ScienceOpen was founded in 2013, and is 100% owned by Alexander Grossmann and Tibor Tscheke. ScienceOpen also has an Editorial and Advisory Board, the members of which can all be found here.

Meet the team!

Founder / President Alexander Grossmann studied Physics at the Technical University Aachen and did his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry at the Research Center Julich 1996 before he left for a PostDoc position in quantum optics at T. Hänsch’s goup in Munich. Until 2001 he was researcher and Associate Professor in Physics at the University of Tuebingen before he decided to join publishing industry at Wiley-VCH and Wiley-Blackwell where he was responsible for their publishing program in Physics worldwide until 2007. Before he got an appointment as Professor of Publishing Management in 2013, Alexander spent five years at Springer and De Gruyter as Managing Director and Vice President Publishing, respectively.

alexander.grossmann@scienceopen.com | @SciPubLab

Founder / CTO, CFO Tibor Tscheke is entrepreneur, experienced international manager [GM/CEO] (USA, Germany, UK, Norway, Hungary, Poland, Dubai) and pioneer in SGML, XML and Content Life-cycle Management (CLM / CMS). He is president and CEO of Ovitas: a CMS-WorkFlow-XML software architecture company, developing the next generation of end2end Content Lifecycle Solutions. Previous ventures include STEP GmbH which was acquired by Bertelsmann in 1999 and merged into empolis GmbH. Originally from Tibor studied Computer Science & Mathematics at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg.

tibor.tscheke@scienceopen.com | @tigracc

CEO Stephanie Dawson grew up in northern California and studied Biology at Yale University. She then worked at the labs of Susan Parkhurst at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, WA and Ralph Rupp, at the MPG Friedrich Miescher Laboratory, Tübingen, Germany before changing fields and getting a PhD in German Literature from the University of Washington under Jane Brown. From 2001-2012 she worked in various positions at the academic Publisher De Gruyter in Berlin in the fields of biology and chemistry in both journals and book publishing. In 2013 she joined the ScienceOpen management team.

stephanie.dawson@scienceopen.com | @SDawsonBerlin

Stuart Cooper, Global Business Development Director has over 30 years experience in the Publishing Industry as a Senior Sales, Marketing and Business Development expert. Stuart started his career with the newly-formed Electronic Publishing Division at Chapman & Hall and then spent over 8 years at Thomson Scientific (ISI). Having successfully sold Web of Knowledge across France, Belgium, Netherlands, and French-speaking Africa, Stuart moved to Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA) to spearhead the Sales operations into EMEA. With brief forays into Business Information, Stuart joined Wize Nordic and for over 3 years represented publishers such as IMF, NTIS, Knovel, OECD, Alexander Street Press across the globe. Stuart was Vice President Global Business for colwiz, an Oxford University start-up, who provided state-of-the-art interactive pdf and community solutions for Publishers and more recently as Sales Lead for a Cambridge University start-up, Futureproofs.

Stuart is bilingual French-English and also counts German, Spanish, and Italian amongst his languages and his extensive knowledge of the language and culture of clients has been extremely beneficial to his successes at Consortium and National level through the years.

Stuart.Cooper@ScienceOpen.com | LinkedIn

Nina Tscheke, Content Integration Manager/ Project Manager OA META/ Sales support. After having dwelt in the sphere of literary and cultural studies, with a special attention to critical race theory, gender, and minority studies and having helped introduce several generations of students at the JLU into the very field it was now time for her to move on and beyond the academical field. She was delighted to have found a new place/opportunity with ScienceOpen where she can further help in accumulating and disseminating the global knowledge while at the same time providing access and a networking platform for all.

Nina.Tscheke@scienceopen.com | @NTscheke

Nur Atmaca | Journal Editorial Assistant is a PhD candidate at Humboldt University of Berlin, Department of Transregional Southeast Asian Studies. Previously, she studied international relations in her bachelor and master studies in Turkey and Sweden, respectively. She has began to work in academic publishing sector as the assistant managing editor at Eurasia Business and Economic Society in Istanbul, Turkey. Then, she has worked as sales support for journals and books in Wiley’s Istanbul office for two years. She enjoys having combined the editorial and sales experiences as well as contributing scholarly knowledge production by pursuing doctoral research. She has lived in Berlin since 2019 and joined ScienceOpen in 2023.  

Nur.Atmaca@scienceopen.com | LinkedIn

Kevin Jasini, Scientific Communications and Outreach Manager is currently pursuing his Master’s studies in Intercultural Conflict Management in Berlin at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences. He has worked for the past years as Content Editor and Project Manager in the non-profit sector, with previous experiences as a journalist and social media manager. He strongly believes that the outcomes of scientific research should not be limited to academia and researchers only. They should be available to anyone who wants to learn more and use their knowledge to make a difference in society.

Kevin.Jasini@scienceopen.com | LinkedIn

Previous employees

Carlos de la Huerta, Global Business Development Manager, has over 15 years of sales experience in scholarly and commercial publishing. He has worked in various sized companies and institutions including The British Library, Publishing Technology, and Pipeline Publishing Inc.  Carlos is also highly active in academic research, having recently completed a Ph.D. in history at Kingston University under the supervision of Professor Emeritus Marisa Linton. He is a published author and is currently writing a follow-up to his non-fiction title that was published in 2016 and sold across major retail outlets in the UK. Born and raised in London, he now lives happily in Nice where he has been a resident for the past twelve years.

Bartosz Radomski, Scientific Communication and Outreach Manager has graduated in Philosophy and Economics from the University of Edinburgh and completed a MSc in Cognitive Science at Ruhr-University Bochum. He strongly believes that science should not sit behind paywalls, and that it is about time to do something about it! This motivated him to join ScienceOpen, which is a fantastic reply to this call for change. Using his interdisciplinary and science-oriented academic background as an asset, he actively supports others in making their research noticeable and within reach of everyone.

Inasa Bibić, Scientific Communication and Outreach Manager, is currently working towards her master’s degree in English Literature at Freie Universität Berlin. She is passionate about visual storytelling and interested in (scientific) communication. Her previous liberal arts studies and work experience in communications and higher education led her to join ScienceOpen, where she has found the perfect opportunity to further her communications skills and help make scientific research accessible to everyone.

Sarah Rioton, our Research Communities Manager, studied chemistry in France, achieving first chemical engineer studies at CPELyon, and then a PhD in Organic Chemistry at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. After her studies, she decided to leave France to settle down in Germany. Her experience in research made her conscious of the value of communicating about scientific knowledge, and she found a good opportunity with ScienceOpen to develop new communications skills.

Content Integration Manager Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra is about to finish her PhD in Cultural Linguistics at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, where she was also a guest lecturer at the Department of Hungarian as a Foreign Language from 2012-2016.  From 2015-2016 she was also teaching at the Fachhochschule Burgenland in Eisenstadt, Austria. Her interest in big data and data mining as well as her commitment to democracy in science lead her to join ScienceOpen.

erzsebet.czifra-toth@scienceopen.com |  @etothczifra

Jixin Zhou is our Chinese Social Media Manager, and currently a Masters student at the Berlin School of Economics and Laws (2015 – 2017). Her bachelors degree was in the area of Environmental Science (2007 – 2011). After she got the degree, she had worked for a German company over 4 years on business process analysis. As she had no business background, she came to Germany last year and hoped to gain diverse knowledge on business. She is quite interested in the business exchanges between Germany and China. Right now she is focusing on Chinese and European Economics and Business

Jixin.Zhou@scienceopen.com | @fussyzita

Erik Riemenschneider is our Sales and Acquisitions Manager. He studied Russian Literature, Journalism and Politics in Germany and Estonia. Making his first steps on the job ladder at the German Embassy in Moscow, he realized that his attraction to books and the written word was stronger than he had expected and thus decided to switch to the publishing industry, no matter how precarious that would be. He has since seen many aspects of book marketing, which included working for Passagen Verlag in Vienna, setting up a program for the notorious lit.cologne, and working as a literary agent for Rauchzeichen Agentur in Berlin, where he spent the last five years dedicated to nonfiction. Now he’s with ScienceOpen, still fighting for the cause.

erik.riemenschneider@scienceopen.com | @science_erik

Editor Dan Cook received his Master’s degree from the The Berlin School of Mind and Brain in 2017. He did a B.A. in philosophy (2007) at Eckerd College in Florida, and he studied cognitive science (Graduate Cert., 2009) at the University of Central Florida.

dan.cook@scienceopen.com | @DanielJohnCook

Communications Director Jon Tennant has just finished his PhD at Imperial College London, where he researched deep time evolutionary patterns in groups like dinosaurs and crocodiles. Alongside this, he currently works as a PLOS Paleo Community Editor, is a freelance science writer and consultant, and author of the kids dinosaur book Excavate Dinosaurs! He spends far too much time on Twitter (personal account, @protohedgehog) talking about open access.

Jon.Tennant@scienceopen.com | @Science_Open | ORCID

Agata Morka is Sales and Acquisitions Manager. She studied art history and culture management in Poland and France. Since architecture and travelling have always been her two big passions, she decided to write her PhD about contemporary train stations. In France, as she has a weak spot for good cheeses. To her slight surprise some generous folks at the Fulbright Foundation, she decided it was not an outlandish idea. This is how she ended up at the University of Washington. After graduation, she got a job in academic publishing. She worked for De Gruyter Open, where she was in charge of their open access books program, which she launched and supervised. Then she quit and met Stephanie for lunch. And this is how she joined ScienceOpen.

Consulting Editor Richard Gallagher is a science and science publishing enthusiast. He was previously Senior Editor at Science, Chief Biology Editor and Publisher at Nature and Editor-in-Chief and Publisher at The Scientist, and spent the last several years gaining entrepreneurial experience as co-founder of startup publishing companies.  Richard has a PhD in immunology and spent five years in research before moving into publishing. He is based in San Francisco, CA.

@Barclay88

VP of Marketing and Communication Liz Allen is an alum of PLOS where she worked for nearly nine years to establish Open Access and launch PLOS ONE, now the world’s largest journal. Prior to that she was at Nature, the international weekly journal of science for ten years. She has an abiding passion for “open” and tweets prolifically @LizAllenSO and for @Science_Open. Liz is the parent of three teenagers and a white Westie dog called Patches. Liz resides in scenic Mill Valley CA with husband Ken and runs the ScienceOpen CA office from her kitchen table.

@LizAllenSO