Against The Grain - The Podcast

The following interview is part of the 2025 Charleston Conference Leadership Interview Series. In this series, we sit down with leaders and innovators who are making a real difference in scholarly publishing, libraries, and the broader information world. Each conversation is a chance to hear firsthand how these decision makers tackle new challenges, rethink traditional models, and collaborate across sectors. Today's episode features the next conversation from the 2025 Charleston Conference Leadership Interview Series.  Heather Staines, Senior Consultant, Delta Think, and a Conference Director, talks with Elizabeth Bik, Science Integrity Consultant and Microbiologist. Elisabeth is a prominent microbiologist and renowned investigator into scientific misconduct, particularly the manipulation and falsification of research data. She has uncovered issues in over 7,000 scientific papers, resulting in more than 1,000 retractions. Her work has gained international attention, earning her the 2021 John Maddox Prize.

The following interview is part of the 2025 Charleston Conference Leadership Interview Series. In this series, we sit down with leaders and innovators who are making a real difference in scholarly publishing, libraries, and the broader information world. Each conversation is a chance to hear firsthand how these decision makers tackle new challenges, rethink traditional models, and collaborate across sectors. Today's episode features the next conversation from the 2025 Charleston Conference Leadership Interview Series.  Erin Gallagher, Chair, Acquisitions & Discovery Services at the University of Florida, and a Conference Director, talks with Xan Arch, Dean of Libraries, Portland State University. In this conversation, Xan shares with Erin her library origin story which began with her love of checking out books from the public library as a child and a temp job at the Duke Business Library that she took after college while doing temp work.  She talks about switching institutions post pandemic and her mov

The following interview is part of the 2025 Charleston Conference Leadership Interview Series. In this series, we sit down with leaders and innovators who are making a real difference in scholarly publishing, libraries, and the broader information world. Each conversation is a chance to hear firsthand how these decision makers tackle new challenges, rethink traditional models, and collaborate across sectors. Today's episode features the next conversation from the 2025 Charleston Conference Leadership Interview Series.  Heather Staines, Senior Consultant, Delta Think, and a Conference Director, talks with Lucy Santos Green, Director, Professor, School of Library and Information Science, University of Iowa. In this conversation, Lucy shares with Heather the myriad of details of her current role, which she says involves working with faculty to develop and implement the SLIS (school of library and information science) strategic plan, leading innovation in the curriculum and making sure that it responds to curr

Today's episode features guest host Michael Upshall (guest editor, Charleston Briefings) who talks with Ciaran Talbot, Director: AI and Ideas Adoption, The University of Manchester Library. Ciaran studied computing and began his career as an IT support analyst in the central team at Manchester University before an IT position opened up in the library, where he has now been for over 15 years.   He says his current role allows him to work more connectedly with students, researchers and collections, and he encourages staff in open discussion and the adoption of useful tools in technology and to experiment with technology while balancing it with ethical and environmental concerns. Ciaran says he believes that libraries sit at the center of the AI landscape and are evolving from service providers into facilitators of innovation, guiding users with critical thinking, and helping them navigate and critically engage with AI-driven tools while maintaining trust and academic integrity. The video of this interview

Today's episode features guest host Michael Upshall (guest editor, Charleston Briefings) who talks with Thorsten Fröhlich, Professor of IT Management and Big Data at IU International University of Applied Sciences. Thorsten has over 35 years of experience in higher education, IT & digital transformation, and curriculum development and he holds a doctorate in chemistry.  He is an entrepreneur, having founded several companies in scientific publishing and software development, including LUMITOS AG and Unchained Intellect Press, and he's an author of textbooks and publications on academic writing and AI in creative fields. In this conversation, Thorsten shares his journey from a rural upbringing to becoming a prominent figure in chemistry, technology, and academia. He discusses his early interest in chemistry, the founding of his first startup, and his transition back to academia where he focuses on guiding students in thesis writing. Thorsten talks with Michael about the innovative use of AI in evaluati

Today's episode features guest host Michael Upshall (guest editor, Charleston Briefings) who talks with Phillip Bradley, Consultant on AI and the Internet. Phillip has titled his life story "From CD-Rom to AI". He says he decided as a child that he wanted to be a librarian and obtained an Honours degree in librarianship from the Polytechnic of North London. Phillip then went to work for the British Council in the UK, where he became involved in training people from overseas offices that would come to the UK. He discovered that he really enjoyed teaching people about information work.  He was running training courses on how to use reference books, and eventually how to put promotional videos together. He taught a Basics of Librarianship course in Lesotho, South Africa.  He started to do more training for British Council offices and went around the world to different countries teaching aspects of librarianship. He took an interest in CD-Roms, which the British council was not interested in, so he left to join

Today's episode features guest host Michael Upshall (guest editor, Charleston Briefings) who talks with Brewster Kahle, Founder & Director, Internet Archive. Brewster says that back in the 1980's he believed that everything would eventually become digital. He dreamed of building a Library of Alexandria where humanity's knowledge would be freely accessible. In this conversation, he talks with Michael about his work building early search technologies at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 1983, he helped create Thinking Machine Corporation, a pioneering supercomputer manufacturer.   In 1996, he founded Alexa Internet, a web traffic analysis and ranking company that was eventually acquired by Amazon. He then launched The Internet Archive, which now contains over a trillion archived web pages and works with thousands of libraries around the world to preserve digital content. Brewster says he believes the internet should be a global, open library that supports learning and that compensates conte

Today's episode features guest host Michael Upshall (guest editor, Charleston Briefings) who talks with Rachel Miles, Research Impact Coordinator, Virginia Tech University Libraries. Rachel is "an expert in the applications and impacts of research in academia and the public sphere: how it's communicated, what makes it most visible to different audiences and why, what makes it "impactful" and how this impact is tracked, as well as how academics perceive impact when they publish, go up for promotion and tenure, and how they view it from a philosophical perspective throughout the different stages of their careers." She is also a strong supporter of open access. In this conversation, Rachel talks with Michael about how her first degree was in psychology, but she became interested in librarianship while teaching English in South Korea.  She wanted to help people with their research more directly. She didn't yet know how, but she wanted to be the service point where people could really get the insight that they

Today's episode features guest host Michael Upshall (guest editor, Charleston Briefings) who talks with Stevan Harnad, Professor of Cognitive Science, University of South Hampton. Stevan is one of the most prominent advocates for open access and a distinguished scholar in cognitive science. In 1978, he founded the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences which pioneered "open peer commentary", a form of public discussion on published content. In this conversation, Stevan looks back on over 50 years of campaigning for, and implementing tools for, open access.  Stevan invented a term for internet-based discourse, which he called "scholarly skywriting" in 1987. But, his most famous intervention was the 1994 "Subversive Proposal", the call for peer-reviewed papers to be made openly available on the Internet so that everyone could access them – which became green Open Access. He also talks about why in 2026, the mechanism set up in the early 2000s still has not delivered what he had hoped for.  Lastly, Stevan talk

Today's episode features guest host Michael Upshall (guest editor, Charleston Briefings) who talks with Rupert Gatti and Alessandra Tosi, Co-Founders, Open Book Publishers. Alessandra, a literary historian specializing in Russia, and Rupert, an economist, both Cambridge based scholars, founded the biggest independent open access academic book publisher in the UK, Open Book Publishers, in 2008.  In this conversation, Alessandra talks with Michael about frustrations over the limited reach of her own scholarly monographs, and many scholars being excluded in the humanities in Russia over the high cost of scholarly works and high book processing charges with traditional commercial publishers. This is why they founded the open access, non-profit academic press, following the diamond open access model, to service both authors and readers and make research in the humanities and social sciences freely available worldwide.  Rupert says open access is not an end in itself, but part of a larger commitment to open schol

The following interview is part of the 2025 Charleston Conference Leadership Interview Series. In this series, we sit down with leaders and innovators who are making a real difference in scholarly publishing, libraries, and the broader information world. Each conversation is a chance to hear firsthand how these decision makers tackle new challenges, rethink traditional models, and collaborate across sectors. Today's episode features the next conversation from the 2025 Charleston Conference Leadership Interview Series.  Heather Staines Senior Consultant, Delta Think, and a Conference Director, talks with Paul Rosenzweig, Principal, Red Branch Consulting and a Lecturer at George Washington University. Paul has had what could be called a "zigzaggy" career, but it all came full circle. He started out as a chemist with a master's in chemical oceanography and expected he would be a senior oceanographer examining the world by now.  However, due to difficulty obtaining government funding, and the job being not as

The following interview is part of the 2025 Charleston Conference Leadership Interview Series. In this series, we sit down with leaders and innovators who are making a real difference in scholarly publishing, libraries, and the broader information world. Each conversation is a chance to hear firsthand how these decision makers tackle new challenges, rethink traditional models, and collaborate across sectors. Today's episode features the next conversation from the 2025 Charleston Conference Leadership Interview Series.  Erin Gallagher, Chair, Acquisitions & Discovery Services at the University of Florida, and a Conference Director, talks with Leo Lo, Dean of Libraries and Advisor for AI Literacy at the University of Virginia. Leo shares that he has a film degree and originally wanted to be a film scholar and film preservationist and didn't realize that librarianship could be a career until he discovered it by accident when searching for a graduate program in film preservation. One of his professors sugg

Today's episode features guest host Michael Upshall (guest editor, Charleston Briefings) who talks with Paolo Manghi, CTO, OpenAIRE, and Researcher, Italian National Research Council. Paolo is a prominent figure in European Research Infrastructures. In this conversation, he talks about his career path, first earning a degree in information science in Pisa, then a degree in science and technology, and then a PhD in research on data and databases before working with data infrastructures and joining CNR, a pioneer in the field of technical innovation and scientific advancements and who he says coined many famous terminologies used in the industry today.  Paolo talks about dividing his time between being a researcher and working at the worldwide open scholarly communication infrastructure OpenAire which he describes as being more than a technical platform, that provides a trusted forum for policymakers, funders, institutions, and researchers to share data and shape open science together. The video of this inte

Today's episode features guest host Michael Upshall (guest editor, Charleston Briefings) who talks with Gregory Laynor, PhD, Director, Meta-Research Collaborative and Systemic Review Librarian, NYU Health Science Library. In this conversation, Gregory discusses founding the Meta Research Collaborative, which aims to improve transparency, impact and research practices across disciplines. He also discusses his work in meta-research, or research on research, and says he is cautious in using Generative AI in research due to concerns over bias, rigor and reproducibility amid an AI mediated research landscape, and he believes that the library's future is shifting and now lies more in helping people interpret, evaluate, and synthesize information, and helping provide AI literacy, than in being repositories. The video of this interview can be found here: https://youtu.be/nVxUojjh64k Social Media: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mupshall/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregory-laynor/ Keywords: #Science #Open

Today's episode features guest host Michael Upshall (guest editor, Charleston Briefings) who talks with Andrew Smeall, VP, Product Innovation at Sage. Andrew is a leader in digital scholarly publishing. He began his career in publishing, and became interested in media and technology, while working at the Center on US-China Relations, which he describes as a "think tank" that produces research on US-China environmental relations and US-China economic relations, where he worked to organize research projects, make their white papers more interesting  and to make that research more discoverable using WordPress sites or flash sites.  He joined Hindawi while working towards his MBA, where he learned about open access and led the redevelopment of its publishing platform, eventually becoming Chief Digital Officer.  Now at Sage, he builds technology strategy for their research business and journals business, helping to decide what platforms to build and which to buy, whether to develop a technology in house or work

Today's episode features guest host Michael Upshall (guest editor, Charleston Briefings) who talks with Michele Frison, Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit at the University of Cambridge. Michele is originally from Italy and completed his PhD at UCL in England with a focus on cell biology. He defines himself as a cell biologist and biochemist, and much of his current research specializes in cell and mitochondrial biology, aging and disease.  The Mitochondrial Biology Unit is part of a larger infrastructure that runs clinical trials for rare diseases. Michele says the process is very slow, taking up to a decade or so, but that he has been fortunate enough to have made a recent discovery that could well lead to clinical trial: the protein target that he's worked with is actually a target for drugs that have already passed phase one clinical trials and are now passing phase two for Parkinson's disease. If the research he has done in models replicates in humans, then it could w

The following interview is part of the 2025 Charleston Conference Leadership Interview Series. In this series, we sit down with leaders and innovators who are making a real difference in scholarly publishing, libraries, and the broader information world. Each conversation is a chance to hear firsthand how these decision makers tackle new challenges, rethink traditional models, and collaborate across sectors. Today's episode features the next conversation from the 2025 Charleston Conference Leadership Interview Series.  Meg White, Senior Consultant, Delta Think, and a Conference Director, who talks with Judy Russell, Former Dean of Libraries at the University of Florida. Judy has had a long, distinguished career. She served as Superintendent of Documents at the US Government Printing Office and as Deputy Director for the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science and just completed 18 years as the first dean of university libraries at University of Florida, before recently retiring. In th

The following interview is part of the 2025 Charleston Conference Leadership Interview Series. In this series, we sit down with leaders and innovators who are making a real difference in scholarly publishing, libraries, and the broader information world. Each conversation is a chance to hear firsthand how these decision makers tackle new challenges, rethink traditional models, and collaborate across sectors. Today's episode features the next conversation from the 2025 Charleston Conference Leadership Interview Series.  Meg White, Senior Consultant, Delta Think, and a Conference Director, who talks with Kathleen McEvoy, Senior Policy Fellow, EveryLibrary Institute. Kathleen is a senior communication executive with expertise in public relations, crisis communications, and public affairs. In this conversation, Kathleen talks with Meg about her professional journey from broadcast journalism to public relations to now her work with EveryLibrary. Kathleen also describes the dual role of EveryLibrary with their w

The following interview is the first in this year's Charleston Conference Leadership Interview Series. In this series, we sit down with leaders and innovators who are making a real difference in scholarly publishing, libraries, and the broader information world. Each conversation is a chance to hear firsthand how these decision makers tackle new challenges, rethink traditional models, and collaborate across sectors Today's episode features Meg White, Senior Consultant, Delta Think, and a Conference Director, who talks with Roger Schonfeld,  Managing Director of JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services. Roger is very prolific in the scholarly communication industry, both as a leader and as an innovator, with a large part of his career having been devoted to advancing and supporting the work of libraries. In this conversation, Roger talks with Meg about his background in librarianship and how he came to ITHAKA SNR over 20 years ago. He also talks about the new initiative that he's working on since recently becoming M

Today's episode features guest host Michael Upshall (guest editor, Charleston Briefings) who talks with Ross Mounce, Director of Open Access, Arcadia, a family philanthropy. A paleontologist, Ross has a PhD in evolutionary biology. When he began his PhD research at the University of Bath, he realized the lack of access to research papers and the data, and he believed researchers need to be more open and transparent with their work. Ross began working with Acadia around 8 years ago. Since 2002, Arcadia has awarded $1.3 billion to organizations around the world. Arcadia funding areas include conserving and restoring nature, recording cultural heritage and promoting open access. In this interview, Ross talks about the Arcadia funding model, and how it is managed.   Ross says "We love to see practical change in the world. So, that doesn't always mean commissioning people to do research. It means really commissioning people to do things that will change the world." Social Media: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedi