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Director, Open Access Australasia, Queensland University of Technology

Dr Virginia Barbour is the Director of Open Access Australasia (Previously Australasian Open Access Strategy Group), which is hosted by UNSW. She is based in Brisbane, Australia. She has a long history of working in open access publishing, having joined PLOS in 2004 as one of the three founding editors of PLOS Medicine, finally becoming Medicine and Biology Editorial Director of PLOS in 2014. Her training in publishing was at The Lancet where she worked before joining PLOS.

She studied Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, then medicine at UCL and Middlesex Hospitals, London, specializing in haematology. Her DPhil was on alpha globin gene regulation at the University of Oxford. She undertook post-doctoral work at St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

She was Chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) from 2012-May 2017. She has been involved in a number of reporting guidelines including CONSORT, PRISMA and TIDieR statements. She is an advisor to a number of publishing and ethics initiatives. She is Chair of the Advisory Group for DORA, the Declaration on Research Assessment.

She is co-lead for the Office for Scholarly Communication at Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

Experience

  • 2015–present
    Executive Officer , Australian Open Access Support Group
  • 2014–2015
    Medicine and Biology Editorial Director , PLOS
  • 2012–2014
    Medicine Editorial Director, PLOS
  • 2004–2013
    Editor, PLOS Medicine, PLOS