Alma Swan obtained a first class honours degree in zoology in 1974 and a PhD in small room biology in 1978 from Southampton University . After research fellowships funded by the Cancer Research Campaign at Southampton General Hospital and St. George's Hospital Medical School (London), she took a position as Lecturer in Zoology at the University of Leicester. Her research was in medical cell biology and she taught a range of courses from vertebrate biology to the biology of cancer.

In 1985, she moved into science publishing as managing editor of a Pergamon Press (later Elsevier Science) biomedical research indexing service, published both in print and online.

In 1996, she jointly founded Key Perspectives, a consultancy serving the scholarly publishing industry.

Though she has worked in the commercial sphere for 20 years, she retains links with academic life: for four years she was tutor and consultant for the Open University Business School 's MBA programme and since 1991 has been tutor for two business strategy courses on Warwick Business School 's MBA programme. She holds honorary roles as business mentor and teacher for the Institute for Entrepreneurship (part of the School of Management ) at Southampton University . Alma has an MBA from Warwick Business School and is a Member of the Institute of Biology and is an elected member of the Governing Board of Euroscience (the European Association for the Promotion of Science and Technology).

Drs. Astrid Wissenburg is Director of  Communications and Information at the Economic and Social Research Council. Her responsibilities include strategic leadership on knowledge transfer, internal and external communications, science and society, research evaluation and e-business. Current corporate projects include the development of an internal communications and knowledge management strategy, and of an organisation-wide knowledge transfer and impact strategy (inclusing  ESRC Society Today ).  Astrid is also leading on behalf of Research Councils UK on open access issues.

Astrid has had a varied academic career in London , Glasgow and her home country of the Netherlands . Astrid was from 1999-2003 assistant-director of Information Services and Systems at King's College London. Her role involved the provision of information resources and delivery systems to support both teaching and research. Previous posts at King's have included the management of a national R&D project on electronic libraries and the co-ordination of user services for the Arts and Humanities Data Service.

Astrid has experience of computer-based learning and IT in the humanities, gained at Leiden and Glasgow universities, and holds a degree in Contemporary History from the University of Nijmegen , The Netherlands. In her spare time, Astrid is still enjoying student life and is close to completing her Master of Public Administration at Warwick Business School .

David Prosser was appointed the first director of SPARC Europe in October 2002. Previously, he spent ten years in science, technical, and medical journal publishing for both Oxford University Press and Elsevier Science. During this time he was involved in all aspects of publishing from production through to editorial and financial management of journals. Before becoming a publisher he received a PhD and BSc in Physics from Leeds University , UK .

Eloy Rodrigues is the Director of the University of Minho Documentation Services . In recent years he has devoted much of his work to the development of digital libraries, education and training of librarians and library users and the study of the scholarly communication system. In 2003, Eloy Rodrigues lead the project to create RepositoriUM – the institutional repository of Minho University , and he has directed this services ever since. 

At the end of 2004 he drafted the formal policy of Minho University on open access to its scientific output. The other main focus of Eloy's current activity is promoting and advocating Open Access and institutional repositories in Portugal and in the Portuguese speaking world.

Isabel Soares Carneiro co-ordinates, since May 2005, the team responsible for the Scientific Production of the Observatory of Science and Higher Education (OCES), which aims at amongst others activities : making available on-line the world-wide scientific production, through the ISI Web of Knowledge platform. Other activities include international diffusion, of free access contents, through the SciELO Platform; the production and outsourcing of statistical and bibliometrics pointers related to the national scientific production, and respective evolution;, and the constitution of elements of analysis of the national system of I&D, related directly to Scientific Production.

Previously, Isabel Soares Carneiro was a teacher and exerted positions of management in predominately Secondary Education Schools, having during more than twenty years, undertaken numerous activities relating to educational Administration. Other activities include: a Government liaison officer and well as a prominent position within the Portuguese Ministry of the Education.

Joanne Yeomans is a Scientific Information Officer at CERN Library in Geneva . She arrived at CERN in 2003 and is currently section leader of the User Services section where she has reponsibility for various Open Access related activities. Before CERN she spent five years as the Maths and Physical Sciences Faculty Team Librarian at Leeds University in the UK where she focused particularly on faculty liaison and developing the information literacy programmes across the library. She completed a degree in Mathematics and Physics at the University of Warwick before studying for a Masters degree at Loughborough University to become a librarian.

Leo Waaijers (1938) studied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in Leiden. In 1964 an almost lifelong carreer followed at TU Delft where he started as a scientist, including a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1968. In 1977 he switched to management, at first as the personal manager of his department, to become member of the University Executive Board from 1984 to 1988. Following discontinuation of this position he was appointed University Librarian. In this function he realised a.o. the new library buidling, the merger with the university press and the transfer to the new library system Aleph.

In 2001 he accepted a corresponding post at Wageningen University & Research Centre. From January 1-th 2004 he is manager of the SURF Platform ICT and Research in which position he oversees the DARE programme, with well known international services like Cream of Science.

Leslie Carr is Senior Lecturer at the Intelligents, Agents, Multimedia Research Group at the University of Southampton . Dr Carr's background is as a researcher in distributed information systems (hypermedia, Web, Semantic Web). He has worked with Stevan Harnad on Open Access for over 10 years, through a number of collaborations including the UK-US/JISC-NSF International Digital Libraries II project "Open Citations" which was a collaboration between Southampton, Cornell and Los Alamos . Since then Dr Carr has become Technical Director of EPrints repository software (and its commercial arm EPrints Services), the Repository Manager for a School Repository (eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk) and a member of the advisory board of an Institutional Repository (eprints.soton.ac.uk). He currently manages a number of JISC projects on preservation, e-research environments, research assessment and interoperability.

Having graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1982, Mark Patterson obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester where he worked on yeast cell cycle genetics. Mark then carried out post-doctoral research at Oxford University and Stanford University . In 1994, after four years as a lecturer back at the University of Cambridge , where he studied the genetics of human sexual differentiation, Mark made the move into scientific publishing as the editor of Trends in Genetics .

In 1999, he was appointed as the Biology Reviews Editor at Nature and was subsequently involved in the launch of the Nature Reviews Journals as the Editor of Nature Reviews Genetics.   Mark worked as the Publisher for the Company of Biologists before joining the Public Library of Science in 2003 to help launch PLoS Biology .  He was appointed as the Director of Publishing at PLoS in 2005.

Pedro Oliveira obtained a Phd in Innovation, Technology and Operations Management from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . Pedro Oliveira also obtain the following academic qualifications: a Master degree in System Operations and Engineering and a degree in Naval Engineering from IST (Instituto Superior Técnico – Portugal ); where he was Coordinator of the Department of Studies and Planning. Presently he is an Assistant Professor at the Catholic University , where he teaches Innovation and Operations Management as part of curriculum for both the MBA and Degree programs . He also is responsible for coordinating the Advanced Program in Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management (PAEGI) as well as the Advanced Program of Management for Executives - Telecommunications and Information Technology. He is co-responsible for Creative Commons Portugal.

Stevan Harnad http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad was born in Hungary,     did his undergraduate work at McGill University and his graduate     work at Princeton University and is currently Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science at University of Quebec/Montreal and adjunct Professor in Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University, UK.

His research is on categorisation, communication     and cognition. Founder and Editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences  http://www.bbsonline.org/ (a paper journal published by Cambridge University Press), Psycoloquy http://psycprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ (an electronic journal sponsored by the American Psychological Association) and the CogPrints Electronic Preprint Archive in the Cognitive Sciences http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ he is Past President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Corresponding Member of the Hungarian Academy of Science, and author and contributor to over 150 publications, including Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech (NY Acad Sci 1976), Lateralization in the Nervous System (Acad Pr 1977), Peer Commentary on Peer Review: A Case Study in Scientific Quality Control (CUP 1982), Categorical Perception: The Groundwork of Cognition (CUP 1987), The Selection of Behavior: The Operant Behaviorism of BF Skinner: Comments and Consequences (CUP 1988) and Icon, Category, Symbol: Essays on the Foundations and Fringes of Cognition (in prep).