Alma Swan is a consultant working in the field of scholarly communication. She is a director of Key Perspectives Ltd (http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/), convenor for Enabling Open Scholarship (http://www.openscholarship.org ), and Director of European Advocacy programmes for SPARC (http://www.arl.org/sparc ). Enabling Open Scholarship is the global organisation of universities promoting the principles of open scholarship in the academic community. Alma holds honorary academic positions in the University of Southampton School of Electronics & Computer Science (http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ ) and the University of Warwick Business School (http://www.wbs.ac.uk/).

Her work covers market research and business modelling, project management and evaluation, research communication practices and behaviours, and the study and promotion of new forms of scholarly communication in the age of the Web. She writes and makes frequent presentations on scholarly communication issues.

Alma has BSc and PhD degrees from the University of Southampton and an MBA from Warwick Business School. She is a Fellow of the Society of Biology (UK) and a Chartered Biologist, is an elected member of the Governing Board of Euroscience (http://www.euroscience.org/ ), the European Association for the Promotion of Science & Technology, and is the former editor of its online magazine, The Euroscientist.