Dr. Peter Binfield has worked in the academic publishing world for almost 20 years. Since gaining a PhD in Optical Physics, he has held positions at Institute of Physics, Kluwer Academic, Springer, SAGE and most recently the Public Library of Science (PLoS). At PLoS he ran PLoS ONE, and developed it into the largest and most innovative journal in the world. He is a respected authority in the academic publishing and Open Access worlds and has made numerous presentations to industry and academia. He is currently a member of the International Advisory Committee of the International Society of Managing and Technical Editors (ISMTE) as well as being on Board of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA).

Ron Chrisman is director of the University of North Texas Press in Denton, Texas. He received his bachelor's degree in psychology from Occidental College in Los Angeles and his master's degree in social science from Syracuse University. While at Syracuse he began his publishing career in the editorial department of Syracuse University Press. In 1993 he moved to the University of Oklahoma Press to manage the Oklahoma paperbacks program and acquire book manuscripts in military history for the Campaigns and Commanders Series. In 2000 he became director of the University of North Texas Press, where he manages a staff of four and publishes 20 titles annually in the fields of Texas history, military history, western history, music studies and biography, folklore, and multicultural topics, among others.

Mark is the founder of Figshare, a research data dissemination platform. He is fresh out of academia, having completed his PhD in stem cell biology at Imperial College London and previously studying genetics in both Newcastle and Leeds. He is passionate about open science and the potential it has to revolutionise the research community.

Kevin S. Hawkins is a librarian and the first director of library publishing at the University of North Texas Libraries. Until recently he was director of publishing operations for Michigan Publishing, the primary academic publishing enterprise of the University of Michigan, which includes the University of Michigan Press and other brands and services. He oversaw a team who coordinate copyediting, conversion to XML, layout/typesetting, and graphic design for the University of Michigan Press brand, who convert content for various Michigan Publishing imprints into standard formats for ingest into DLXS and HathiTrust, and who manage relationships with order fulfillment vendors.

As Director of the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship at Columbia University, Rebecca is responsible for developing the programs and services of the Center and for coordinating these efforts with other library divisions. Her primary objective for the Center is to facilitate scholarly research and the communication of that research through technology solutions, and she works closely with faculty and researchers to address the issues that affect them.

Sarah Lippincott is Program Manager for the Library Publishing Coalition project, a two-year initiative to create a new organization to support library publishing and scholarly communications activities in conjunction with 60 academic libraries. Lippincott received her MSLS from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her BA in the College of Letters and French Studies from Wesleyan University. Before joining Educopia, she supported communications and research activities for ARL, SPARC, and the open access journal eLife.

Erin McKiernan is a Researcher in Medical Sciences at the National Institute of Public Health in Mexico. She received her PhD in Physiological Sciences in 2010 from the University of Arizona. Her research involves the integration of experimental and computational approaches to solve diverse problems in epidemiology, physiology, and neuroscience. She is an advocate for open access, open data, and open source, and blogs about her experiences with open science at emckiernan.wordpress.com. You can follow her on Twitter @emckiernan13. 

 Salvatore Mele is Head of Open Access at CERN and Strategic Director for INSPIRE, the digital library for the worldwide High-Energy Physics community. His team of software developers and information scientists is exploring innovative ways to disambiguate authors; text-mine the literature for relevant metadata; build citation networks; publish high-level research data and crowd-source curation. Salvatore  leads the SCOAP3 initiative to convert High-Energy Physics journals to Open Access, through a global partnership of publishers and thousands of libraries. He co-ordinates Open Access and Open Data policy studies for the European Commission and is responsible for several CERN initiatives in this field.

Sarah Melton is a PhD Candidate in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts and the Digital Projects Coordinator at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. Her research examines public histories of South African apartheid resistance and the U.S. civil rights movement. She is the assistant managing editor of the open access journal Southern Spaces (http://www.southernspaces.org), a journal about the regions, places, and cultures of the US South and their global connections. She is also the community and advocacy coordinator for the Open Access Button (http://www.openaccessbutton.org), a mapping project that visualizes the global effects of research paywalls. 

John Nickerson currently Professor and Vice-Director for Research in the Ophthalmology Department at Emory University, which he joined in 1991. Preceding that he was a Biologist at the National Institutes of Health for ten years. He received a BS in biology from MIT in 1974 and a PhD in Human Genetics and Cell Biology from the University of Texas Medical Branch in 1980. He has served on Emory University's Library Policy Committee since 2007 and chaired the committee from 2009-2012. He is Editor-in-Chief and Founding Editor of Molecular Vision, a peer-reviewed primary science journal covering topics in vision sciences and ophthalmology. The journal began in 1995, making it among the first web-based journals. It is available Open Access and without any charges to the authors, and one of only a handful of "Diamond Access" journals available in the world.

As Dean of Library and Academic Information Services at Barnard College, Lisa provides leadership, management and planning for all aspects of library and teaching and learning with technology, including classroom design. Prior to joining Barnard, she was the Coordinator of Instructional Services then Director of Public Services at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has also held positions at Penn State Harrisburg and George Mason University and has served as an adjunct professor at UNC and Pratt Institute's School of Information and Library Science.

Cyril Oberlander is the Director of Milne Library at the State University of New York at Geneseo since January 2011, and is the Principal Investigator for the Open SUNY Textbook Project.  He was previously the Associate Director of Milne Library since January 2008, and prior to that, the Director of Interlibrary Services at the University of Virginia Library from 2005-2008; the Head of Interlibrary Loan at Portland State University from 1996-2005, and served in various roles in Access Services since 1987. 

Anna Pechenina is a Ph.D candidate in Political Science at the University of North Texas, Denton with concentration in Comparative Politics and Methodology. She holds a B.A. from Truman State University in Music and Political Science. Her research focuses on Fiscal Politics of Federal States; specifically - strategic implications of intergovernmental transfers. At UNT, Anna serves as Vice President of Administration and Finance for the Graduate Student Council.

Author of Constructing Pakistan (Oxford UP), Dr. Masood Ashraf Raja is an Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature and Theory and the editor of Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies. Dr. Raja specializes in politics of the Islamic world, issues of Islamic radicalism, and US relations with the Muslim world with a specific focus on Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East. Dr. Raja moved from Pakistan, his native country, to America in 1996 after ten years of military service as an officer in the Pakistan army. Raja hopes to foster a better understanding between the people of his primary culture and the rest of the world through his writings, teaching assignments, and through public intellectual exchanges. He is currently working on his second book, entitled Democratic Criticism: Poetics of Incitement and the Muslim Sacred.

David Scherer is the Scholarly Repository Specialist at the Purdue University Libraries. In his role, he serves as the manager of the Purdue e-Pubs institutional repository (http://docs.lib.purdue.edu). David works closely with faculty, staff, and students to expand the role of Purdue e-Pubs as a service of the Purdue Libraries providing free global online access to their research and scholarship. As a representative of the Scholarly Publishing Services unit, David collaborates alongside the Purdue University Press to provide the best scholarly communication solutions and services across a spectrum of library publishing services offered by the Purdue Libraries Publishing Division to campus stakeholders.

John Sherer was named the seventh director of the University of North Carolina Press in June of 2012. Prior to that, he was the publisher of Basic Books where he published numerous best-selling and award-winning authors including Douglas Hofstadter, Chris Hedges, Henry Louis Gates, Diane Ravitch, Eduardo Galeano, Thomas Sowell, Richard Florida, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Walter Mosley, Åsne Seierstad, and William F. Buckley. He had previously been the Marketing Director at Basic and has held marketing positions at Henry Holt, the Brookings Institution, and the University of North Carolina Press. John was a manager and buyer at Olsson’s Books and Records in Washington, DC for ten years.

Nick Shockey is the Director of Programs and Engagement for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and founding director of the Right to Research Coalition (R2RC). Supported by SPARC, the R2RC is an international alliance of local, national, and international student organizations that advocate for researchers, universities, governments, and students themselves to adopt open scholarly publishing practices.  Under Nick’s direction, the R2RC has grown to represent just under 7 million students in more than 100 countries around the world and has facilitated over one thousand advocacy meetings with policymakers.Prior to joining SPARC, Nick was a student activist for the causes of Open Access and Open Educational Resources.

Matt Schultz is currently serving as the Program Manager for the MetaArchive Cooperative, a program of the Educopia Institute. In addition to serving as Program Manager for MetaArchive, he is also Project Manager for the NEH-funded Chronicles in Preservation project (2011-2013) that is studying and documenting preservation readiness practices for born-digital and digitized newspapers. Matt graduated Spring 2009 with a Master of Science in Information degree at the University of Michigan's School of Information. He specialized in Archives & Records Management, Digital Preservation, and Human-Computer Interaction.

Susan Skomal, Ph.D., has been President/CEO of BioOne since 2005. BioOne was launched in 2001 as an innovative not-for-profit collaboration among scientific societies, libraries, academe, and the private sector to provide cost-effective access to high quality biological, ecological, and environmental science research. The organization provides a platform, as well as distribution, marketing and sales services to nonprofit publishers for the full-texts of bioscience research journals. In 2013, BioOne launched its own Open Access publication, Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, designed to facilitate scientific solutions to the challenges presented by this era of accelerated human impact.

Tyler Walters is the Dean of University Libraries, Virginia Tech. Previously Walters was the Associate Dean of the Library and Information Center, Georgia Institute of Technology. He was a 2008-2010 Fellow in the Association of Research Libraries'€™ Research Libraries Leadership Fellows program. Walters is a founding Board member of the Educopia Institute and Steering Committee member of the MetaArchive Cooperative. He serves on many professional bodies such as an elected member of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (Library of Congress), Steering Committee for the International Conference on Open Repositories, Interim Governing Board for the Unified Digital Formats Registry, Editorial Board of the International Journal of Digital Curation, and the Advisory Board for the Digital Information Management program, University of Arizona.

As Managing Director of Portico, Kate Wittenberg is responsible for leadership and management of ITHAKA’s digital preservation service. Prior to this position, Kate served as Project Director, Client and Partnership Development in ITHAKA’s Strategy and Research group, where she focused on helping clients develop organizational and business models for their digital projects. Before joining ITHAKA, Kate served as Director of EPIC (the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia), an initiative in digital scholarship and publishing, and a model partnership for libraries, presses, and academic IT departments. Kate has extensive experience in preservation, digital publishing, and new models of scholarly communication.