Hello there, and Happy New Year from the new Communications Director of ScienceOpen!

My name’s Jon, and I’m currently finishing up my PhD at Imperial College London, where I’m a palaeontologist! (think Ross from Friends..) This year, I’ve been fortunate enough to join the ScienceOpen team to help grow their communications and networking abilities, and continue to realise the benefits of their pretty cool open research networking platform.

Those of you who know me will be aware that open access and more broadly, open science and communications, is something that I’ve been quite active in over my short career as a researcher. Some of the more ‘open-related’ projects I’ve been involved with include the writing of the Open Research Glossary, as well as challenging the AAAS on non-optimal publishing practices. For those of you lucky enough not to have met me yet, I’m highly interested in a whole array of factors that influence scholarly communication, including:

• Publishing and disruptive technologies and innovation
• Access to raw data and reproducibility
• Community building and the power of social networks
• Social media for researchers
• Science communication, public engagement and outreach
• Academic assessment and altmetrics

I’ll be taking over the reins from Liz Allen, who will shortly announce her new non-profit role. Rest assured that she will continue to spread the word about the importance of open. On behalf of the ScienceOpen team, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Liz for helping to establish our brand and offering her personal support as I get up to speed with the nuances of the job. Over the next few months (and onwards), I hope to help to raise awareness of what ScienceOpen does, and why it should be part of the essential toolkit for researchers, along with a host of other innovative applications that are bringing research into the digital age.

Why ScienceOpen? Well, apart from the obvious name, I support their ideals that science deserves to be open, transparent, and equal in every way. This essentially is the inverse of the traditional method of scholarly communication of publishing via journals, which are closed, opaque, and beset by inequalities on all fronts, the foremost being financial. ScienceOpen offers a valuable service that doesn’t replace traditional publishing, but compliments it through having a community aspect of driving open peer review, which is still the golden standard of acceptability for published research. Combine this with a hefty archive of both open and non-open research articles, and you have a valuable platform for developing research networks and building upon the published literature in an open, transparent, and community-driven way. For me, this is just one of the many ways in which the way we conduct research and disseminate those results is changing for the better, by harnessing the power of the Web and the opportunities it gives us for greater inter-operability throughout academia.

Alongside my activities here, I’ll be continuing my research and finishing the dreaded thesis, as well my science communication activities, in particular for the PLOS Paleo network which is great fun! So essentially combining my three favourite things: research, science communication, and open science policy and communications. Yay!

You can contact me on Twitter, or drop me an email if you wish. I look forward to working with ScienceOpen, and with them the global research community!