Assembly of the Commons
The Assembly of the Commons (AoC) is one of OPERAS’ governance bodies and it gathers all Ordinary Members of the infrastructure. It is convened at least once a year. Its objective is to present the work completed in the Special Interest Groups over the course of the previous year, propose subjects to be discussed during the General Assembly, and elect the community representatives every two years. The community is currently represented by two delegates.
The Assembly of the Commons on 11 May 2022 voted for Vanessa Proudman and Mark Huskisson as representatives for two years.
Vanessa Proudman is Director of SPARC Europe, where she is working to make Open the default in Europe. Vanessa has 20 years of international experience working on Open Access, Open Science, Open Culture and Open Education with many leading universities and libraries worldwide from over 20 countries. Research and knowledge exchange are her vehicles to inform, connect and advocate for change in these areas: to increase international, national and regional policy-making and practice in Europe. Prior to SPARC Europe, she worked at Tilburg University on various international initiatives, was programme manager at Europeana and led a department on information and IT at a UN-European region research institute in Vienna for over 10 years.
Mark Huskisson began his career in academic book publishing in 1992 with Cambridge University Press, working for thirty years at the turbulent confluence of traditional and digital business streams. Moving to academic global book distributors and library suppliers, developing eBook platforms, discovery tools, industry standards, and more latterly product and platform development for Chinese universities and researchers. Mark joined the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) to head up and accelerate the sustainable growth of its open source software for the purpose of making Open Access publishing a viable option for the public good on a global scale, and improving the quality development of scholarly publishing tools for all. OJS is the most widely used publishing platform in existence and all software is available free to the community. As well as OJS, PKP is the creator and steward of the publishing solutions OMP (Open Monograph Press) and OPS (Open Preprint Systems).
With a masters in business from the University of Nottingham, Mark specialises in publishing business models and technology development, working with the international community to reduce barriers to access and participation in scholarly communication.