The guests for this week’s INSPIRING STEM PODCAST are Kamran Robert Kardan Founder and CEO at Knowledge E and Knowledge E’s Head of Publishing, Emily Choynowski.Kamran founded Knowledge E in 2012, with the aim of providing unique, professional and high-quality services to information professionals in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regions and beyond. The conversation explores how the MENA region can develop and promote open access and open science as well as plans for International Open Access Week with the launch of ‘Forum for Open Research for MENA’.We explore Zendy and its role as an online platform created to facilitate more affordable and equitable access to academic literature and Knowledge E's recent signing of the UN SDG Publishers’ Compact.

At a recent Research to Reader Conference, a panel including Haseeb Irfanullah, a visiting fellow at the Center for Sustainable Development, explored strategies to diversify scholarly research authorship.  This is in the context of ongoing calls for social change have drawn attention to the need in scholarly publishing for greater equity, diversity, and inclusion, including for peer review, editorial practices, and business models. To help explore these issues, this week's INSPIRING STEM PODCAST welcomes as our guest Jamie Carmichael, Senior Director for Information and Content Solutions at the Copyright Clearance Center.Jamie brings nearly 20 years of publishing experience to her current role, where she is responsible for the strategic direction of CCC’s flagship Open Access platform, RightsLink for Scientific Communications, and heads go-to-market efforts for new products and services across the scholarly publishing ecosystem. In her 10 years with CCC, she’s held leadership positions across CCC’s publisher portfolio of rights licensing, content delivery, software, and professional services offerings, leading teams of product managers and product marketers to solve unmet market needs at the intersection of customer collaboration and technology advancements.Our conversation explores the understanding that open without equity is neither. We discuss also how CCC is collaborating to increase transparency and efficiencies in scholarly communications and an update following the 2019 Future of Science Leadership Summit hosted by CCC and Outsell.

Last year, Cambridge University Press (CUP) announced the launch of a new concept in journals publishing – Research Directions. It’s stated that the approach would "speed discovery by fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing between subject communities" as well as provide "opportunities to publish research from areas not well served by traditional, discipline-specific journals". Our guest for this week's INSPIRING STEM PODCAST episode is Mónica Moniz, Publisher with CUP. Monica started at the Press in 2015 and ever since has been involved in the launch of four new STM open access journals and managed a number of life science journals. Monica now programme manages the launch of Research Directions and what promises to be a new innovative series of open access, STM journals. The aim is to better reflect the research lifecycle and invite different voices to shape which questions researchers should be answering. (Monica can be contacted at monica.moniz@cambridge.org or at researchdirections@cambridge.org).Having previously been a researcher in Marine Biology, Monica is keen to experiment with new publishing models and tools and work with research communities to launch new journals that work for them.

This week’s INSPIRING STEM PODCAST episode has as its guest, Euan Adie who is CEO at Overton.io. Euan has a background in bioinformatics and a wide range of expertise in research impact measurements including alternative publication metrics and social media engagement. Overton is a London based company that tracks and indexes the research, ideas and influences behind governmental policies worldwide. Overton works with global policy organisations including various United Nations agencies and European Union think tanks.  A recent LSE Blog article describes more of Overton's work. Before Overton, Euan founded and ran Altmetric, the company that tracks the attention given to scholarly works online. Altmetric was acquired by Digital Science in 2015.We explore the challenges in determining policy impact that is not typically direct and has fewer associated publications compared with research outputs.  We consider also, how traditional publishers can best support what are essentially, intergovernmental deliberations seen through a science-policy interface.With thanks to our sponsor INSPIRING STEM CONSULTING

In this week’s episode, I am chatting with Markus MacGill a science writer and Editor with Green Ink.Green Ink provides expert communications support to major organisations around the world and specialises in projects relating to the increasingly important areas of environment, climate change, public health, science and international development. Markus has an PGCert (with distinction) from the MSc programme in Science Communication and Public Engagement at the University of Edinburgh and a CertHE in Biomedical Science from Anglia Ruskin University.  He has over 20 years’ experience as a writer, reporter, editor and photographer and, a strong track record in science writing and editing, particularly in the fields of health and medicine. His experience spans the full range from explanations for lay audiences to technical documents for highly scientific readers. We discuss the role of science writer in supporting these areas, how open science has the potential of making the scientific process more transparent, inclusive and democratic. Markus shares many examples of his science communications work but one which demonstrates the importance  of open science enabling societal benefit is the following PLOS Medicine article describing a gender-based violence and recovery centre at Coast Provincial General Hospital, Mombasa, Kenya.  And we finish on some great advice for science researchers who want to better communicate their work and success.

In this week’s episode, I am chatting with Adam Hyde the Founder of the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation – COKO.Over the past 15 years Adam has been on a mission to transform publishing and knowledge production through innovation in workflows, development of technology, and facilitation. He has designed facilitation methodologies such as Workflow Sprints, The Cabbage Tree Method and Book Sprints and led the development of open source software for publishing such as PubSweet, Editoria, Kotahi, PagedJS, Wax, BookType and many more. Adam is a Shuttleworth Fellow and has helped many organisations and companies transform the way they produce and publish knowledge. These include Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Caltech, the Novel Coronavirus Research Compendium, Cisco, World Bank, eLife, ArXiv, Hindawi, Californian Digital Library, the United Nations Development Project and many others.

This week’s INSPIRING STEM PODCAST guest is  Kylie Ahern. Kylie is a Sydney-based, award-winning STEM publisher and a highly skilled strategist. As CEO of the content and engagement agency, STEM Matters, she is in the business of transforming how the STEM sector engages with the audiences to increase awareness, influence and funding.  In 2005 she co-founded COSMOS Magazine and was CEO for the first ten years building it to be Australia’s top selling science magazine. In 2013, she was appointed by Nature Publishing to build its strategy and establish its team in Australia and New Zealand.  Her new publication, The Brilliant, profiles global leaders in science communication and engagement.

Open science can be best defined as the practice of science across all disciplines such that others can collaborate and contribute, and where research data and processes are freely available, under terms that enable reuse, redistribution and reproduction. This includes includes peer-reviewed publications, data repositories, workflow and collaboration tools. Open science is driven and governed by science policies and mandates. Pharmaceutical companies, which fund approximately half of all biomedical research, are now leaders in the publication and disclosure of research. However, access to much company-funded research is still restricted by journal paywalls. Therefore, with open science continuing to rise in prominence and adoption by science funders and researchers, how can pharmaceutical companies play their part? This episode was part of a podcast series funded by Pfizer to celebrate 2021 International Open Access Week. The series interviewed experts working within clinical and medical disciplines who shared their perspectives on the impact and benefit of open science for patients and key stakeholders.My guest for today’s podcast is Dr Joana Osório, Communications Consultant for a global collaboration called Open Pharma.  Open Pharma aims to improve the pharma publications model by connecting pharma with innovations in publishing to increase transparency and access to research outputs.

Consistently, during the current global pandemic, Open Science collaboration has contributed to the rapid translation of clinical and scientific knowledge into successful treatments. Despite this fact, many stakeholders still hesitate to construct policies and practices to support the adoption and implementation of Open Science. Therefore, concerns remain about inequities in the global information system and access to its benefits. This episode was part of a podcast series funded by Pfizer to celebrate 2021 International Open Access Week. The series interviewed experts working within clinical and medical disciplines who shared their perspectives on the impact and benefit of open science for patients and key stakeholders.Today's podcast guest is Dr Akhil Bansal who is a medical doctor and a former associate medical writer at Oxford PharmaGenesis. He is a policy and research analyst at Charity Entrepreneurship, a social VC that incubates and strategies for NGOs working in global health and health policy. Most work is in low-income countries, where access to scientific and health information is problematic and work is focused on incubating NGOs that seek to promote open development and access to science, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa.

It is now over 30 years since Tim Berners Lee and CERN launched the World Wide Web to meet the demand for open information-sharing between scientists around the world. Our current definition of Open Science emphasizes collaboration and transparency for research and research-related publications and data. Making science truly “open” will see information about discoveries become freely available, under terms that enable re-use, redistribution and reproduction. So, with Open Science continuing to rise in prominence and adoption by science funders and researchers, can we demonstrate the real-world impact?This episode was part of a podcast series funded by Pfizer to celebrate 2021 International Open Access Week. The series interviewed experts working within clinical and medical disciplines who shared their perspectives on the impact and benefit of open science for patients and key stakeholders.Today's podcast's guest is Dr Lonni Besançon, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Computer Science Engineer with Monash University, joins me as my guest for the conversation today.

Open Science is a term that extends beyond just open access publishing to include a wide range of activities from basic biological research to clinical research, that makes it easier for scientists and clinicians to share and access knowledge, resources, tools, and data. The premise of Open Science is that research will progress faster if data and knowledge are openly shared with proper data safety measures and ethical frameworks and that has been the case during the current global pandemic. But despite significant progress, Open Science principles and practices still need to be more formally embedded within clinical research institutions and organisations. This episode was part of a podcast series funded by Pfizer to celebrate 2021 International Open Access Week. The series interviewed experts working within clinical and medical disciplines who shared their perspectives on the impact and benefit of open science for patients and key stakeholders.Today's podcast's guest is Dr Guy Rouleau, Director at The Neuro, McGill’s Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital, and the co-Founder of the Tanenbaum Open Science Institute. In 2020, Dr Rouleau was recognised with Canada’s highest civilian honour, the Order of Canada, for his outstanding contributions as a clinician-scientist and as a leader in health care. He also received the Gairdner award for his work on Open Science.

Open Science can be best defined as the practice of freely sharing clinical and scientific knowledge such that others can collaborate and build upon that knowledge to accelerate research applications. Within this Open Science ecosystem, clinical data sharing, and data transparency continue to advance. Many national and international organisations such as the National Institutes of Health and the UK’s Medical Research Council, are adopting open data policies. But barriers remain.This episode was part of a podcast series funded by Pfizer to celebrate 2021 International Open Access Week. The series interviewed experts working within clinical and medical disciplines who shared their perspectives on the impact and benefit of open science for patients and key stakeholders.This podcast's guest is Dr Joseph Ross, Professor of Medicine and of Public Health at the Yale-New Haven Hospital. Dr Ross co-directs the Yale-Mayo Clinic Center for Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation, the Yale Open Data Access (YODA) Project, the Collaboration for Research Integrity and Transparency at Yale Law School and leads efforts at Yale-New Haven Health System in collaboration with the National Evaluation System for health Technology. Dr Ross is also currently the U.S. Outreach and Research Editor at BMJ. Disclosure: Inspiring STEM Consulting Limited received funding from Pfizer. None of the podcast participants received funding or were contracted to speak. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/