Announcing the PLOS Scientific Advisory Council

Author: Veronique Kiermer, Chief Scientific Officer

We are delighted to announce the creation of the PLOS Scientific Advisory Council, a small group of active researchers with diverse perspectives to help us shape our efforts to promote Open Science, globally.

PLOS, as a non-profit organization committed to empowering researchers to change research communication, cannot successfully pursue its mission without listening to the research community. We regularly survey and consult the research communities we work with, formally and informally, to guide our choices and developments. The organization’s governance, including our Board of Directors, has always involved active researchers. And we derive great insight and advice from our continuous exchange with the academic Editors of PLOS journals. 

We’ve decided to take an additional formal step and create a forum where the researchers who contribute to PLOS through different channels can interact directly with each other, and to ensure that this forum includes voices from researchers around the globe. 

We’ve created the PLOS Scientific Advisory Council, a small group of researchers who represent varied scientific and career perspectives, who will advise PLOS executive and editorial leadership on strategic questions of scientific interest. 

At this point, the Scientific Advisory Council is deliberately small–about a dozen individuals–to ensure in-depth discussions and engagement, but we’ve strived to include different disciplinary interests, career stages and geographic representation. The group includes four PLOS Board members who are themselves active researchers, two of our journals’ academic Editors-in-Chief, alongside researchers who are not formally associated with PLOS. 

We are delighted to welcome the following members to the PLOS Scientific Advisory Council. To see their photos and full bios, please visit their page on our website: 

Sue Biggins
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and University of Washington, Seattle, USA

Yung En Chee
University of Melbourne, Australia

Gregory Copenhaver
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA

Abdoulaye A. Djimde
University of Bamako, Mali

Robin Lovell-Badge
The Francis Crick Institute, London, UK

Direk Limmathurotsakul
Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand

Meredith Niles
University of Vermont, Burlington, USA

Jason Papin
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA

Simine Vazire (Chair)
University of Melbourne, Australia

Keith Yamamoto
University of California, San Francisco, USA

Veronique Kiermer (Secretary, ex officio)
PLOS