Alison Mitchell is Editorial & Publishing Director at Springer Nature, responsible for the Nature family of journals. She has spent the past 20 years building this portfolio of prestigious science publications, which now number almost 50 titles across the life, physical, social and clinical sciences. Alison’s team of over 300 PhD-qualified in-house editors have led the way in areas such as reproducibility and robustness in scientific research. They continue to experiment – testing different peer review models, and also finding ways to make scientific research more engaging and understandable for non-specialist readers.
The merger that saw the Nature journals become a part of Springer Nature in 2015 gave Alison an opportunity to work with a broader canvas, and she has championed the Springer Nature SharedIt initiative – a free and legal way for researchers to share their research. She is also driving Springer Nature’s initiatives to support researchers in addressing some of the ‘grand challenges’ that face society today, such as food security, climate change and education. Alison holds a PhD in Molecular Biology from Imperial College London.