Webinar

Driving the SDGs Forward: The Soft Power of Publishers’’
October 24, 2024
11:00 am - 12:30 pm ET

Sponsored by Digital Science

This webinar is 90 minutes. Soft power, a concept that originates from political science, embodies a non-coercive yet impactful mechanism for driving cultural and societal change. Notably, this concept has not been applied as a political category to elucidate the short, medium, and long-term effects of publishers on society. This webinar seeks to investigate how publishers can leverage their soft power to promote the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Experts from prominent industry leaders, including Springer Nature, Frontiers, Taylor & Francis, Creative Commons, and Digital Science, will engage in a structured dialogue to illustrate how academic publishers are aiding researchers, NGOs, and policymakers in tackling global challenges. The discussion will underscore Open Access as a pivotal enabler, the application of data to assess impact, and the critical importance of collaboration among publishers, researchers, and policymakers.

Speakers

Dr. Monica Granados has a PhD in ecology from McGill University. While working on her PhD, Monica discovered incentives in academia promote practices that make knowledge less accessible and has since devoted her career to working in the open science space in pursuit of making knowledge more equitable and accessible. She has worked on open knowledge initiatives with Mozilla, the Government of Canada and is a co-founder of PREreview. Monica is now Director of Open Science at Creative Commons working on promoting open access of scientific research.

Stephan Kuster is the Head of Public Affairs at Frontiers. His role involves working with governments, research funders, universities, libraries and policy makers around the world to jointly develop conditions to make Open Access the default way of disseminating peer-reviewed research results.
Before joining Frontiers in 2019, Stephan was the Secretary General of Science Europe, where he worked with European Research Funders and Research Performing Organizations to develop policies, practices, and joint initiatives to support European science. He was part of the group that developed Plan S to accelerate the transition to Open Access. He has also advised the European Commission as part of the Executive Board the European Open Science Cloud and was a member of the Open Science Policy Platform. He lives in Zurich, Switzerland, is married and has two small kids.

Marios Karouzos is the Head of Publishing Strategy - Reviews, News & Opinion for the Nature Portfolio, working on the publishing strategy of commissioned content in the Nature Portfolio of journals. Marios is an astronomer by training, with expertise in black holes and the galaxies they live in, and he joined Springer Nature in 2016 as one of the launching editors of Nature Astronomy. Marios co-chairs the Springer Nature SDG 5 "Gender equality" working group and the Springer Nature Women employee network. Marios is also a Springer Nature Brand Ambassador and a judge of the Nature Awards for Inspiring Women in Science.

Andrew Bostjancic is the Senior Policy & External Affairs Manager at Taylor & Francis. In that role he works to coordinate with federal lawmakers on Open Science and other Scholarly Communication matters. He serves as a fellow for the Sustainable Development Goal Publishers Compact. He is a board member for CHORUS. He began his career working as a staffer for President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. He went on to serve as the Director of Policy and Government Affairs at Catholic Charities USA working to on domestic poverty reduction. Andrew served as a consultant on Tom Steyer’s 2020 presidential campaign. He has a Master of Public Policy from the George Washington University.

Michelle Herbert is the Product Engagement Specialist for Publishers at Digital Science - working on Altmetric and Dimensions. Michelle is based in London, and has worked for Digital Science for over three years. Before joining Digital Science, Michelle spent twelve years working in the Editorial and Production Departments for the International Water Association Publishing (IWAP) where she helped shape the Editorial policy for their flagship journal Water Science and Technology. Worked on gaining COPE membership for IWAP and co-ordinated with the wider International Water Association (IWA) to help strengthen the ties between IWAP journals and the IWA member’s specialist groups.

Moderators: Eleonora Colangelo and Steve Smith