Dr Alexander Hasgall is Executive Director of LIBER, the Association of European Research Libraries, representing over 400 research libraries in 40 countries across Europe. He joined LIBER in March 2026 and served previously as Senior Adviser at the European Alliance for Social Sciences and Humanities (EASSH) and as Head of International Funding Policy at the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). From 2017 to 2023 he was Head of the Council for Doctoral Education at the European University Association (EUA-CDE), where he was also responsible for EUA's work on research ethics and integrity. His current work focuses on Open Science, copyright and the role of research libraries in the changing information ecosystem. He holds a doctorate in Contemporary History from the University of Zurich.

Tasha Mellins-Cohen, Executive Director at COUNTER Metrics and Founder of Mellins-Cohen Consulting, has been part of the knowledge community since 2001. She has held roles within and consulted for learned societies and commercial publishers across operations, technology, editorial and executive functions, while donating time to key initiatives and bodies such as UKSG, ALPSP, NISO and STM. In 2022 she started running COUNTER, the standard for usage metrics.

Judit Fazekas-Paragh is a research support librarian and Head of the Research Support Department at the University and National Library of the University of Debrecen (DEENK), Hungary. Her work focuses on advancing Open Science at institutional, national, and European levels. She has been actively involved in OpenAIRE since 2015, serving as the Hungarian National Open Access Desk (NOAD), and is currently a member of the OpenAIRE Executive Board. As a coordinator within HUNOR, the Hungarian Open Repository Working Group, she supports Hungarian research-performing organisations in connecting national developments with the wider European Open Science ecosystem. Her areas of expertise include Open Access, FAIR research data and research data management, Open Science infrastructures, researcher training, and responsible research assessment. She has contributed to national activities related to the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and has been involved in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), including its Task Force on Data Stewardship, Curricula and Career Paths. Since 2024, she has represented the University of Debrecen in the Hungarian National Chapter of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) and contributed to the CoARA Working Group Towards Open Infrastructures for Responsible Research Assessment. Through these interconnected roles, she works to strengthen the links between Open Science policies, infrastructures, skills, and research assessment reform.

Ayşe Damla Çelik works at TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM, where she is involved in activities related to Open Science, Open Access, and research infrastructures. Since 2018, she has been contributing to processes concerning electronic information resources and Open Access agreements within the scope of EKUAL (Electronic Resources National Academic License). Over the past two years, she has also been responsible for Aperta and Harman as part of TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM’s Open Science initiatives.

She contributes to national and international collaborations in the field of Open Science and is also involved in institutional activities concerning academic integrity and research ethics, as well as in the organisation of events in these areas.

Her work focuses on supporting the development of a more open, reliable, and sustainable research ecosystem in Türkiye.

Abdullah Demir was born in Kırşehir, Türkiye, in 1980. He graduated from the Faculty of Theology at Uludağ University in 2002. He completed his master’s degree at the same university and received his PhD from Sivas Cumhuriyet University. Between 2015 and 2016, he conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. From 2011 to 2017, he worked as a research assistant and faculty member at the Faculty of Theology of Cumhuriyet University. In 2017, he joined the Faculty of Theology at Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University as a faculty member in the Department of Kalam, where he continues to serve.

In 2018, with project support from Sivas Cumhuriyet University, Demir developed the İSNAD Citation Style, an academic writing and referencing system. The İSNAD Citation Style has since been translated into English (ISNAD Citation Style, 2020), Arabic (İSNAD: Nizâm Tevsîki’l-Merâci’, 2022), and Persian (Şîvenâme-i İstinâddehî be Reveş-i İSNAD, 2022). Offered free of charge, İSNAD is used, as of August 2026, by 64 graduate schools and institutes for the preparation of postgraduate theses and by 186 peer-reviewed journals in Türkiye and abroad for scholarly article writing.

Demir coordinates the academic event first organised by Sivas Cumhuriyet University in 2018 and subsequently continued under the title Türkiye Editörler Çalıştayı (Türkiye Editors Workshop). He is also the founder of the Türkiye Editors Group, established in 2018 as a platform for sharing experience and exchanging views on peer-reviewed book and journal publishing. The group currently has 1,025 peer-reviewed journal editors as members (www.editorlercalistayi.com).

From 2016 to 2019, Demir served as editor of the Cumhuriyet Theology Journal, which is indexed in Web of Science ESCI and Scopus. He currently serves as editor of Eskiyeni, which is indexed in ESCI. To support journals in monitoring their compliance with scholarly publishing standards, he developed the Peer-Reviewed Journal SWOT Analysis. He has also voluntarily delivered training sessions and contributed to seminars aimed at improving the compliance of Türkiye-based journals, particularly in the social sciences, with international scholarly publishing principles.

Between 2017 and 2021, Demir served as project coordinator of the National Theology Citation Index Project. One of the project’s outputs, DAVET: Database for Religious Studies, is available as an open-access platform (https://davet.org.tr). He also leads other open-access scholarly publishing projects, including TURAN Index: Academic Index of the Turkic World (https://turanindeks.org) and ODİD: Authority Index (https://otoritedizini.org).

In 2020, Demir became the founding president of the Oku Okut Association, established to improve students’ reading skills, promote a culture of reading in society, and provide free services in this field. He continues to serve as its president. The association provides free services through Oku Okut Academy (www.okuokut.org), an online educational portal and book-club platform, as well as Oku Okut Publications, an open-access publishing initiative. He also serves as a Ministry Advisor for the Project for the Identification, Development, and Monitoring of Students’ Vocabulary, launched by the Turkish Ministry of National Education in 2024 (https://sozvarligi.meb.gov.tr).

Demir has published works on the Hanafi-Maturidi understanding of religion, as well as on scholarly research and peer-reviewed publishing. He delivers training programmes and seminars in these fields both in Türkiye and across the Turkic Republics.

In addition to serving on various committees of public institutions in areas related to his expertise, Demir is married and has three children (www.abddemir.com.tr).

Dr. Burak Beygirci is the Director of the Library and Documentation Department and the Coordinator of Scientific Publications at Bartın University. He received his bachelor’s degree from the Department of Information and Records Management at Ankara University’s Faculty of Languages, History and Geography. He subsequently completed his master’s degree at Çankırı Karatekin University and earned his PhD in Information and Records Management from Ankara University.

Dr. Beygirci began his professional career in 2015 as a librarian at Van Yüzüncü Yıl University, where he assumed various responsibilities in cataloguing and classification, technical services, library automation systems, and the coordination of branch libraries. He joined Bartın University in 2018 and served as a lecturer between 2018 and 2023. During this period, he undertook a range of responsibilities, particularly in technical services, electronic resource management, bibliometric analysis, and library administration. Since 2023, he has served as Director of the Library and Documentation Department. He has also taught courses on cataloguing and bibliometrics in the Department of Information and Records Management at Bartın University since 2021.

Between 2016 and 2025, Dr. Beygirci served as a database liaison for various electronic resources within the Anatolian University Libraries Consortium (ANKOS). He has been a member of the ANKOS Executive Board since 2025. His academic and professional interests include university libraries, open access, electronic resource management, scholarly communication, bibliometric analysis, cataloguing and classification, and scholarly publishing.

Susanne Aerni is Head of Consortial Services and a member of the Executive Board at the Swiss Library Service Platform (SLSP). She leads the office of the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries (CSAL) which provides Swiss universities, research institutions, and other academic organisations with access to electronic information resources by negotiating and managing licences on their behalf. Her team supports the member institutions throughout the licensing lifecycle and provides services around Open Access.

She is closely involved in the strategic development of consortial services and the development and implementation of Switzerland’s approach to transformative agreements and Open Access. As process owner for Switzerland’s national Big Deal negotiations on behalf of swissuniversities, she has contributed to the development of national negotiation mandates and governance structures and to negotiations with major international publishers.

Before joining SLSP, she held various roles in market research/business information, primarily at strategy consultancies with a personal focus on telecommunications and media. She graduated in English and German Studies at University of Zurich.

Ertuğrul Çimen has a BS from Hacettepe University Faculty of Literature, Librarianship Department, and an MA from Kadir Has University, Social Sciences Institute, Finance, and Banking Program. His current position is the library director of MEF University.

His professional interests are academic library management, library consortia, license agreements for e-resources, library collaboration, resource sharing, document delivery, lifelong learning, and staff exchange programs for librarians.

He has held active roles in NGOs and professional organizations at both national and international levels. Ertuğrul Çimen currently serves as the Chair of the IFLA Regional Council and is a Member of the IFLA Governing Board. He is an editorial board member of the Information Discovery and Delivery Journal (Emerald Publishing).

In the past, he served as: President of the Anatolian University Libraries Consortium (ANKOS), Executive Board Member of the Turkish Librarians Association (TLA), Information Coordinator and Secretary of the IFLA Document Delivery and Resource Sharing Standing Committee, Information Coordinator of the IFLA Freedom of Access to Information and Freedom of Expression (FAIFE) Advisory Board, Chair of the IFLA Europe Regional Division Committee, and a Member of the IFLA Regional Council, Coordinator of the Sustainable Libraries Standing Committee of the University and Research Library Association (UNAK). He has published articles, presentations, book chapters, and research papers in different languages, such as English, Italian, Japanese, Hungarian, and Turkish.

He completed his primary, secondary, and high school education in Istanbul-Üsküdar. He pursued his university education at Istanbul University, Faculty of Letters, Department of History between 1985-1989. In October 1988, he began working as an Archive Officer at the Presidential Ottoman Archives. He completed his Master's degree in 1994 and his Doctorate in 2001 at Istanbul University. In September 1993, he was appointed as a Lecturer in the Department of History at Celal Bayar University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences. After completing his doctoral education, he started working as a faculty member in the Department of Archival Studies at Istanbul University, Faculty of Letters. In May 2004, he was appointed as the Head of Department at the Presidential Ottoman Archives Department. Following the end of his duty at the Prime Ministry, he started working at Marmara University. He currently continues his duty as the Head of Library and Documentation Department at Marmara University. Önder Bayır has 6 published books, 4 chapter authorships, and more than 50 published articles.

İsmail ÇETİNKAYA, who graduated from Ankara University, Faculty of Language, History and Geography, Department of Information and Records Management in 1998, completed his master's degree in Business Administration at Van Yüzüncü Yıl University. He worked as a Researcher in the Ministry of Forestry's Ottoman Period Forestry Research Project and publication, as a Librarian at the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and as an Instructor at Van Yüzüncü Yıl University, and mainly conducted Medical Librarianship and Medical Documentation courses. Çetinkaya served as the Head of the Library and Documentation Department at Van Yüzüncü Yıl University between 2006 and 2021 and has been working as the Head of the Library and Documentation Department at Isparta University of Applied Sciences since January 19, 2021. Çetinkaya, who conducted the Science Board Membership and Information Literacy course in the Primary and Secondary Education Project Execution and Science Counseling Education Project (Science Counseling Workshop in Education) carried out by the TÜBİTAK Scientist Support Department in 2007-2008, and in 2014, he was appointed by the Higher Education Board to study the University Libraries Study. Group (Improving University Libraries and Setting Standards) and was among those who prepared the report titled “The Current Situation of University Libraries in Turkey Towards 2023, Problems, Standards and Suggestions for Solutions”. Çetinkaya, who has been serving as ANKOS Board Member since 2010, has been serving as ANKOS President since 05 August 2022. He continues to share his professional knowledge and experience by taking part in many national and international events in the field of librarianship and publishing. Çetinkaya is married and has one child.