Liz Bal

I am responsible for the strategic development and delivery of a diverse range of services relating to policy implementation, monitoring and underpinning infrastructure for open research.

A key part of my role is to take a more a holistic approach to open research by developing our services to support openness throughout the research life cycle. This includes the process, management and outputs of research. As the scholarly ecosystem and policy landscape continue to evolve at pace around the world, I am committed to helping the sector embrace the full potential of open research.

Open research has been a part of my career since 2010. A biologist by education, I started out my career at BMC, the first commercial open access publisher. In my most recent role, I was a publisher at Springer Nature, with accountability for the growth and development of a portfolio of journals in the life sciences.

Throughout my time in publishing, I was focused on launching and developing open access journals, and looking beyond open access to supporting open research practices and initiatives. This provided me with insight into the challenges faced with transitioning to open access and open research across different disciplines, as well as researcher needs and motivations.