Paul Harvey Peters (born September 24, 1982) is the non-Executive Board Chair of online conference software provider ExOrdo and from 2015-2021 was the Chief Executive Officer of the

Open Access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...

publisher

Hindawi Hindawi or Hindavi can refer to: * Hindawi affair *Hindustani language (Hindi-Urdu), Central Indo-Aryan languages, or any language of the Hindi Belt *Something of, from, or related to Hind or Hindustan (another name of India) *Hindawi Programming S ...

. He is past Chair of the Board of Crossref and was President of the

Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) is a non-profit trade association of open access journal and book publishers. Having started with an exclusive focus on open access journals, it has since expanded its activities to include ...

(OASPA) from 2013 to 2019. Peters is known for his work as an advocate for

, open infrastructure for Open Science, and research integrity in the published literature.

Early life

Paul Harvey Peters was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on September 24, 1982 where his parents both taught chemistry at

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

. The family moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1984 where Paul went to Bixby Elementary School, Baseline Middle School, and Fairview High School.

Education

He was educated at the

College of William and Mary The College of William & Mary (officially The College of William and Mary in Virginia, abbreviated as William & Mary, W&M) is a public research university in Williamsburg, Virginia. Founded in 1693 by letters patent issued by King William III a ...

from 2000 to 2004 where he completed his bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern Studies. While at William and Mary, he spent his junior year abroad at the American University in Cairo (AUC).

Professional life

Upon finishing college aged 21, Peters returned to Cairo. He applied for a temporary copy editing position at Hindawi, but was then hired to develop Hindawi's Open Access journal program. At the time, Hindawi was a subscription publisher with a portfolio of 14 journals. He led the conversion of Hindawi’s journal portfolio to open access, making it one of the first subscription publishers to convert fully to an APC-funded open access model in 2007. In 2008, Hindawi joined nine other publishers to found the

(OASPA), which was born out of the Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communications. He was a founding board member of OASPA and was elected President of the organization on March 15, 2013. In 2015, he was appointed Chief Executive Officer of Hindawi. He restructured the company creating a new limited liability company located in London, Hindawi Ltd. In 2017, he instigated Hindawi’s resignation from the

International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, known for short by the initials for the last part of its name, STM, is an international trade association organised and run for the benefit of scholarly, scientific, tec ...

(STM) in protest over their lack of support for open access publishing. Peters has also been critical of the blacklisting of certain open access journals by librarian

Jeffrey Beall Jeffrey Beall is an American librarian and library scientist, best known for drawing attention to "predatory open access publishing", a term he coined, and for creating what is now widely known as Beall's list, a list of potentially predatory op ...

. Peters served as a Nominated Member on the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body o ...

’s working group on the development and implementation of open science in Europe – the European Open Science Policy Platform from 2016 to 2017. He has been on the Board of Directors of Crossref since 2009 where he is currently the Board Chair, and he is a former board member of the

. He appeared in the 2018 feature length documentary about open access, ''Paywall: the business of scholarship''. In 2018, Paul Peters proposed the concept of the OA Switchboard and convened a meeting of key stakeholders in December 2018 to develop the idea. The OA Switchboard was formally launched on 31 January 2020. In February 2021, having successfully completed the sale of

Wiley Wiley may refer to: Locations * Wiley, Colorado, a U.S. town *Wiley, Pleasants County, West Virginia, U.S. * Wiley-Kaserne, a district of the city of Neu-Ulm, Germany People * Wiley (musician), British grime MC, rapper, and producer * Wiley Mill ...

for $298m he announced his intention to leave his role as CEO to focus full time on his family In May 2022 Peters was appointed as non-Executive Board Chair of ExOrdo a provider of cloud-based conferencing software

Personal life

Peters has lived in London since 2013. He is an amateur skydiver and a vegan. On 20 July 2019 he married Maria Burnuz in London. In January 2021 their son was born.

Family

His mother is

Veronica Vaida Veronica Vaida (born August 3, 1950) is a Romanian-American chemist and professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is an expert in environmental chemistry and aerosols. Early life and education Vaida was born in Bucharest. Her parents ...

is an atmospheric chemist and his father
Kevin Peters
is an emeritus professor of chemistry (both at the

University of Colorado Boulder The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University of Colorado syst ...

). He has one sister
Katherine Heaton
(née Peters) who is an attorney.

References

External links

*
Interview on the challenges of sustainability (SPARC-ACRL Forum on Emerging Issues in Scholarly Communication, 2007)

Lecture at the 13th Berlin Open Access Conference, March 2017

Presentation at the 13th Berlin Open Access Conference, March 2017
{{DEFAULTSORT:Peters, Paul 1982 births Living people The American University in Cairo alumni College of William & Mary alumni Businesspeople from Boulder, Colorado Open access activists American publishing chief executives