics with honours from the University of Delhi and an MBA from SYMBIOSIS in Pune, a top 10 Indian B’School.

Jemma Macfadyen

Affiliate Senior Associate

Jemma has 22 years’ business management and product development experience in the B2B online information industry through senior management roles at Thomson Reuters, Gartner and LexisNexis UK and more recently, through strategic and consulting engagements for large online information and software vendors.  Jemma founded Spinnaker Consulting in 2008, a small, successful and well-networked consultancy.

At Thomson Reuters, Jemma was responsible for a range of online, software and advisory services including Consult GEE, online information subscription services for the UK regulatory market.  Jemma delivered a completed online product overhaul including usability testing, detailed market research and an accessibility audit. Previous to Thomson Reuters Jemma was at LexisNexis, managing and delivering a range of editorial projects then later heading up the development of online products and services. In addition, Jemma has experience of successfully setting up and delivering strategic partnerships and revenue generating initiatives.

Jemma specialises at the customer and markets end of qualitative research, delivering insight for market planning, segmentation, growth strategies, go-to-market tactics, new online product development and competitive intelligence. She  excels at getting to grips with projects and markets quickly and in not just delivering PowerPoint but real, executable outcomes that drive commercial results for clients. Jemma has a first class degree and a scholarship from the University of Manchester.

Alison Jones

Affiliate Senior Associate

Alison Jones is a business coach, consultant and independent publisher. She is passionate about supporting people and books that make a difference.

She has enjoyed a prestigious 22-year career in trade and scholarly publishing working with major publishers such as Chambers Harrap, Reader’s Digest, Oxford University Press and Macmillan, most recently as Director of Innovation Strategy for Palgrave Macmillan. Throughout her career she has pioneered digital publishing of reference works, ebooks and apps, delivering award-winning online products such as The Statesman’s Yearbook Online and Palgrave Connect.

In 2014 she left Macmillan to set up Alison Jones Business Services and establish a new model: position, or brand, publishing. She works with entrepreneurs wanting to build their brand and take their business to the next level, focusing on clarifying the strategic purpose for the book, coordinating content creation and publication with core business activities, and creating superb books with professional, polished editorial and production standards under the imprint Practical Inspiration Publishing. She also offers consulting and training services to traditional publishers and societies, especially those seeking to diversify and/or upskill their workforce.

A trained small business and corporate coach, she combines extensive publishing expertise with coaching, facilitation and training skills. Her focus is on business strategy, content marketing, innovation and digital publishing.

David Ball

Affiliate Associate

David is a consultant with many years’ experience, specialising in scholarly publishing, Open Access, e-books, virtual learning environments, design and management of academic libraries. Recent projects include: research in the area of open access publishing for Public Library of Science (PLOS) and the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (see http://edoc.bbaw.de/frontdoor.php?source_opus=2515); a full library service review for City University London; an e-books contract for Jisc Collections; research on approaches to collection management by universities for a major serials agent; training in Open Access for SPARC Europe and UKeiG (UK Electronic Information Group).

As University Librarian at Bournemouth he created a vibrant library service, chiefly electronic in delivery, both for research, through the institutional repository and e-journals, and for teaching, pioneering the integration of paid-for and open educational resources into the virtual learning environment. He also won two prestigious national awards: the quinquennial SCONUL Library Design Award 2007 and the Times Higher Education Leadership and Management Award for the Outstanding Library Team 2009. David has a strong record in procurement, having led six ground-breaking national and regional tenders for journals, books and e-books, with individual contracts worth £10m per annum.

Previous experience includes the private sector, as information manager for the Glasgow Herald and Evening Times, where he was responsible for transforming a cuttings library into a full-text electronic archive. He was also responsible for negotiating the sale of rights to text and pictures, publishing the first digital newspaper in Scotland on CD-ROM. He has a strong publishing record; including a major book, Managing Suppliers and Partners for the Academic Library. He is also a frequent speaker at conferences, particularly on e-books, VLEs and procurement. For a list of major publications click here.

Janice Kuta

Affiliate Associate (USA)
Janice is a highly respected STM and scholarly publishing industry executive with over 25 years experience. She has worked for both global commercial and not- profit organizations, with a proven a track record for generating profits & surplus, successful in sales, marketing, strategic planning, change management and new business development.

She has a proven ability in developing business partnerships, strategic alliances and branding initiatives, with broad experience in online, digital, web-based products and services. Janice brings a high energy, hands-on approach with excellent cross-cultural communication, team-building and problem-solving skills.

Acting as consultant, Janice was Director of Membership for the International Association of STM Publishers and Marketing & Event Director of Books for Development.  She has held Executive and Senior Vice President positions at Classical International, Macmillan Online Publishing, Palgrave Macmillan, AIP Press and Blackwell Publishers. Janice also served as Chair of AAP/PSP’s Executive Committee and has participated as speaker and moderator at many industry events.

Tao Tao

Affiliate Associate, China Specialist

Tao Tao’s entire career has been in scholarly publishing and communication. She started as an Associate Editor of the Chinese Medical Journal, the oldest Chinese academic journal published in English.

Later she joined the Charlesworth Group, a UK publishing services company, and helped establish their first overseas office in Beijing from scratch. There she held the position of General Manager for 15 years, before moving to the US office and taking the position of Vice President China Sales. In 2018 Tao became an Independent Consultant focusing on China market research and development. In this new role she helps both western organizations to explore and further penetrate into China, as well as Chinese publishers to grow their impact internationally.

She is also an active member and volunteer of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (as a member of the Community Engagement Committee) and is also a Scholarly Kitchen chef.

Charly Nobbs

Affiliate Senior Associate, Supply Chain, Distribution and Logistics
With over 40 years Industry experience, Charly specialises in Supply Chain Optimization, delivering significant and sustainable improvements across local, regional and global publishing supply chains. He has considerable experience reviewing logistics arrangements and distribution operations, delivering increased productivity and improved accuracy, whilst at the same time reducing time to market and overall costs. He has also helped many publishers increase their revenue by working with them to develop fully integrated solutions to allow them to transition to lean inventory models by exploiting the latest short and ultra-short print capabilities. Additionally, he specializes in warehouse design, redesign and automation as well as systems selection, integration and upgrading. He can also assist with the review, selection and negotiation with domestic, international and global freight suppliers.

Charly’s earlier career started in 1975 with Grantham Book Services where he ran the warehousing operation. In 1988 he joined Cambridge University Press, working predominantly at their UKDC, but also spending time at all their other operations around the world. In 2003 he moved to Wiley, becoming responsible for Distribution and Customer Services in the UK, Singapore and Australia. Promoted to Vice President, Global Supply Chain in 2014, he was responsible for the global distribution and inventory management of all Wiley book and journal products in print. He developed optimal logistics arrangements globally to support their network of distribution centres, ensuring consistent provision of a cost effective and market leading service to all internal and external customers.

Clare Painter

Affiliate Associate
Clare Painter is a well-known rights and licensing professional, helping publishers and content-owning organisations to manage digital licensing and reduce copyright risk, especially where licence terms need to be both effective and practical.

She has a particular expertise in digital rights, and works with an unusually wide variety of clients: book and journal publishers, professional membership associations, NGOs, microbusinesses, business schools and universities, case study providers, information professionals and university presses.

She acts as copyright and permissions consultant at Oxford University Press Journals, and associate at award-winning digital licensing agency Attwooll Associates. She writes regularly on copyright issues for information professionals on the Jinfo subscription service.

Clare was involved with digital rights from the early days in the 1990’s, as Rights Director at multi-platform reference publisher Helicon Publishing, a pioneer in electronic and multimedia publishing. In 2002 she became independent, first on a freelance basis and then setting up Clare Painter Associates Ltd, so as to offer practical and commercial copyright management practices both to publishers and to others using content online.

Clare combines strategic overview, market knowledge and an eye for contractual detail. Her focus is on copyright audits, digital rights strategy, licensing contracts and permissions.

Mark Lane

Affiliate Associate Partner

Mark began his career in magazine and book publishing, where he worked for twelve years, progressing to become General Manager and Publisher responsible for the launching and/or profitability of both magazines and directories (alongside numerous conferences and newsletters). Since March 1988 he has worked as a consultant offering coaching, management training, organisation development consultancy and group facilitation for a wide range of organisations including banks, insurers, pharmaceutical companies, publishers, societies and exhibition organisers.

As part of his MBA, which focused on strategic management issues and organisational development, he undertook a research project on UK business publishing and the World Wide Web.

In addition to training he has been involved in a range of consultancy projects including organisational change and Sales + Marketing team development; Executive Coaching; M+A integration; and executive recruitment.

Recent clients include: London Stock Exchange, Institute of Physics, Elsevier, Lexis Nexis, Costar, FTSE, Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET), Springer Nature, Thomson Reuters.

Jonathan Tedds

Affiliate Senior Associate

Jonathan is the ELIXIR Europe Compute Platform Coordinator based at the Cambridge Hub. ELIXIR is an intergovernmental organisation that brings together life science resources from across Europe through secure AAI access and identity management. These resources include databases, software tools and containers, training materials, hybrid cloud services and HPC.

He is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Leicester and as Director of Research and Data Informatics (RED) Informatics Ltd coordinates research and development implementations and consultation in the critical data integration space between multi discipline research and health datasets and systems with the informatics + big data analytics end users. He is an internationally recognised expert in research informatics, compute and data management bringing together research, commercial, public and educational communities including negotiating funding & collaboration with NHS England Code4Health, Genomics England, NIHR, RUK, EU FP6,7 and H2020, Jisc, NSF, RDA, Digital Curation Centre, Wellcome Trust, IBM, Cerner, Eduserv, Arkivum, Aimes, UK Cloud, Krishagni.

He took the lead in the HEFCE/Jisc funded BRISSKit integrated open source biomedical research software solutions for a range of public health, environmental health and multi-disciplinary research challenges. His background also includes Publishing and Peer Review of Research Data online and via Data Journals contributing to leading research articles in the area. He led the Jisc funded PREPARDE project, was a founding Co-Chair of the RDA Publishing Data Interest Group and is Editor-in-Chief of Open Health Data Journal (Ubiquity Press), Associate Editor at Geoscience Data Journal (Wiley).

He has 20+ years research experience in astrophysics and was a Science Team member for the XMM-Newton Survey Science Centre, International Virtual Observatory Alliance, European Virtual Observatory and the UK AstroGrid project. He contributes at Advisory Board Level to e.g. BioSharing.org and the UK Environmental Observation Framework Data Advisory Group.

Helga Zunde-Baker

Affiliate Senior Associate
Helga Zunde-Baker has almost 25 years of experience in academic and professional publishing. She has worked with organisations as diverse as the British Standards Institution, The Lancet (Elsevier), The Chambers Dictionary, IDS (Thomson Reuters), Palgrave Macmillan and most recently, SpringerNature.Expert at developing large, global, teams, and with a wealth of technical production knowledge, Helga can quickly build rapport and deliver meaningful results fast. Most recently Helga was Global Head of Production at SpringerNature, responsible for production of the Nature Academic, Palgrave, and British Dental Association journals portfolios. This involved both in-house and offshore production, including the sensitive management of learned society partner relationships, and production of the Nature Partner Journals open access list. As part of post-merger integration she led the successful migration of large volumes of legacy data and work in progress to Springer tools and systems. Prior to this she was Publishing Services Director for Palgrave Macmillan, where she led a digital first review and worked collaboratively with offshore suppliers to develop fast-track scholarly monograph production (weeks, not months) for the innovative Palgrave Pivot offering.

Helga has extensive experience of RFP and procurement, vendor management, workflow optimisation, restructuring, change management and BPO. She has been a guest lecturer on the UCL MA in Publishing, and in 2016 spoke at the ALPSP “new digital models” event.

Sarah Waldram

Affiliate Senior Associate

Sarah is an accomplished project manager for both print and digital publishing initiatives. For example, she managed the launch of the industry-wide award-winning Berg Fashion Library (now Bloomsbury Fashion Central) for Bloomsbury Publishing. Similarly, at Oxford University Press, she oversaw preparation of lexical datasets for technology company clients, bringing in revenue of over £9 million.

She has strong cross-functional skills – her success in project delivery relies on close collaboration with business development, editorial, technical and sales colleagues. And a talent for leading teams, whether in-house or external.

Sarah also has solid editorial experience, having first gained formal copy-editing training at Macmillan Publishers, then going on to do managing editing and commissioning for other blue-chip publishing companies. Meanwhile, her strong analytic skills and technical interests give her the edge in dealing with XML technologies, systems and web considerations.

Finally, Sarah has a background in Chinese and fluent spoken/written Mandarin. She has recently been living in Beijing, working for Chinese publishing enterprises on digital project management, print book creation and rights acquisition, and is keen to grow networks in China.

Nancy MacCreery

Affiliate Associate, Marketing and Market Research (USA)
Nancy is a business-oriented marketing professional whose diverse career spans strategic marketing, product and business development for both B2B and consumer products. She has an in-depth knowledge of all the facets of effective marketing strategies and understands the processes needed to create, facilitate and drive the implementation of practical, innovative marketing solutions.

Her industry experience gives her insights into healthcare and professional services as well as e-books and publishing. Nancy implemented groundbreaking market research and digital campaigns for Ingram Digital (VitalSource Technologies) and has developed newsletters and white papers for major publishers. Nancy has worked for both large and small organizations, co-founded, supported and built successful small businesses, and is a life-long continual learner. This diverse background gives her a unique understanding of the challenges in maximizing business resources and priorities.

Her educational foundation is an engineering undergraduate degree complemented by an MBA from Michigan State University; she is the author of several books as well as numerous business publications.

Nancy holds certifications in: Idea and Innovation Management (North Carolina State University); Practical Product Management (Pragmatic Marketing); Inbound Marketing (HubSpot)

Donna Sanzone

Affiliate Associate
Donna brings to Maverick more than 30 years of executive-level experience in academic, reference, educational, and trade publishing, specializing in strategic planning, new product development/management, publisher/partner relations, and the transition from print to digital for both commercial and not-for-profit companies and organizations. Over the course of her successful career, she has provided the vision as well as strategic direction for many publishers, often working in close collaboration with educational/cultural institutions and scholarly societies (for instance, the Getty Art History Information Program, Smithsonian Institution, and the American Studies Association).  Her background and extensive experience have given her unique insight into the business requisites of commercial publishers as well as the mission of scholarly/not-for-profit organizations, resulting in the development and execution of successful, high-quality, market-driven, and profitable products and programs for a wide range of publishers and organizations.

Career highlights include:  Executive Editor at Macmillan Reference (developing and implementing large-scale reference/academic programs); Editor in Chief at Grolier Academic Publishing (developing and managing a new Grolier division of academic print and digital products); Executive Editor at HarperCollins (creating and directing the joint Smithsonian-Collins imprint); VP of new product development at M.E. Sharpe (developing, implementing, and distributing new digital products and academic databases); and Consultant/Project Manager at Choice/Association of College and Research Libraries (developing and managing a new review database).

Michael Ross

Affiliate Senior Associate
Michael Ross is the President/Founder of Ross & Associates LLC, an educational publishing and technology consultancy. R&A’s clients are based in the U.S., U.K., the Middle East, and Asia, and comprise nonprofits, private equity firms, publishers, content developers, universities, marketers, and corporations.

Before establishing Ross & Associates in 2017, Michael was the SVP and Education GM at Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., where he led the sales and marketing activities in North America and EMEA and ran the product development and technology teams. He led the expansion of the company’s institutional products and databases in the K-12 and higher education channels. Prior to joining Britannica in 2002, he was the EVP and Publisher of World Book, Inc. and previously held executive positions at other global publishing companies. He began his career as an editor for Time-Life Books, including three years in Tokyo.

Michael’s products and publications have had worldwide circulation, have generated substantial revenue over decades, and have won the highest industry awards, including: The Distinguished Achievement and the Golden Lamp Awards from the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP/AAP), and the Software & Information Industry Association’s (SIIA) prestigious Codie Award.

Michael has written and spoken extensively on digital publishing and educational technology. In addition to articles in textbooks, journals, and blog posts, he has authored three books, most recently Dealing with Disruption: Lessons from the Publishing Industry (2016, Routledge). He has been a keynote speaker at global conferences such as: The Licensing Executive Society; the Hammond Organization; Book Expo America; BookTech; The London Book Fair; SIIA; the Shanghai Book Fair; and the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Michael was inducted into the PrintMedia Production Executives’ Hall of Fame in 2002 and the Association of Educational Publishers’ Hall of Fame in 2009. He has served on several boards, including the Board of Directors of the Association of Educational Publishers, and one year as president.

Michael holds a B.A., summa cum laude, from the University of Minnesota; an M.A. from Brandeis University; and a certificate from Stanford University’s Advanced Management College.

Chris Baker

Affiliate Associate
Chris Baker has been involved in digital publishing for over 20 years, initially as an editor and then as a project manager, requirements analyst and consultant. After 7 years at Oxford University Press, finishing as Web and Electronic Development Manager, Chris founded his own business in 2002. Since then he’s worked with a range of well-known publishers including Oxford University Press, Pearson and Professional Engineering Publishing. He has managed a string of successful projects from CD-ROMs and websites (with various platforms and online hosts) to content management systems, databases, xml production processes and usage statistics systems.

Chris began his career as a molecular biologist, being awarded a PhD in Biochemistry. While he no longer often needs to extract RNA from frogs’ eggs, the analytical skills and insight into publishing from the academic’s point of view have continued to be useful.

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