Open Knowledge Institutions

John Hartley AM is an Australian academic and John Curtin Distinguished Emeritus Professor at Curtin University. He has also held professorships at Cardiff University and Queensland University of Technology, where he was founding dean of the Creative Industries Faculty. His research and writing span media, journalism, cultural studies, digital media, and creative industries. Hartley is a fellow of the International Communication Association, the Royal Society of Arts, and the Learned Society of Wales, and was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2009.

Hartley is a co-author of Open Knowledge Institutions: Reinventing Universities (2021), edited by Lucy Montgomery, and has written or co-written more than twenty books, including Reading Television, Popular Reality, Creative Industries, and Digital Futures for Cultural and Media Studies.

Cameron Neylon is an independent researcher and consultant specializing in open research, research evaluation and reform, research policy, and institutional design. From 2015 to 2025, they were Professor of Research Communication at Curtin University’s Centre for Culture and Technology and co-lead of the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative. Previously, Neylon served as Advocacy Director at the Public Library of Science and as a senior scientist at the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council.

Neylon is a co-author of Open Knowledge Institutions and Reading Peer Review, and contributed to the Altmetrics Manifesto and the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure. Their earlier research career included work in biophysics and molecular biology.

Malcolm Gillies is an Australian musicologist, music critic, and higher-education leader. He is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University and a Visiting Professor at King’s College London. He has served as vice-chancellor of City University London and London Metropolitan University, and as president of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He holds doctorates in music from the University of London and the University of Melbourne.

Gillies has authored or edited more than a dozen books and numerous articles on music history, analysis, and performance, with particular expertise in Béla Bartók and Percy Grainger. His books include Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger, co-edited with David Pear and Mark Carroll, and Open Knowledge Institutions: Reinventing Universities, co-authored with Lucy Montgomery, John Hartley, and others.

Eve Gray is a South African publishing professional, consultant, and researcher specializing in scholarly communication, open access, copyright, and the dissemination of African research. She studied French and English at Rhodes University and earned a master’s degree in English literature from the University of the Witwatersrand. Her publishing career included leadership roles at Wits University Press, Juta’s Adult and Higher Education Publishing division, and the University of Cape Town Press; she has also been affiliated with the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Educational Technology.

Gray has written extensively on scholarly publishing, copyright reform, educational resources, and open access in Africa. She is a contributing author to Open Knowledge Institutions: Reinventing Universities (2021), edited by Lucy Montgomery and John Hartley, among others, and authored research including “Research for development and the role of ‘grey literature’ in southern African research production” and “The Neo-Colonial Political Economy of Scholarly Publishing.”

Chun-Kai (Karl) Huang is a Senior Research Fellow and data scientist in the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University. Huang is a co-author of Open Knowledge Institutions: Reinventing Universities, published by MIT Press in 2021.

Their research and professional interests center on open knowledge, universities, and the role of data and technology in cultural and educational institutions.

Joan Leach is a professor and Director of the Australian National Centre for Public Awareness of Science at The Australian National University. She holds degrees in arts, science, and communication-related fields, and her research focuses on science communication, public engagement, rhetoric, ethics, and the relationship between knowledge and society. She has previously held academic roles at Imperial College London, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Queensland.

Leach is the author, co-author, and editor of works including An Ethics of Science Communication, Rhetorical Questions of Health and Medicine, and Communicating Science: A Global Perspective. She also contributed to Open Knowledge Institutions: Reinventing Universities, published by MIT Press in 2021.

Jason Potts is a professor of economics whose research focuses on innovation, technological change, economic evolution, institutional economics, and digital economies. He earned a B.Com. (Hons) in economics from the University of Otago and a PhD in economics from Lincoln University, New Zealand. He was previously a professor at RMIT University, where he founded and directed the Blockchain Innovation Hub, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia.

Potts is a co-author of Open Knowledge Institutions: Reinventing Universities (MIT Press, 2021). His other books include Innovation Commons, The New Evolutionary Microeconomics, The General Theory of Economic Evolution (with Kurt Dopfer), and Creativity and Innovation: A New Theory of Ideas (with Prateek Goorha).

Xiang Ren is a media and communications scholar who researches digital publishing, open knowledge innovation, media industries, and Chinese digital media and cultures. He is a Senior Lecturer at Western Sydney University and holds a PhD in media and cultural studies from Queensland University of Technology, where he received the Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award.

Ren is the author of China’s eBook Evolution: Disruptive Models and Emerging Book Cultures and co-author of Open Knowledge Institutions: Reinventing Universities, published by MIT Press.