OA Week 2025: Who owns our knowledge? Event 1

Heather Joseph is the Executive Director of SPARC, an international coalition of academic and research libraries promoting the open sharing of knowledge. Under her stewardship, SPARC has become the leading advocacy organization promoting innovative open and equitable global systems of research and education. Based in Washington, D.C., she leads SPARC’s strategy and policy work, including advocacy that resulted in the establishment of the landmark 2022 White House OSTP Memorandum requiring open access to all U.S. federally funded research outputs. Before SPARC, she spent 15 years in commercial and nonprofit publishing. She is a widely respected expert on national and international open research policies and implementation strategies. Heather actively participates in the global knowledge-sharing community and serves on boards including the Arcadia Fund and Our Research. She is a frequent speaker and writer on scholarly communications, higher education, and open access to research.

Ksenia Lavrenteva is a PhD Researcher at the University of Exeter Law School specialising in the socio-legal governance of digital heritage and culture-relevant data. Her work examines how infrastructures, standards and institutional politics shape what is recorded, who controls it, and how it circulates across platforms. Her current work explores how museums, digital collections, and open data can be weaponized to reinforce state ideologies or promote broader public access, with recent research focusing on Russian museums and digital platforms in the context of the Ukraine war. Drawing on more than a decade as a lawyer in policy and advocacy, she develops practical guidance to make digitisation, access and reuse more inclusive, ethical and flexible.

Dr Encieh Erfani is a researcher currently at the Perimeter Institute in Canada. Previously, she served as an Assistant Professor in the Physics Department at a university in Iran until her resignation in September 2022, in solidarity with the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests. Since then, she has been an exiled scholar. Erfani earned her Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics/Cosmology from Bonn University, Germany, in 2012. Following her resignation, she has become a vocal advocate for academic freedom and human rights. In November 2022, she co-founded the International Community of Iranian Academics (ICOIA) to further this cause. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) and the International Science Council (ISC), an Advisory Board member of the InterAcademy Partnership (IAP), a TWAS Young Affiliate member, and a member of the Global Young Academy (GYA). In 2025, she was awarded the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility.

Professor Sandy O’Sullivan is a Wiradjuri transgender/non-binary scholar, a Professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies at Macquarie University, where they also work in the Centre for Global Indigenous Futures. They are an ARC Future Fellow (2020–2024 ) and their project, Saving Lives: Mapping the influence of Indigenous LGBTIQ+ creative artists, explored how queer Indigenous artists contribute to the wellbeing of First Nations peoples.  Sandy has worked across gender, sexuality, museums, performance, design, and Indigenous identity. They were the inaugural director of the Centre for Collaborative First Nations’ Research and the Deputy Head of the School of Creative Industries at the University of the Sunshine Coast. They are also a musician and sound artist with national and international residencies.

Dr Danny Kingsley is an Australian-based thought leader in the international scholarly communication space. She is Director of Library Services (Information) at Deakin University and an Ambassador for the OAPEN Library of open access books. She has consulted for multiple Australian universities since returning from the UK where she was Deputy Director of Cambridge University Libraries. She is a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science. Her research centres on scholarly communication including the academic reward structure, scholarly infrastructure and open access advocacy. She established Open Access Australasia in 2013 and sits on multiple committees, including the Royal Society Advisory Committee on the Future of Research Publishing, the Australian National Open Science Taskforce and the FORCE11 Board of Directors.

Anne Lennox has over 30 years’ experience in the university sector in a range of leadership roles, as Associate Director Library Services Learning, Teaching and Research, Anne is focused on leading and transforming Library learning, research and teaching support teams, building agile services to meet the needs of the changing digital environment in which we work. Anne has championed open education since 2009 and is passionate to progress open pedagogy as an innovative pedagogy being active, applied and authentic.  Open education 2.0 provides the opportunity to explore how open pedagogy can contribute to the scholarship of learning and teaching. Anne is a member of the OAA Executive Committee.