Heather Joseph has spent the last 16 years in scholarly publishing, working for both nonprofit and commercial publishers. She began her scholarly publishing at the American Astronomical Society, where she helped create one of the first fully electronic journals. While at the American Society for Cell Biology, she developed a system to peer review and publish multimedia content in the journal Molecular Biology of the Cell. She was pleased to have this journal earn the distinction of becoming the first journal to commit its full content to PubMed Central, and currently serves on the National Advisory Committee for this initiative.
For her work as President and Chief Operating Officer of BioOne, an innovative collaboration between publishers and the library community, Heather was awarded the 2002 ALPSP Award for Service to Not-for-Profit Publishers. She is an active participant in several professional societies, and just ended her term as the President of the Society for Scholarly Publishing. On July 1, 2005, Heather accepted a new challenge, when she was appointed to serve as the Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) to focus on Open Access advocacy issues.