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.