Researcher to Reader is pleased to announce that Sara Rouhi has joined the R2R Advisory Board.

Sara is Director of Portfolio Growth and Open Innovation at AIP Publishing. A political scientist by training, she joined the scholarly publishing community in 2008 and has since worked across a range of publishers and software providers, including ACS Publications, Digital Science, PLOS, and AIP Publishing.

Her work sits at the intersection of community engagement, product development, and equitable business models for sustainable non-profit knowledge dissemination. She is a strong advocate for a global knowledge ecosystem that maximises participation in the benefits of scholarly inquiry.

Sara received the Emerging Leader Award from the Society for Scholarly Publishing in 2015 and served as an at-large Board member for SSP from 2022 to 2024. Her work at PLOS was also part of the initiative recognised with the 2021 ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing.

Outside her role at AIP Publishing, Sara is active as a free-speech advocate, co-author of the “Declaration to Defend Research from US Government Censorship,” and a founding member of DefendResearch.org. She is also a long-form improviser in the DC comedy scene and writes on scholarly publishing, politics, free speech, and comedy.

Sara’s perspective will be especially valuable as R2R continues to develop as an independent forum for deeper understanding between different research stakeholders. Her experience will strengthen R2R’s engagement with open innovation, community participation, equitable business models, non-profit knowledge dissemination, and the public responsibilities of scholarly communication.

We warmly welcome Sara Rouhi to the R2R Advisory Board.