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.