FORCE11 members are encouraged to participate in the 2020-2021 election for the FORCE11 Board of Directors.
Please complete the online Election Ballot Form by December 8, 2020
Nominations and elections follow the posted Timeline. All successful candidates will take office on January 1, 2021. Directors serve three-year terms with the maximum of two terms (6 years).
Here are this year's candidates (alphabetically listed):
- Tony Alves – Scholarly Publishing Free Agent
- Todd Carpenter – NISO
- Emma Ganley – protocols.io
- Cynthia Hudson Vitale – Pennsylvania State University
- Danny Kingsley – Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science
- Helen Morgan – The University of Queensland
- Heather Piwowar – Our Research
- Mantra Roy – San Jose State University
- Natasha Simons – Australian Research Data Commons
- Jesse Xiao – University of Hong Kong
How to cast your vote?
In order to be eligible to vote in this election, you must be a member of FORCE11. If you are an existing member, please log in to our webiste to access the ballot webpage. If you are not yet a member, please click "Join Us" at the top of the website and you will be informed when your membership is approved (membership is free of charge).
Please complete the online Election Ballot Form by December 8, 2020
Candidate Statements and Bios
Tony Alves – Scholarly Publishing Free Agent
VISION :
FORCE11 is one of the most interesting and progressive organizations that I've come across in all of my time working in scholarly publishing. The strong focus on the researcher, the collaborative ethos, and the dedication to open science are all reasons why I want to be a part of this very excellent organization.
I have spent a lot of time in recent years working with various groups to promote the use of technology standards in the peer review and publishing process. These standards are integral to the advancement of open science and open source software. I believe that the easy exchange of files and data is essential for creating a healthy publishing infrastructure because it helps to level the playing field, making it easier for all participants in the scholarly research ecosystem to contribute, particularly those that are less well funded. I was recently involved in the Manuscript Exchange Current Approach NISO working group to create a recommended practice facilitating the transfer of prepublication manuscript files and metadata. As co-chair of this working group, I was very excited to publish standardized protocols that will allow manuscripts to be easily transferred between different systems, such as preprint servers, submission systems, vendors, and others. This means that systems and platforms will not have to build independent, “siloed” solutions, but rather, these varied organizations can adopt the MECA recommended practice, and be ready to interact with multiple organizations with less effort and cost.
I would bring my own experiences and understanding of technology, along with the contacts and alliances that I’ve forged, to bring forward opportunities related to artificial intelligence and machine learning. I see the implementation of tools that utilize AI and ML as the next frontier in scholarly publishing. I want to work with FORCE11 to investigate how these tools can help in the evaluation of science and scholarly works. I believe that it is important that researchers, editors and staff fully understand how these tools work, how to put them to use, and how to interpret the results. These tools will help researchers and scholarly publishers become more efficient, and making sure that these tools operate in an open environment and that the benefits are equitable would be a priority for me.
I have been participating in the open revolution for several years and I am eager to take a more active role in the effort to make science and scholarship more open, equitable and accessible. I feel that taking a leadership role in FORCE11 is the best way to accomplish this.
BIOGRAPHY:
Tony Alves has worked in scholarly publishing since 1990, focusing on electronic publishing for almost thirty years, designing online learning products and workflow management software. Tony joined Aries Systems in 2001 to manage the development of the Editorial Manager. Previously he served as Publisher at HealthStream, Inc., and at SilverPlatter Education. Tony is involved in promoting industry standardization focused on system-to-system communications protocols and other industry shared services. He co-chairs the NISO MECA working group, and participates in the STM Image Manipulation Detection project, OASPA’s OA Switchboard, and DocMaps, an initiative to make peer review part of the scholarly record.
Tony is a member of several professional societies, such as the Council of Science Editors (CSE), the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP), the International Society for Managing and Technical Editors (ISMTE), the International Association of STM Publishers (STM), the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), and FORCE11. For CSE, Tony has served as Treasurer, participates on the Program Committee, has served on various task forces, and has written for the CSE publication Science Editor. For ISMTE he has served on the Industry Advisory Board, on the Asian-Pacific annual meeting committee, and has written articles for their publication EON. For SSP he chaired the website redesign task force.
Tony has organized, moderated and/or presented many sessions, often on industry standards, such as ORCID, CRediT, Funder ID, organizational IDs, JATS and BITS. Tony’s Twitter handle, @OccupySTM, is well known because of his live-tweeting at industry conferences.
Todd Carpenter – NISO
VISION :
Since its foundation, Force11 has sought to be a place where the "community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders" could gather in a collaborative forum. As it continues to work toward this goal, participation in Force11 among scholars, researchers, and librarians has remained high. The excitement and enthusiasm of the organization’s first decade have been driven by the refreshing nature of Force11 and the connections it enabled between the different elements of the scholarly community — all of whom are seeking to improve the ecosystem of communications.
To ensure that this level of participation continues to grow across all Force11’s stakeholder groups, as a Director, I would seek to reinforce the organization’s cross-community ethos as its core value. Building on its strong tradition of collaboration, Force11 could drive further advancement across the community, in areas like machine-reading-rights and functionalities, around data interoperability, and in development, distribution, assessment, and preservation of non-traditional content forms. Force11 is best positioned to bring together the expertise of the scholars creating the content, the publishers distributing it, and the libraries collecting and preserving it. As a director, I will ensure it remains a vital forum where those communities can communicate and collaborate to solve those problems. Throughout my career, I have a track-record of bringing together communities of interest to achieve common goals and I look to continue that within Force11.
BIOGRAPHY:
Todd Carpenter is Executive Director of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), a non-profit industry trade association that fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information used in publishing, research, and learning. Throughout his career, Todd has served in a variety of roles with organizations that connected the publisher and library communities. Prior to joining NISO, Todd had been Director of Business Development with BioOne. He has also held management positions at The Johns Hopkins University Press, the Energy Intelligence Group and the Haworth Press. Todd is frequent speaker at industry events, active on twitter @TAC_NISO, and blogs regularly as a member of the Scholarly Kitchen. In addition to his work at NISO, Todd currently serves as Secretary/Committee Manager of the ISO Technical Subcommittee on Identification & Description (ISO TC46/SC 9), as a member of the Board of Directors on the Foundation for the Baltimore County Public Library, as a Director of the Free Ebook Foundation, a member of the American Library Association Policy Corps, as well as several publication and organizational advisory boards. Previously, he served as Treasurer of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) and has led a variety of interest groups and projects within the Research Data Alliance. Outside of work, Todd is the father of two wonderful kids, a daily runner, a gourmet cook, an enophile, and a photographer.
Emma Ganley – protocols.io
VISION :
I'd be thrilled to join the Board of FORCE11, an organisation that I've been a part of for several years now. Meetings that I've been able to attend have always left me enthused and full of ideas for things to try and take forwards as I returned to my daily work. I'd love to have the chance to give back to this organisation and in the position where I am now, I have the availability to do so and believe I'd have a lot of different background insights and expertise to bring to the organisation.
VISION
As we continue through the current challenges of pandemic, my vision for FORCE11 would be to demonstrate how the organisation can continue as a global hub for all to rely on for support. FORCE11 is an organisation that can continue to provide a crucial cornerstone location for important information sharing, critical discussions and continuation of (or creation of new) projects needed for the cohesion, advancement, and improvement of Research Communication and e-Scholarship.
What do I want to get done?
I'd love to have the opportunity to see what new directions can be forged towards several areas:
– improving research assessment;
– modular publishing with appreciation of all individual forms of research output, which may be smaller than the traditional research article);
– expediting research information dissemination — can we build on current preprint momentum to explore sharing of individual distinct research outputs even earlier?
– improving how research is reviewed — once again, exploring how mechanisms of sharing earlier in smaller pieces could improve on the status quo;
– mechanisms of ensuring or recognising research integrity;
– options for correcting the research record (can we come up with more dynamic versioning that would improve upon retractions);
– means to increase adoption and dissemination of FAIR data
– tracking, exploring, and delivering alternate business models for global open access (as more publishers explore new and alternate models to cover the costs of open access, FORCE11 is well placed to oversee a comparison and consideration of the costs and benefits of these).
In sum, I've lots of ideas and places for exploration, and I'd love to have the chance to take some of these suggestions forward with like-minded individuals under the FORCE11 umbrella.
BIOGRAPHY:
Emma Ganley is Director of Strategic Initiatives at protocols.io. Emma was formerly Chief Editor of PLOS Biology and worked in scientific publishing for 15 years. She has consulted for the preprint server medRxiv, and has been an Affiliate for bioRxiv for several years. Initially Emma followed a standard research career path, she obtained a PhD from the MRC-LMB in Cambridge in the UK, followed by a postdoc at UC Berkeley. She then moved into science publishing joining PLOS Biology in San Francisco in 2005. She took a position as Executive Editor of the JCB at Rockefeller University in New York in 2007. During this time she gained an enthusiasm for open data, she worked with developers to launch the JCB DataViewer as a tool for making original image data available with published research articles. After relocating back to the UK and working at the University of Dundee first for the funder CR-UK, and then as a Project Manager for the Open Source, Open Microscopy Environment project, Emma eventually re-joined PLOS Biology from 2011 until 2019 where she advanced to the position of Chief Editor. Emma is passionate about all things related to open research, data, code, and method availability alongside the articles, research reproducibility and integrity.
Cynthia Hudson Vitale – Pennsylvania State University
VISION :
Scholarly communications is an evolving landscape – where new, innovative modes of communication are being tested and adopted regularly. In the last few years we've seen greater shifts towards the publishing of computational environments, reproducibility containers, and articles embedded with code and data. To support the integrity of the research process and increase transparency and trust in science, these new modes of communication are critical. Working across stakeholders within Force11, we should be thinking collectively about what opportunities and challenges these bring. My goal and vision for working on the Force11 board is foster and support the adoption, publication, and socio and technical infrastructure needed for these developing modes of scholarly communications – while also balancing traditional forms of publication.
BIOGRAPHY:
Cynthia Hudson Vitale is the Head of Research Informatics and Publishing at the Pennsylvania State University Libraries where she leads a team focused on enhancing the technology-driven research capacity of faculty and students particularly in the areas of statistics, digital humanities, research data services, open-access publishing, and maps & GIS. She is a founding member of the Data Curation Network, a multi-institutional initiative building a shared staffing model for making research data FAIR and the principal investigator on a project developing specialized data curation training. She received her BA from St. Louis University and her MA from the University of Missouri, Columbia. Her areas of expertise include information architecture, data curation, and scholarly communication.
Danny Kingsley – Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science (Visiting Fellow)
VISION :
I feel that we are at a strange point in the move to open up research. There has been a big shift with some funding bodies pulling together, and the pandemic has demonstrated the value of openness to people that were previously unaware (or not interested) in the open argument. But the pandemic has also deeply affected the higher education sector directly, not just in retrenchments and reduced funding, but also in the way research and collaborations are conducted. The economic fallout of the pandemic won't be understood for some time. It could be easy to turn away from the open discussions and pull back to what is seen as 'safe' and 'known'. So it is very important to keep the pressure on governments and funders with a strong message that we need consistent policies. We also need to engage with the disciplines to tackle that aspect of the shift towards opening up research practices. We need to support our community with their ideas and innovation through providing a platform for showcasing them and finding collaborators. We also particularly need to look at the frameworks around training in the area of 'research practice' – not just from the perspective of a curriculum but also the education/professional development of those conducting the training.
BIOGRAPHY:
Danny is an expert in developing strategy and policy in the higher education and research sector with extensive international experience, in Australia, Europe and the UK. She is available for consultancy work with a particular focus on Open Research and research communication. Her work involves aspects of advocacy, professional development, research and communication through developing relationships with all levels of the scholarly communication landscape, from the individual researcher, to editors and publishers of journals and monographs, funding bodies, research institutions and government. She has written extensively and presented all over the world in this area.
Since returning to Australia in May 2019 Danny has consulted for QUT, University of Melbourne and the Australian Academy of Sciences. She holds a Visiting Fellowship at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science. Until April 2019 she was the Deputy Director of Cambridge University Libraries (Scholarly Communication & Research Services). The announcement of Cambridge's Position Statement on Open Research in February 2019 was the culmination of four years' work in this area. Danny took up the position of Head of Scholarly Communication at the University of Cambridge in January 2015 and oversaw all aspects of scholarly communication at the University, including compliance with funder open access policies, research data management, intellectual property, copyright and other areas. Her research centres on scholarly communication with interests in the academic reward structure, scholarly infrastructure and open access advocacy. She sits on multiple committees.
Her full publication and presentation list is available here https://www.force11.org/node/6222
Helen Morgan – The University of Queensland
VISION :
• Determined to bring change to scholarly communications
• Experienced in institutional administration
• A member of FORCE11
• Willing to serve for three years
BIOGRAPHY:
As Deputy Director, Research Strategy, Planning and Performance at The University of Queensland I lead a team dedicated to understanding and improving the university’s research performance, ensuring timely provision of research performance metrics for both internal and external audiences, as well as ensuring the university meets its external research performance reporting requirements to Government. I also work closely with key units and relevant policy owners to ensure internal policies adequately support the university’s research goals while ensuring compliance with the external regulatory environment and oversees a variety of projects and coordinating the Research Portfolio operations on behalf of the Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research).
I am passionate about bringing change to the scholarly communication landscape, to champion academia and reproducible research, to build trust in navigating the variety of emerging communication pathways available for research outputs, and to shifting the focus away from journals and systems locking us into "metrics" driven culture.
Heather Piwowar – Our Research
VISION :
I see FORCE11 as the place for scholarly communications progressives to find each other, inspire each other, learn, and build. A supportive community that helps accelerate change to a more efficient, effective, and inclusive future for scholarly communication. I love FORCE11 and want to help make sure it stays strong and useful.
BIOGRAPHY:
Dr Heather Piwowar is a cofounder of Our Research, the nonprofit company behind the Unpaywall database for Open Access discovery (API receives more than 1 million calls/day; powers OA links in Scopus, Web of Science, and almost all discovery platforms) and the Unsub data dashboard for reevaluating Big Deal subscription packages (saves libraries millions of dollars). A longtime advocate for Open Science, Dr Piwowar is also a leading researcher in research data availability and reuse, including a key paper measuring the citation benefit of publicly available research data. Heather got her bachelors and masters at MIT, worked as a computer programmer for 10 years, went back to school for her Ph.D, and has been an advocate for open science ever since.
Mantra Roy – San Jose State University
VISION :
Force11 provides a much needed platform for learning about multiple aspects of scholarly communications from around the world. My recently funded ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) project, “Global South Speaks: A Librarianship Perspective” about the scholarly communication challenges faced by academic librarians in India informs my interest in working with FORCE11.
I would like to see more growth in:
– globalizing FORCE11’s focus on scholarly communications by inviting and incorporating participation of and coursework on the Global South – Latin America, Africa, and Asia
– including the role of translation in order to make FORCE11’s work more inclusive by including content in multiple languages and inviting presenters and scholars who may not be able to communicate as effectively in English, and
– encouraging more librarians and information science professionals to participate in FORCE11’s events and activities.
BIOGRAPHY:
Mantra grew up in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in eastern India. She moved to the United States to pursue her PhD in English with a focus on race, ethnicity, and gender. Following a brief college-teaching career, she completed a short but rewarding stint at the Global Libraries Program at The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation during her MLIS (Masters in Library and Information Science) program. Inequity of "access" to information and scholarly research drew her to the world of librarianship and informational services. Now she is a Collections Strategy Librarian with a focus on equitable and global scholarly communications and Open Access, among other areas.
Natasha Simons – Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC)
VISION :
With its strong and diverse global community, FORCE11 plays a remarkable role in changing scholarly communications through information technology. It would be an honour for me to help FORCE11 to 1) significantly grow and diversify the membership (e.g. reaching out further to the global south) and use this to expand group involvement and topics 2) make the FORCE11 conference bigger and better by involving more of the membership and community 3) see the FORCE11 Scholarly Communications Institute (FSCI) become broader and more dynamic in terms of both courses and students, become financially sustainable and even more widely regarded than it is now and 4) better align the activities of FORCE11 with similar players in the scholarly communications landscape, such as the Research Data Alliance and the Research Software Alliance.
BIOGRAPHY:
Natasha Simons is Associate Director, Data & Services, for the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). With a background in libraries, IT and eResearch, Natasha has a history of developing policy, technical infrastructure (with a focus on persistent identifiers) and skills to support research. She works with a variety of people and groups to improve data management skills, platforms, policies and practices. Based at The University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, Natasha is co-chair of the Research Data Alliance Interest Group on Data Policy Standardisation and Implementation, Deputy Chair of the Australian ORCID Advisory Group and co-chair of the DataCite Community Engagement Steering Group. She has delivered the FAIR Data in the Scholarly Communications Lifecycle course at the FORCE11 Scholarly Communications Institute (FSCI) every year since 2017. Natasha is co-author of a 2013 book on research data and repositories and has published many journal articles including master guidelines for journal data policies co-authored with collaborators from the Research Data Alliance. She is passionate about enabling FAIR data and a corresponding change in scholarly communication culture.
See my ORCID record – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0635-1998
Jesse Xiao – The University of Hong Kong
VISION :
FORCE11 will engage in scholarly communication between the publishers and academic institutions. As the data and scholarly communication librarian, I will engage in promoting FAIR research data (Data Management Plan, Research Data Management etc), digital scholarships and future institutional repository.
From my background and knowledge in academic publishing, research data and scholarly communication, I think I can provide the business needs for what the academic researchers and libraries required for the research communication and scholarly communication and lead the FORCE11 to provide the better services. FORCE11 plays the important role in sharing good practice in scholarly communication and research communication. Research communication is defined as the process of interpreting or translating complex research findings into a language, format and context that non-experts can understand. It goes way beyond the mere dissemination of research results. It involves a network of participants and beneficiaries. Researchers themselves, journalists, editors and their media, intermediaries who provide links between stakeholders. As the librarian, we will play as the bridge to centralized the information. FORCE11 as the community will provide the instruction, guideline through different workshops and conferences to lead the research communication and scholarly communication.
BIOGRAPHY:
I'm the data and scholarly communcation librarian in the University of Hong Kong Libraries. My key role is to provide the research data services and coordinate the vision, planning, and implementation of the library's scholarly communications program. I oversee the research data services team and institutional repository (Scholars Hub) team. We offer the data steward services to researchers and students to make research data FAIR and maintain the HKU Scholars Hub as a one-stop-shop for storing all the information related to the HKU research activity. Before joined the HKU Libraries, I was the data architect in the GigaScience Journal – Oxford University Press. I developed and managed the journal data repository – GigaDB database to make research data FAIR.
Please complete the online Election Ballot Form by December 8, 2020
