Claire Redhead
Executive Director
About Claire
Claire was appointed Executive Director in 2016 having led the development and growth of OASPA during her time with the association. She joined in 2012 as Membership and Communications Manager, building on a successful background in scholarly publishing. Prior to working for OASPA, Claire worked for 12 years in the academic publishing sector, building up editorial and management experience and valuable insight into the industry. Claire sits on a number of working groups and committees to represent the views of the open access publishing community and is Chair of the OA Switchboard.
Bernie Folan
Communications, Engagement and Outreach Manager
About Bernie
Bernie has been OASPA ‘s Communications, Engagement and Outreach Manager since January 2021 having joined OASPA in April 2019 as Events and Communications Coordinator.
Prior to joining OASPA, Bernie worked for six years as an independent consultant providing market research, marketing strategy and customer insight services to scholarly publishers. Before that she worked in various marketing roles with academic publisher SAGE, working closely with researchers, librarians, and the wider research community. With a passion for improving access to reseacrh outputs, she has contributed to many scholarly communication events and written on industry matters with an aim to improve understanding of existing needs and challenges.
Lulu Stader
Membership Manager
About Lulu
Lulu started assessing membership applications for OASPA in September 2017 and has gradually been providing more support for OASPA’s membership processes. Lulu is an academic publishing professional with a PhD in evolutionary ecology and more than 25 years of experience. Open Access and the future of scholarly publishing are very close to her heart. For the past 16 years, Lulu has been freelancing remotely for international publishers such as Oxford University Press, Elsevier, PLoS and Springer, from her home in the beautiful Scottish Highlands (if she is not hill-walking). She also consults as Executive Administrator for the Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE).
Malavika Legge
Program Manager
About Malavika
Malavika is Program Manager, leading a range of activities that directly support OASPA’s mission. With roots in editorial development and extensive licensing experience developed over a long career in STM publishing, Malavika has a love for harnessing workflows and technology on the one hand, and galvanising people and communities on the other, to help deliver open access for scholarly content. Much of her experience is in cross-functional working: bringing disparate teams together and using data and creativity to find ways of achieving sustainable open access. Before OASPA Malavika led an open-science agenda as Director of Publishing at the Biochemical Society, and was elected to the first Council of the Society Publishers’ Coalition (SocPC), going on to serve as its Chair from 2020 to 2023. She started her career at Informa Healthcare, where she worked on peer-reviewed journals, books and databases.
Malavika dreams of a world where scholarly publishing is open access publishing – by default, for everyone. She is the author of OASPA’s series on Equity in Open Access.
Melvin Kasanrokijat
Business Operations Manager
About Melvin
Melvin is OASPA’s Business Operational Manager and ensures that OASPA is run effectively and soundly, in accordance with the financial and legal requirements for operation in the UK and Netherlands. Melvin has previous experience as a programme manager at the Dutch national funding organisations, STW and NWO, where he ran several national and international research programmes and headed the bureau of the national facility for nanotechnology research, NanoLabNL. Prior to that, Melvin acted as a National Contact Point for researchers and industry participating in European research programmes (FP7 and Horizon2020) and as an expert and country representative in one of the corresponding programme committees.
David Ross
Community Engagement Manager
About David
David has over 30 years of experience in the Scholarly Communications industry. Initially commissioning textbooks and monographs then, for the last two decades, focussing on journal publishing. He has been at the forefront of the Open Access movement for many years. As Business Development Manager for Sage Publications, in 2005 he launched a series of open access journals across a broad range of STM and HSS disciplines and was a founding board member of OASPA in 2008. In the following years he became the Global Lead for Open Access and VP for Open research for Sage working closely with a variety of shareholders in the wider scholarly communications community: funders, policy makers, institutions, consortia as well as the academic community itself. He has also been heavily involved in the development of scalable and interoperable systems and processes that underpin the transition to open access.
Since 2022 David has been working as an independent consultant, providing strategic advice to small publishers and learned societies on how best to navigate the changing publishing landscape as we transition to more open models of publication.
Carol Green
Administrator
About Carol
Carol joined OASPA in December 2021 to support Claire on a part-time basis, with various tasks which include dealing with member queries, updating member information, managing the annual data collection survey and invoicing.
Carol is new to publishing, but absolutely loves the passion within the team for Open Access. With a background in catalogue printing, she has since worked in a PA role for a variety of companies within a diverse range of sectors, which has helped her in learning about OASPA’s work.
