Jan Velterop

Johannes (Jan) Velterop is a science publisher. Born in The Hague, The Netherlands, he was originally a marine geologist and became a science publisher in the mid 1970s. He started his publishing career at Elsevier in Amsterdam. After a few years out of the scientific field as the director of the Dutch regional newspaper De Twentsche Courant, he returned to international science publishing at Academic Press in London. After Academic Press he joined Nature as director for a short while, but moved quickly on to help get BioMed Central, the first commercial open access science publisher, off the ground.

Velterop was one of the small group of people who first defined 'open access' in 2001 in Budapest, a meeting resulting in the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

In 2005 he joined Springer Science+Business Media as Director of Open Access. Springer is the first mainstream STM (Science, Technology, Medicine) publisher to offer open access as an option for virtually all its scientific and scholarly journals.

At the end of March, 2008, he left Springer to become CEO of Knewco, a company that uses semantic technology to accelerate scientific discovery.

Dr Barend Mons PhD

Dr Mons obtained his MSc. (1981, Cum Laude) and his PhD. (1986) at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, majoring in Cell and Molecular Biology.

He performed over a decade of fundamental research on the genetic differentiation of malaria parasites and he published over 45 peer reviewed scientific papers on that topic. In 1996 Barend was invited to assist the European Commissions as a Seconded National Expert with the task to develop and support international scientific networks, especially with developing countries as partners. During this ‘Science Management Period’ Barend supported several other international initiatives. He became intrigued by the opportunities and challenges of international and multilingual networking in the context of the emerging Web technologies. He founded one of the first electronic interactive communication systems for science networking with developing countries, SHARED, for which he started to (co-)design thesaurus based concept extraction technologies in order to match across languages and jargon, with the Erasmus University of Rotterdam as the major partner. In 1999 he joined the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (The National research Council, NWO) as a senior adviser on International Health Research.

At present, since 2002 Barend is Associate Professor in Bio-Semantics at the Department of Medical Informatics, Erasmus Medical Centre, University of Rotterdam and (since 2005) at the Department of Human Genetics at the Leiden University Medical Centre, both in The Netherlands. However, he remained involved in International Scientific Management and Networking at various levels. He was one of the Founding Trustees of The Centre for the Management of Intellectual Property in Health Research and Development (MIHR), which assists people in Developing countries to manage their critical IP for the betterment of Society. He also serves on the board of Knewco, Inc. (co-founded by Barend in 2005).

His present activities mainly focus on International networking to realise a completely new form of Computer Assisted Distributed Annotation and on-line Knowledge discovery, in close collaboration between the University of Rotterdam, University of Leiden and Knewco, and largely based on the Knewco Knowlet technology combined with Open Access and Open Source Wiki-technology approaches.

Paul Mead

With a background in media, Paul left IT publisher VNU for start up dot com UK Net Guide in November 2000. The business model relied solely on PPC, SEO and affiliate marketing to deliver qualified traffic and leads to over 200 of the UK’s leading advertisers in Travel, Finance, Retail, Recruitment, Property and Entertainment. As Sales & Marketing Director, Paul was the driving force behind the sites growth to 1.8 million unique users per month. Paul became MD of the business in 2006 and set up a new division, Quartz Interactive, a specialist search agency which allowed clients to benefit from the techniques and technology the business had used itself to achieve such substantial success through search. Quartz won 22 accounts in its first 12-months and after a total of 7 years with the business Paul left with his team and their proprietary search technology to set up a new search business for Chime Communications PLC and their ad agency VCCP.

Paul launched VCCP Search at the end of 2006 and in doing so VCCP became the first advertising agency in the UK to move into this fast growing area. Ranked in the top 15 UK search agencies by NMA with billings of £5m in its first full year, and as one of the fastest growing search agencies in the EMEA region, VCCP Search specialises in innovative strategies and technical solutions which deliver the full potential of this channel for major brands. VCCP Search clients include Cheapflights, Somerfield, SAB Miller, Fortnum&Mason and Dyson. In December 2007, Paul set another industry first with the launch of Search Relations a joint venture with the UK’s leading PR agency Bell Pottinger and the first agency to specialise in communications and reputation management through search. Paul is MD of VCCP Search and Bell Pottinger Search Relations. He is married with two children and lives in London.

Tim Benjamin

Tim Benjamin has spent nearly 20 years in the communications business. Following five years creating speech-based radio programs for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, he joined Saatchi & Saatchi as a copywriter on accounts like Toyota, Vodafone and Four X Beer.

He then joined London digital agency AKQA planning digital strategy for brands like Microsoft, BMW, Orange, Nike and Sainsbury’s. Next, he became the first head of online at BBC Radio Five Live. Whilst there, he created Britain’s second most visited radio website from scratch. Tim then moved to GCap Media, Europe’s largest commercial radio group. In this role he replaced losses at the business’ 42 regional websites with maiden profits – and an ROI of nearly 70%.

Tim now heads Device, the boutique digital business consultancy he founded to grow online profits for clients in healthcare, finance and business-to-business media.