VC2020 Speakers

We are indebted to our panel of speakers and moderators who gave up their time and put considerable energy into participating in this conference.

Plenary 1

Mrs Pippa Smart
EASE President

Opening address and moderator of the first plenary.

Naomi Lee
Senior Executive Editor (Research) at The Lancet

Naomi Lee is a Senior Executive Editor at The Lancet. She heads the research section of the journal, leading the development and implementation of the research strategy for The Lancet, and advising on the research content of the other journals in the Lancet family of journals. Naomi handles peer review and commissioning across a broad range of subjects including her specialist areas of surgery, digital medicine/AI, and medical technology. She is also a vice chair for the ITU/WHO Focus Group on Artificial Intelligence for Health.

Naomi joined The Lancet in 2014 and was previously an Executive Editor where alongside editorial work she led on digital transformation of the Lancet group, delivering a responsive website. Previously she studied medicine at Cambridge University and King’s College London, before training in surgery, specialising in urology and working for almost 10 years in the UK. She has completed fellowships in Argentina and Mexico. She has also studied data science at University College London.

Ines Steffens
Editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Eurosurveillance

Opening address and moderator of the first plenary.

Plenary 2

Dr Hervé Maisonneuve, MD, is medically qualified from the University of Lyons with business administration qualifications (HEC, Paris). He practiced clinical medicine for ten years in the Lyons hospitals. He spent 10 years in clinical development in the pharmaceutical industry. In 1994 he joined the French national health care agency, and in 2000 became editor of a website dedicated to laparospcopic surgery. He was currently associate professor of public health, and he does consultancy in medical writing. He has published books on medical writing in French, and runs www.redactionmedicale.fr

Dr Joan Marsh is the Deputy Editor of The Lancet Psychiatry, having joined the Lancet group in November 2013. Joan read Natural Sciences at Cambridge University, then completed a PhD in molecular biology. She worked as an editor with The Ciba/Novartis Foundation in London, editing and organizing their prestigious symposium series. Joan then spent several years in South-East Asia, returning to the UK in September 1999 and becoming an editor with John Wiley & Sons, commissioning books in the life sciences and medicine.

Joan was on the Council of the European Association of Science Editors for 12 years, including six as President. She is now Co-chair of its Gender Policy Committee, with a particular interest in improving diversity in peer review. Joan is also an Associate Editor of European Science Editing.

Professor Ana Marušić is Professor of Anatomy and Chair of the Department of Research in Biomedicine and Health at the University of Split School of Medicine, Split, Croatia.

She is an active member of the Croatian branch of the Cochrane Collaboration, Chair of the Board of the Croatian Institute of Global Health, and creator of the first Croatian public registry of clinical trials.

Apart from teaching anatomy, Prof. Marušić teaches university students the principles of research methodology and scientific communication in a mandatory undergraduate course. She has been the editor in chief of the Croatian Medical Journal for more than 15 years, and is now editor in chief of the Journal of Global Health. She is a past President of the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), the Council of Science Editors (CSE) and EASE.

EASE Forum Live! Break-out sessions

Please visit the EASE Forum Live page for full details

Plenary 3

Preprints and independent peer review services in crisis times

Dr. Bahar Mehmani (moderator) is Reviewer Experience Lead in the Global Publishing Development department at Elsevier. Her focus is to improve peer review process and workflow across all Elsevier journals to make peer review process a seamless, informative and pleasant process both for reviewers and editors as well as authors. She launched Elsevier Reviewer Recognition Program in early 2014 with the aim of recognizing reviewers voluntary contribution to the progress of science. She is also working on adding further transparency to the peer review process. Examples are publishing peer review reports (signed or anonymous) with DOIs (link) for both giving credit to reviewers and providing more information to readers. In that regards, she is also working on publishing total number of reviewers as well as name of the handling editors on article pages on Science Direct. Another area she is working on is to improve quality of peer review by introducing quality measures such as editor, author and reviewer surveys or using versions of RQI. Another initiative she is involved with is gender bias in peer review.

Bahar is a member of PEERE and as the representative of Elsevier is collaborating with researcher members of the group in running a scientific study on peer review. She is also chair of one of three organizing committees of the annual peer review week (link)

Bahar joined Elsevier as a managing editor in 2012. She was responsible for checking submitted manuscripts for one physics and two mathematics titles. In her role as Managing editor she also worked on expanding journals’ aims and scopes and launched a new journal (link). Before joining Elsevier, she was a postdoc researcher at Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL). She received her PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) in 2010.

Jessica Polka, AsapBio

Jessica Polka serves as Executive Director of ASAPbio, a researcher-driven nonprofit organization working to promote innovation and transparency in life sciences publishing in areas such as preprinting and open peer review. Prior to this, she performed postdoctoral research in the department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School following a PhD in Biochemistry & Cell Biology from UCSF. Jessica is also a Plan S Ambassador, an affiliate of the Knowledge Futures Group, and a steering committee member of Rescuing Biomedical Research. @jessicapolka

Bianca Kramer is a librarian for life sciences and medicine at Utrecht University Library, with a strong focus on scholarly communication and Open Science. Through her work on the project ‘101 innovations in scholarly communication’ (including a worldwide survey of >20,000 researchers) she is investigating trends in innovations and tool usage across the research cycle, with special attention to open scholarly infrastructure. She researches and leads workshops on various aspects of scholarly communication (e.g. preprints, peer review and altmetrics) for researchers, students and other stakeholders in scholarly communication, and has an active interest in data- and network visualization. She is on the board of FORCE11 and was a member of the EC Expert Group on the Future of Scholarly Communication and Scholarly Publishing. @MsPhelps https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5965-6560

Monica Granados, PREreview

Monica has a Ph.D. in Ecology and joined the PREreview team in January 2018, first as a mentor and advisor, and then as the lead of community building and outreach. Her primary job is as a Mitacs Canadian Science Policy Fellow working as a Policy Analyst at Environment and Climate Change Canada in open science. As a food web ecologist, she has been dedicated to using the current knowledge around food webs to monitor changes in freshwater systems and, most importantly, to provide recommendations to decision makers and the public. Monica is a story-teller and teaches other scientists how to use improv skills as a way to better communicate their science. #@monsauce

Mario Malički, METRICS

After finishing School of Medicine at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, Mario obtained an MA in Literature and Medicine at King’s College, London, UK, and then worked at the University of Split School of Medicine in Departments of Medical Humanities and Research in biomedicine and health, where he obtained a PhD in Medical Ethics titled: Integrity of scientific publications in biomedicine. He has been researching authorship, peer review, duplicate publications, and publication bias. From 2017-2019 he has been a postdoc at AMC and ASUS Amsterdam, Netherlands, and in 2020 he joined METRICS where he will focus on meta-research of preprints. His other interests include medical ethics, hope, statistics, speculative fiction, Frank Herbert’s opus and Leonard Cohen’s poetry.

Janne Seppanen, Peerage of Science

Janne is the founder and managing director of Peerage of Science, an independent peer review service. He is also Team Lead in research support at the Open Science Centre, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. 

Beyond peer review, Janne is interested in researcher assessment and societal decision-making; both need better information. Prior to these endeavours to reconfigure and improve what counts as information among academics and powers-that-be, Janne was doing field experiments to understand what counts as information between different species of birds. Birds were easier. That explains how he got a PhD, in Ecology. @Janne Seppanen