EASE Council nominee Fiona Murphy
Nominated for ordinary Council member
Dr Fiona Murphy
Cofounder, Partnerships & Community Development, MoreBrains Cooperative Ltd
[email protected] / [email protected]
I’m delighted to have been nominated for the EASE Council elections.
I’ve been a member of the publishing and editing community for over 20 years, first as an assistant editor (and freelance proofreader) at Oxford University Press while completing my DPhil in English, then with a range of publishers, including Bloomsbury Academic and Wiley, before setting up my own consultancy in 2015. Last October, I officially joined forces with three others to form MoreBrains Cooperative Ltd. We work chiefly on international research and e-infrastructure projects, including the FORCE11 Reimagining Educational Practices for Open, and the Knowledge Exchange Openness Profile projects.
I became the Book Reviews Editor, first for the EASE journal European Science Editing, then as part of its new sister publication EASE Digest, nearly two years ago. I’ve been enjoying the shift from publishing journals to contributing to their running! (I also review/am on the Board for several other titles, including Learned Publishing and Data Science Journal). Since joining EASE, I’ve been so impressed by the way the EASE members have supported your publications and other communication channels – from volunteering to review books, to conducting lively ethics discussions via the listserv, and attending the conference and online sessions. This is a creative, knowledgeable, friendly community which delivers high-quality services to its clients and employers, and which deserves to continue to grow and prosper. I would like to become even more involved with this process.
If elected to serve on Council, I’m keen to use my remote events, training, and community development experience to enhance members’ enjoyment and benefits of EASE. Where required, through updating toolkits, articles or webinars, I can help plug gaps in understanding around emerging scholarly communications issues such as open science, FAIR data, persistent identifiers. I’m also aware that these issues play out very differently in the sciences from the arts, and across various global regions. As well as giving out information, we need to listen to members’ experiences and needs, and to build upon what we hear through improved supporting materials, conference topics and training.
Career summary
Since completing a DPhil in English Literature, I have held a range of scholarly publishing roles with Oxford University Press, Bloomsbury Academic and Wiley. As Publisher for Earth and Environmental Sciences at Wiley, I began to specialise in emerging scholarly communications with particular emphasis on Open Science and Open Data. I could see that these developments represented huge opportunities for increased access, re-usability and transparency of research. At the same time, they were causing seismic disruptions; to workflows, administrative burdens, cultures, technical and infrastructural requirements, and skills.
In response to these shifts in requirements, I set up my own consultancy, MMC Ltd in 2015. As well as advising institutions, learned societies and commercial publishing companies, and writing and presenting widely on scholarly communications topics, I was an Associate Fellow at the University of Reading between 2015-20. Last October, with three others, I set up MoreBrains (website pending at time of writing). An official member of the Cooperative movement, MoreBrains models the behaviours and values that we’re seeking to encourage in the research landscape: including openness, accountability, inclusivity, community-orientedness, and curiosity.
Meanwhile, I have been contributing actively to research, open scholarship and publishing initiatives. I have Co-chaired several Research Data Alliance Working Groups (including Data Publishing and Exposing Data Management Plans), I’m on the Steering Committee for the Force11 Scholarly Communication Institute (FSCI), Vice Chair of the Board of the data repository, Dryad, and an Editorial Board Member of the Data Science Journal. In the next few months, I will be running the Lightning Posters Sessions at the forthcoming Researcher to Reader Conference (I’m also on the Advisory Board), and will be presenting at PIDapalooza and teaching at the next FSCI summer school.