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Women helping to make Science more open

Opinion
Women helping to make Science more open

Today, we celebrate women’s achievements across the world. In this post, we put the spotlight on women who help to make science more open.


I am proud to call Sarah Greaves my colleague. She joined our team about a year ago and swiftly transformed the way we communicate with our authors and how we serve the research community. Sarah Greaves is a mother, a mentor, and a leader. An avid swimmer and possibly the biggest Norwich City Football Club fan that has ever existed. A woman I admire and look up to.

I would like to take this opportunity to talk about her and put the focus on the women in our industry who make this world a better place by working towards driving more openness in science - a handful of them are featured in the video below. 

Often, the spotlight is on the research, the discovery, the invention, the breakthrough. And that’s where it should be. However, what sometimes may go unnoticed is the hard work and dedication that goes behind the dissemination of that research, that discovery, that breakthrough. 

Sarah Greaves studied Biological Sciences with Molecular Genetics at Warwick and moved to Cambridge for a PhD. She later on undertook a postdoctoral fellowship with the MRC National Institute of Medical Research in London and lectured at Queen Mary University of London. Two years into post-doc work, she decided to leave the lab and move into a business she knew nothing about and a career path she hadn’t studied. But she knew it was the right move. 

Today she is heading the publishing business at Hindawi where she connects daily with researchers across the world and plays her part in making science more open, transparent and easy to not only access but also understand. She is working towards transforming the way scholarly publishing is done by placing the researcher at the heart of every decision Hindawi makes. Even personal ones, like her decision to leave the lab and dedicate her career to communicating science. 

Sarah spent almost 20 years working for Nature where she took on several roles, including being the primary manuscript editor at Nature Cell Biology and writing news stories for other Nature titles. She traveled the world attending conferences and connecting with scientists, she developed and launched two of the world’s biggest Open Access journals, Nature Communications and Scientific Reports. Just as importantly, she helped support the ‘Talent’ program at Nature, took on a mentoring role for other employees and launched the inaugural Nature Innovation and Inspiring awards for women in science and those who support women in science. 

She confesses that her biggest lessons learned so far have been the realization that even now there are times where she might be the only woman in the room, that sometimes you don’t know the right career path to take until you start walking along it and that you will never stop being amazed by the dedication of researchers around the globe. Right now, Sarah enjoys using her role to mentor those around her and supporting female colleagues when they are debating tough career choices around work and their families. Every single day she tries to make an impact in this world whilst never forgetting what it’s like to be the academic at work in a lab wanting to publish their work so it can help advance science and drive discoveries in their area of expertise. 

A big thank you to Sarah, Elodie, Alison, Danjela, Sidorela and Liz Allen, and to all the women who dedicate their careers to being of service to science. We look up to you and celebrate you every single day, not just today.


This blog post is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). The illustration is by Hindawi and is also CC-BY.

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