“I love that we make people happy.”
It’s very varied! In a way you could say I was brought up as a scientist; my dad was an agricultural scientist and as a kid I’d sit at his desk in the laboratory while he was running experiments. My original degree was in Psychology, and three decades later I’m doing a PhD in alternative metrics to explore how Open Access is transforming the way that we do research, and why it’s accelerating research in some fields and not in others.
My love of books led me into publishing and after a few years I joined one of the world’s largest academic book publishers. That’s where I got involved in altmetrics. I’d been an early user of social networks, and I noticed that people were posting on Facebook etc about research they were doing. I got really interested in trying to figure out how we could quantify that sort of work and how people were interacting with it.
So when this thing called “altmetrics” appeared in 2010, I’d already been working in that space for a few years. The company became big users of the Digital Science business Altmetric – then my boss actually went to work at Digital Science and I decided my future was there too.
One of the customers I’m proudest to work with is the Rare Diseases division of a multinational pharma corporation. Compared with areas like cancer or cardiac conditions, rare diseases have historically been rather neglected and under-invested. But thanks to advances in biomedicine, we’re now seeing some revolutionary treatments coming through – for example, a transformative way of managing haemophilia.
However, these breakthroughs aren’t much good if no-one knows about them; research needs to be amplified, shared and used and so we help our customers place their research in places where it’s going to get attention.
For us, it’s about building a relationship. It’s not about selling a product and walking away from it. We want to work with the scientists who are active in this space and their colleagues to ensure that their research is having the full impact that it can have. To do this, we built customized solutions for the client (like Journal Selection and Share of Voice dashboards) to help them understand what publishing strategies and venues will best communicate their research, what their competitors are doing, and so on. That shows them how to place their research where it will get the most attention and have as much impact as possible.
From a business angle, these kinds of insights help the Rare Diseases division level the playing-field with more prominent diseases. From a human angle – quite simply, they help to improve people’s health and lives.
I love that we make people happy. For me the great joy is in supporting people who know that there’s something going on whether it’s with their publications or with a journal, but they don’t have the ability to find it and together we can uncover data they don’t even know is there. And from that data we can extract insights that support them in their goals and, with some customers, that can potentially change lives.
It feels like digging in a secret garden and finding nuggets of hidden wisdom – that’s really exciting to me. It’s like being back in my dad’s lab as a kid, helping him solve problems.
An apple cinnamon donut from a shop out in the wilds of Pennsylvania. That donut was ridiculously good.
I use the purple Smiling Imp way too often. And I think dogs are seriously under-represented in the emoji world, so I’d create a new dog-with-a-tear emoji – because that’s my dog every time I leave her.
