Publisher Relations – Maverick Publishing Specialists

Martin Marlow

President and Principal

Martin Marlow is the President and Principal of Maverick Publishing Specialists. He oversees the overall organisation, coordinates the Associate teams, and often works as the lead analyst on a number of key assignments. With over 38 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 noted as one of 5 “key thought leaders” in the information industry in the UKSG’s Management Handbook, and is frequently consulted to provide his views and opinions on the future of electronic publishing and the industry as a whole.

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 Moakes

CEO

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.

Jayne Marks

Senior Associate, Head of Business Development EMEA

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.

Rebecca Rinehart

Senior Associate

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—with emphasis on strategic alignments with societies and associations. 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.

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 also served as Senior Director of Publications at The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, managing a publishing program of books, periodicals, and consumer literature that included the journal, Obstetrics & Gynecology. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

David Pallai

Affiliate Senior Associate

David has been in the publishing industry for over 40 years, with expertise spanning both the scholarly, professional, and textbook sectors. Alongside business transformation and growth strategy development, his expertise also includes content acquisition, editorial management, and digital product development.

With a keen entrepreneurial vision and extensive knowledge of the evolving publishing landscape, David has founded, developed, and successfully sold three publishing companies. He has driven significant growth across multiple organizations, notably in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) content.

David was president and founder of Mercury Learning and Information, managing all publishing operations until its acquisition by W. DeGruyter GmbH in 2023. Previously he led Jones and Bartlett Learning’s computer science/math division, achieving revenue increase from $2.7 million to $5.5 million within two years. At Infinity Science Press and Charles River Media, he oversaw title production in engineering, computer science, game development and digital filmmaking, with both companies ultimately being acquired by major industry players.

David’s earlier career saw him hold senior roles at Academic Press and Addison-Wesley, (where he launched the successful AP Professional imprint) and began his publishing career in textbook sales for Prentice Hall.

David has also served as an adjunct instructor at Boston University and Emerson College, holds an MA in English Literature from Yale University and dual degrees (BA and MA) from Boston College. He is a member of MENSA, the ASEE, and was a member of the STM Innovations Committee.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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