
Alma Swan is a consultant working in the field of scholarly communication. She is a director of Key Perspectives Ltd, Director of Advocacy for SPARC Europe, and Convenor for Enabling Open Scholarship, an organisation of university managers around the world that promotes the principles of open scholarship and open science. She is also a director of the Directory of Open Access Journals and of the umbrella organisation Infrastructure Services for Open Access. She holds honorary academic positions in the University of Southampton School of Electronics & Computer Science and the University of Warwick Business School.
Her work covers market research and business modelling, project management and evaluation, research communication practices and behaviours, and the study and promotion of new forms of scholarly communication in the age of the Web. She writes and makes frequent presentations on scholarly communication issues.
Alma has BSc and PhD degrees in biology from the University of Southampton, and an MBA from Warwick Business School. In her early career, she held a lectureship at the University of Leicester, teaching courses on cell biology, comparative anatomy and the biology of cancer, before moving into science publishing for eleven years. In 1996 she co-founded Key Perspectives Ltd, a consultancy specialising in scholarly communication. She was adviser to the World Bank when it developed its Open Access policy in 2011 and to UNESCO as it developed its policy in 2013. She also wrote the UNESCO Policy Guidelines on Open Access.
Alma is a Fellow of the Society of Biology and a Chartered Biologist, served three terms as an elected member of the Governing Board of Euroscience (the European Association for the Promotion of Science & Technology) and is the former editor of its online magazine, The Euroscientist. She serves or has served on many advisory boards or steering committees for scholarly communication-related initiatives, conferences and projects.
Publications
Presentations
Curriculum vitae
Interview about Open Access (2005) (text)
Interview about European developments on Open Access (January 2008) (text)
Interview about scholarly communication developments (June 2009) (audio)
Demonstration of OASIS for librarians wishing to use it for Open Access Week (audio and slides) (a SPARC webcast which features the advocacy activities of the Library at Duke University)
Blog
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