Emma Hedington

I'm lucky enough to manage a fantastic marketing team at Springer Nature who bring together market insights with market development to promote all our open products and services – books, journals and data

I'm a freelance science communicator, formerly a Postdoc in the biofilm field. I'm interested in how bacteria cause disease and look to technology to produce novel tools to study and ultimately prevent infection.

I am a microbiologist by training, but I manage a portfolio of varied journals. The ones most relevant to this Community are npj Biofilms and Microbiomes, npj Clean Water, npj Science of Food, npj Systems Biology and Applications and npj Vaccines. Full list of my journals in my LinkedIn profile.

I look after Springer Nature's open research new product development and research data, including promoting open data and good data practice; data publishing; research data services and solutions. I've spent twenty years in publishing, sixteen of those working in open research, joining open access publisher BMC in 2003, and since then in roles at Nature Publishing Group and now Springer Nature.

My background is in technology, professional services and digital media. I co-founded Zapnito due to a number of related observations from my time in these sectors: 1) the social web is creating a huge amount of noise 2) expertise that brands have built up over decades is being drowned out and hidden from those that need it 3) these brands are therefore losing their audience to often undeserving and unhelpful sources, and 4) people are finding it harder to access the expertise that they truly value. I therefore decided to create Zapnito, a white-label platform to help trusted brands reclaim their audiences via expert-driven knowledge networks.

Working within Nature Research's Open Research Group, I am Global Director for Nature Partner Journals based in London. I have responsibility across five global office locations to develop Nature Partner Journals, a new series of online-only, open access journals, published in collaboration with world-renowned partners. Launched in April 2014, the portfolio now includes 14 titles including 'npj Biofilms and Microbiomes'. I have a Degree in Natural Sciences specializing in Microbiology from Trinity College Dublin and a Masters in Business Administration from The Open University. Within the broader medical publications community, I serve as Secretary and Trustee for the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals.

For nearly 20 years, I've worked in the digital media sector, with hands-on experience in editorial, marketing, sales and R&D. I'm passionate about engaging and understanding customers to develop great content and products. Formerly Chief Product & Customer Officer at Zapnito, I'm now an advisor to the company.

I'm no longer with Springer Nature so please send your community-related queries to communities@nature.com. Thanks!

I am a geneticist by training. Having done research using classical genetics and molecular biology in a variety of model organisms I left the bench to become an editor, first for Nature Reviews Genetics and then Nature. I have worked with the research community as an editor, in a variety of roles, for over 17 years