About Us

Ko Maungatautari te maunga; Ko Waikato te awa; Ko Waikato te iwi; Ko Kim Tairi tōku ingoa. He Kaitoha Puku ahau ki Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makaurau e mahi ana.

Kim Tairi is an indigenous, intersectional feminist and librarian. Her career spans more than 25 years in both Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. The Kaitoha Puka (University Librarian) at Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makaurau (AUT) she is Aotearoa’s first Māori University Librarian and proud to be a wahine Māori in higher education senior leadership. AUT is a values-based institution and Kim is pleased to work for a University that aims to enhance the mana of others.  Her commitment to the work of OAA steams from a deep-seated belief that bibliodiversity and open research benefits not only the research community but society more widely.

Dimity Flanagan is the Manager, Scholarly Communications at the University of Melbourne where she is responsible for Open Scholarship and research outputs management. In this role, Dimity leads on training and advocacy of Open Research practices, drives service improvements and technical enhancements in the University’s repository ecosystem, and supports the University in its response to emerging opportunities in scholarly publishing.

This work builds on her significant experience working on Open Access in the UK where she was the Scholarly Communications Lead at the British Library and the Repository Manager at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

David Groenewegen is the University Librarian at Latrobe University.

Fiona has worked at the institutional, national, and global levels to advance open access and access to information. She currently leads scholarly communications and repositories, digital and physical infrastructure, and corporate services at UNSW Sydney and has previously held roles with national and international organisations representing libraries and their users.

Her experience includes open infrastructure, policy reform, the UN SDGs, capacity building, and equitable access. Fiona’s other appointments include the Trove Strategic Advisory Committee, co-lead of the IFLA Open Access working party, IFLA Freedom of Access to Information and Freedom of Expression committee (IFLA FAIFE), and Chair of the SCOSS Advisory Committee. Her presentations and papers are available via ORCID.

Clare Thorpe is an award-winning library leader, evidence-based research-practitioner, and board director. She has worked in academic and state libraries since 2001. Clare is the Director, Library Services at Southern Cross University where she is providing strategic direction, innovation and leadership by enacting transformative cultural change.

She is passionate about building the evidence-base of library and information science through scholarly and informal communication channels. Clare is committed to empowering a culture of openness in education and research to enable equitable and perpetual access to knowledge for our communities.

Dr Virginia (Ginny) Barbour is Director of Open Access Australasia and is Co-Lead, Office for Scholarly Communications, Queensland University of Technology (QUT). In 2004, she was one of the three founding editors of PLOS Medicine. She was Chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics from 2012-2017. She has been involved over the years with many Open Access, publishing, and ethics initiatives including the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) the Cochrane Library Oversight Committee, and as a Plan S Ambassador. She writes for the Conversation. She is on the NHMRC’s Research Quality Steering Committee.

Her ORCID profile is here http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2358-2440

Janet is the Senior Project Officer for Open Access Australasia working three days a week. Janet has worked as a research-focused academic librarian in universities for twenty years in the US, Canada and Australia, with a defining interest in open access and scholarly communications. Recent research includes investigating the open access initiatives across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, comparing universities, health, government, and non-profit research-active institutions.  Janet is passionate about diversity and equity in open scholarship. She is also a Liaison Librarian supporting the health disciplines at James Cook University. Her ORCID profile is here

Sandra works one day per week for Open Access Australasia and is mostly responsible for compiling the newsletter, logistics for webinars and maintaining our website.   Four days a week she is a Librarian at QUT working directly with academic staff and higher degree research students and provides advice & assistance on scholarly publishing, referencing systems, publication metrics, demonstrating research impact, locating and managing information and research data.  She’s also involved in the ongoing development of the QUT Library collection of databases, books and resources. She is a former sessional academic in broadcast journalism at QUT, and was previously a journalist for the ABC.