Elsevier’s Ambassador Program ensures that all receiving editors of a journal are granted complimentary access to the SciVerse Platform – the repository of ScienceDirect and Scopus.

At Elsevier, we immensely value the dedicated work of receiving Editors who between them have helped to publish more than 12 million journal articles. And to acknowledge this, Elsevier has committed itself to providing them with complimentary access to some 2,500 journals and 14,000 electronic book titles published on ScienceDirect.

Editor-in-Chief of the journal International Immunopharmacology, Professor James E Talmadge, comments: “The complimentary access to ScienceDirect and Scopus is very powerful at an academic center that does not have full access to Elsevier publications.”¹

Sir Gordon Duff, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal Cytokine, adds: "This makes checking references and source materials much easier and quicker.”²

In exchange for activating a unique code given to them by the journal’s Publisher, an Editor will receive an automated user login to enable them to access the SciVerse Platform from any computer, tablet or smart phone using the single-user-login functionality.

Eligible Editors are also able to utilise the features of Scopus for free, the world’s largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, and qualify web-sources.

Professor Talmadge adds: “Scopus is particularly useful in the identification of reviewers, as well as potential ethical concerns.”

Whilst still logged into SciVerse, an Editor can perform and save advanced searches across ScienceDirect and Scopus content via the SciVerse Hub as well as other web content and refer to it for future use and also take advantage of using the SciVerse Applications, a marketplace and developer network.

If you need any further information on the Ambassador Program, please contact your publisher.

For all login issues, password reminders etc, please send an email to: ambassador@sciencedirect.com

Please visit the SciVerse InfoSite for online tutorials and newsletters or to read up on the latest developments.

¹ Professor James E Talmadge is the Director Laboratory of Transplantation Immunology, Department of Pathology and Microbiology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

² Sir Gordon W Duff is a Florey Professor of Molecular Medicine, University of Sheffield.

Biggerbrains is a campaign created for the benefit of early-career researchers. That is, those who have recently earned a PhD, are on their way to completing one, or have been in a research career for less than five years.
 
The new Biggerbrains website provides career guidance and advice for early-career researchers who want to build their career more effectively. It has important sections on Search and Discovery, Writing and Publishing, Networking, Funding and Career Planning. Featuring interviews with professors, Biggerbrains represents the collective knowledge of the research community.

The site provides a broad mix of inspiring video interviews with professors, career-planning tools, featured skill development articles and materials, a game and job alerts. The knowledge provided here is of benefit to all research areas, across all disciplines. There's also a deeper section with a range of online tools and solutions.

The campaign reaches young researchers by using various communication vehicles such as print and online advertising, email communications, social media, conferences, events and author workshops. The site has been visited by researchers globally.

We invite you to visit www.biggerbrains.com and share this with the early-career researchers in your institution to help them to build and accelerate their research career. You are welcome to contribute to Biggerbrains by providing guidance and advice to young researchers in the related areas, to do this please contact Kuan Juan at k.juan@elsevier.com

On Wednesday 28th March, Elsevier launched the How do you see the future of peer review? challenge.  The aim of the challenge is to invite our reviewing community to submit ideas on any of the following three aspects of the peer review system (for journals):

• The peer review process itself – new approaches or enhancements of current approaches
• Approaches to help early career researchers to become reviewers
• Improving the recognition and rewarding of reviewers by their institutions and/or journal publishers

The challenge website will remain open to entries until midnight on Monday 7^th May, 2012 (CET).

We will work with the overall winners of the challenge to determine if their idea could be piloted with a suitable Elsevier journal, and in cooperation with the editors of that pilot journal. The winning ideas will be announced around 15th August via the challenge website. 

We hope that this challenge will help inform the ongoing discussions on peer review and help us, as your publishing partners, to work more closely with the reviewing community.

You are welcome to forward this challenge announcement to your colleagues and editorial network to encourage submissions.

Published six times a year and now into its 28th volume, the international journal focuses on  technology law and practice, providing a major platform for publication of high quality research, policy and legal analysis within the field of IT law and computer security. The journal receives circa 200 papers per annum, of which around 30% are eventually published.

Steve Saxby’s current research interests lie in the public policy issues in public sector information; both its use and exploitation as well as new forms of information such as geospatial data. In 2011, he updated his research with a paper examining the politics and process of policy development in public sector information over the past three years. He is presently a member of a research team involving seven universities/research groups taking part in a £1.85m Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded project examining ways to improve understanding and authentication of identity in the digital environment.

Q. What does being a journal Editor mean to you and what do you find most rewarding about this role?
A. It’s immensely rewarding. It’s my window on the world; it keeps me on my toes and up to date with what’s going on. You accomplish more in the working day if you are an Editor as you have to keep up. So long as you have the drive to do that it is a great position to hold. I also love to give folk the opportunity to break through if they have a good paper on a new topic. Finding these gems and getting them out there is a real buzz. As Editor, I can maintain contact with the profession and academic community all over the world. It is better than Facebook for keeping in touch!

Q. What are your biggest challenges as Editor of Computer Law and Security Review?
A. You cannot let your standards drop and for that reason you have to put in the time to get reviews done, improve papers, work with authors and make sure that you keep track of what’s new. You have to love what you are doing. As CLSR was founded back in 1985, it was around during the period when critical legal thinking was taking place to upgrade the law from the offline to the online world. So, from its early beginnings when there was - quite frankly - not much ‘computer law’ about, it now embraces a field in which the scope of legal development and change is immense and fast moving. My biggest challenge then is to keep up with what’s going on and there’s no easy way to do that.

Q. How do you overcome these challenges and what extra support can Elsevier provide?
A. My eyes and ears are my colleagues serving on the Editorial and Professional Boards and my colleagues here at the University; I value their opinions very much.  I found the Elsevier Editors’ Conference in Budapest in May 2011 a real eye opener. It was great to engage with other Editors and to see all that Elsevier is doing. Being an Editor for a long time certainly helps too, as does being a specialist in the overall field - after a while you get an instinct for a topic and an idea gels. It also helps to know where the major research centres are in the field.

Best paper award winners at a CLSR international conference

With regard to competitor challenges, one must always be prepared. Hard work and being open to a regular review of your methods is important. Getting out into the field is vital too and CLSR does this through its sponsorship of www.lspi.net. I think it is also important to bring new people on to the Boards of CLSR from time to time. That does mean saying goodbye to existing Board members, but it is important that the journal keeps refreshing its advisory team so that the impetus for new ideas and advice remains.

Q. In many areas of research, the growth of paper submissions is outpacing the growth of qualified reviewers and resulting in pressure on the peer-review system. What do you think the solution to this problem is and how do you see the peer-review process changing in the future?
A. I don’t have easy answers. You just need to keep your network going and bring in new people when you can. You have your tried and trusted reviewers and folk who in the past have published papers and have the expertise to advise. You have to value these reviewers and try to keep them on board.  It is also vital to keep talking to the wider community of authors and researchers, for example at conferences and workshops. The rewards for reviewing are usually intangible - most folk do it because they want to stay on the cutting edge. If you are interested, researching or practising professionally in a field, then you are naturally interested in a good paper. No half measures, hard work and commitment is all I can suggest but I do believe the peer-review process is vital to maintaining quality.

Q. We have observed a recent trend that researchers are increasingly accessing journal content online at an article level, i.e. the researcher digests content more frequently on an article basis rather than on a journal basis. How do you think this affects the visibility of your journal among authors?
A. The key thing for me is that the papers are published in CLSR. If they don’t carry that seal of approval then the reader is not aware of the provenance of the paper. It has to be linked to the journal and to an issue. Of course, folk will download but they will do so because they know from whence the paper comes. It is the hallmark of peer reviewed quality if it comes with the CLSR imprint on it. That link must not be lost.

Q. The move from print to electronic publishing has stimulated a broad discussion around alternative publishing models. These models are often termed open access and include:

• Author pays journal
• Sponsored articles
• Free access to archives
• Open-archiving

What is your opinion about the open access movement and how does it affect your journal?
A. Open access after publication and in the author’s imprint on peer to peer sites like SSRN is fine with me. There are plenty of folk out there who will also want the added value of SciVerse ScienceDirect and the tools available for finding papers. I have no problem with that at all. I would never go down the path of making CLSR an Author Pays journal – to me that would undermine the independence of the journal’s content and its position as an academic journal of repute.

Q. Researchers need to demonstrate their research impact, and they are increasingly under pressure to publish articles in journals with high Impact Factors. How important is a journal’s Impact Factor to you, and do you see any developments in your community regarding other research quality measurements?
A. The Impact Factor is not used in Law journals nearly as much. Lawyers tend to use primary sources when they write, rather than cite other authors. It is not a factor that will be used directly in the forthcoming academic review of legal research known as the REF – Research Excellence Framework.

Q. As online publishing techniques develop, the traditional format of the online scientific article will change. At Elsevier we are experimenting with new online content features and functionality. Which improvements/changes would you as an Editor find most important?
A. Lawyers want embedded web links to primary sources and whatever added value can go with that. The new online content features you mention are probably going to be more useful in the scientific, rather than the legal community. However, I am always open to suggestions.

Q. Do you use social media or online professional networking in your role as an Editor or researcher? Has it helped you and, if so, how?
A. I do belong to LinkedIn but do not use it yet as much as I should. I think it could be useful for informing users about content as well as finding folk out there with expertise who might like to write or review for CLSR. Pressures of work have prevented me getting stuck into professional networking and social media yet, but it is on the agenda.

Q. How do you see your journal developing over the next 10 years? Do you see major shifts in the use of journals in the future?
A. Since 2005, I have linked CLSR to the series of International Conferences that Professor Sylvia Kierkegaard of the CLSR Editorial Board and I run together. I think this is an excellent way to connect CLSR to its readers and the author community. CLSR sponsors best paper awards (see photo) and I lead an annual CLSR seminar at the conference. It has been a great success, especially as it brings early career researchers from all over the world into face to face contact with me and some of my board. I will continue to build on that connection and to ensure that CLSR also uses its capability to contribute to policy debates and to government and EU consultations. This is where journals have to go in the future.

Q. Do you have any tips or tricks to share with your fellow Editors about being a journal Editor?
A. You have to be an early starter - getting into work early helps, e.g. 6.45am. You build experience over time and that helps in the day to day management of the journal. I juggle many tasks each day and knowing when to prioritize a task is vital and I have never been short of copy for an issue or missed a deadline in 28 years as Editor. The secret is keeping on top of everything and being flexible too. I don’t let things pile up. When a new paper comes in I try to sort out the reviewer fairly quickly and then chase things up if need be. I negotiate with my authors and use the reviews to improve papers wherever possible, even if we are not taking it. You build up a relationship that way. It is a privilege to be an Editor and the responsibility one carries is high, but I have loved every moment of my 27 years so far. I may get into the Guinness Book of Records one day for my length of service. Roll on the 200^th issue in 2018!

Imagine if contributors could submit their papers to a journal without worrying about formatting the manuscript, including those pesky references, to exacting specifications? Well that’s precisely what we at Free Radical Biology & Medicine have invited authors to do. Since July of 2011, we have encouraged contributors to submit ‘Your Paper, Your Way.’

As fellow scientists, I and my associate editors of Free Radical Biology & Medicine wondered why journals make people spend so much time and effort formatting their entire paper for submission, especially when it’s a journal with extremely high rejection rates. Although standard formats do make it just that little bit easier for editors and reviewers to see everything in the correct style, the reality is that the advantage is very small, and we should really be focusing on the quality of science and not the format. For authors the difference is very significant. Just think of all the time contributors spend doing secretarial formatting work on a paper, only to have it rejected immediately and be forced to repeat the whole process again for the next journal to which they submit their paper. An easier submission process not only saves time and effort but may also allow authors to achieve faster publication speeds.

In initiating ‘Your Paper, Your Way,’  Free Radical Biology & Medicine decided to invite all authors to submit their manuscripts as single PDF files, including all figures, figure legends, and references.  Of course, all scientific papers need to include the following key elements: title, abstract, introduction, materials & methods, results, discussion (or results and discussion combined), references, and figures and figure legends. Contributors can use whatever layout style suits them best, however, including references.  All we ask is that the paper has all the key elements, is legible, and that all figures are of sufficiently high quality to permit proper review.  If we don’t accept a paper, the authors will have saved valuable time and effort. If we do accept a paper we then have the authors format their work to fit the Free Radical Biology & Medicine style, but they really don’t mind at that point. Elsevier automatically actually converts any reference style to that of our journal at the time of acceptance, as long as the references contain all the normal information, including the paper title.

In addition to creating a ‘friendlier’ journal for scientists, ‘Your Paper, Your Way’ also allows us to capture scientifically excellent papers that almost made it into one of the top flight generalist journals, but were considered too specialist to be accepted; the authors don’t have to re-format their paper to then submit it to our specialist Free Radical Biology & Medicine journal.

As of January 2012, half a year after initiating ‘Your Paper, Your Way,’ approximately 50% of all the papers we receive now take advantage of this simplified submission system. We have not had any complaints from reviewers about the new system, and many authors have sent us letters of thanks and praise for the ease and simplicity of Your Paper, Your Way.’ The editors of Free Radical Biology & Medicine think that ‘Your Paper, Your Way’ represents a return to common sense and a genuine renewed focus on the rights and needs of authors. It also benefits our journal in numerous ways.  We look forward to seeing others try the ‘Your Paper, Your Way’ approach.

Does open access publishing increase citation rates?

Studies conducted in this area have not yet adequately controlled for various kinds of sampling bias.  Read on...

The debate about the effects of open access upon the visibility or impact of scientific publications started with the publication by Steve Lawrence (2001) in the journal Nature, entitled ‘Free online availability substantially increases a paper's impact’, analyzing conference proceedings in the field computer science. Open access is not used to indicate the publisher business model based on the ‘authors pay’ principle, but, more generally, in the sense of being freely available via the Web. From a methodological point of view, the debate focuses on biases, control groups, sampling, and the degree to which conclusions from case studies can be generalized. This note does not give a complete overview of studies that were published during the past decade but highlights key events.

In 2004, Stevan Harnad and Tim Brody (2004) claimed that physics articles submitted as pre-print to ArXiv (a preprint server covering mainly physics, hosted by Cornell University), and later published in peer reviewed journals, generated a citation impact up to 400% higher than papers in the same journals that had not been posted in ArXiv. Michael Kurtz and his colleagues (Kurtz et al., 2005) found in a study on astronomy evidence of a selection bias – authors post their best articles freely on the Web -  and an early view effect – articles deposited as preprints are published earlier and are therefore cited more often. Henk Moed (2007) found for articles in solid state physics that these two effects may explain a large part, if not all of the differences in citation impact between journal articles posted as pre-print in ArXiv and papers that were not.

In a randomized control trail related to open versus subscription-based access of articles in psychological journals published by one single publisher, Phil Davis and his colleagues (Davis et al, 2008) did not find a significant effect of open access on citations. In order to correct for selection bias, a new study by Harnad and his team (Gargouri et al., 2010) compared self-selective self archiving with mandatory self archiving in four particular research institutions. They argued that, although the first type may be subject to a quality bias, the second can be assumed to occur regardless of the quality of the papers. They found that the OA advantage proved just as high for both, and concluded that it is real, independent and causal. It is greater for more citable articles then it is for less significant ones, resulting from users self-selecting what to use and cite. But they also found for the four institutions that the percentage of their publication output actually self-archived was, at most, 60%, and that for some it did not increase when their OA regime was transformed from non-mandatory into mandatory.  Therefore, what the authors labeled as ‘mandated OA’ is in reality, to a large extent, subject to the same type of self selection bias as non-mandated OA.

On the other hand, it should be noted that all citation based studies mentioned above seem to have the following bias: they were based on citation analysis carried out in a citation index with a selective coverage of the good, international journals in their fields. Analyzing citation impact in such a database is, in a sense, a bit similar to measuring the extent to which people are willing to leave their car unused during the weekend by interviewing mainly persons on a Saturday at the parking place of a large warehouse outside town. Those who publish in the selected set of good, international journals – a necessary condition for citations to be recorded in the OA advantage studies mentioned above – will tend to have access to these journals anyway. In other words: there may be a positive effect of OA upon citation impact, but it is not visible in the database used. The use of a citation index with more comprehensive coverage would enable one to examine the effect of the citation impact of covered journals upon OA citation advantage; for instance: is such an advantage more visible in lower impact or more nationally oriented journals than it is in international top journals?

Analyzing article downloads (usage) is a complementary and, in principle, valuable method for studying the effects of OA. In fact, the study by Phil Davis and colleagues mentioned above did apply this method and reported that OA articles were downloaded more often than papers with subscription-based access. However, significant limitations of this method are that not all publication archives provide reliable download statistics, and that different publication archives that do generate such statistics may apply different ways to record and/or count downloads, so that results are not directly comparable across archives. The implication seems to be that usage studies of OA advantage comparing OA with non-OA articles can be applied only in ‘hybrid’ environments, in which publishers offer authors who submit a manuscript both an ‘authors pay’ and a ‘readers pay’ option. But this type of OA may not be representative for OA in general, as it disregards self-archiving in OA repositories that are being created in research institutions all over the world.

An extended version of this paper will be published soon in the Elsevier publication Research Trends.

References

Davis, P.M., Lewenstein, B.V., Simon, D.H., Booth, J.G., Connolly, M.J.L. (2008). Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: Randomised controlled trial. BMJ, 337 (7665), 343-345.

Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviére, V., Gingras, Y., Carr, L., Brody, T., Harnad, S. (2010). Self-selected or mandated, open access increases citation impact for higher quality research. PLoS ONE, 5 (10), art. no. e13636.

Harnad, S., Brody, T. (2004). Comparing the impact of open access (OA) vs. non-OA articles in the same journals. D-Lib Magazine, 10(6).

Kurtz, M.J., Eichhorn, G., Accomazzi, A., Grant, C., Demleitner, M., Henneken, E., Murray, S.S. (2005). The effect of use and access on citations. Information Processing & Management, 41, 1395–1402.

Lawrence, S. (2001). Free online availability substantially increases a paper's impact. Nature, 411 (6837), p. 521.

Moed, H.F. (2007). The effect of “Open Access” upon citation impact: An analysis of ArXiv’s Condensed Matter Section. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58, 2047-2054.

Biophysical Journal has experienced a reasonable uptake of this option and we asked Editor-in-Chief, Professor Edward Egelman, for his thoughts. He says: “While I do not view the open access option that we offer as highly significant, it remains a useful source of revenue for Biophysical Journal.”

Edward Egelman

He adds: “We have some papers, where research has been supported by HHMI or the Wellcome Trust, which require the authors to use our open access option. This option involves a payment for immediate open access for that paper, as opposed to our normal policy of providing access to subscribers for one year, after which all of our papers are freely available to everyone. If we look at the last 24 papers published in Biophysical Journal with open access, only seven of these have been supported by HHMI or Wellcome. The rest have used other funds to pay for this open access, and we do not know if the open access was mandated by the source of the funds.”

In terms of the importance of sponsored articles within the field, Professor Egelman is yet to be convinced. He says: “The reason that I feel that the open access option is not terribly important within the biophysical community is that the vast majority of people who are reading and citing our papers within the first year after publication are either at institutions which have subscriptions to the journal, or are members of the Biophysical Society, where access to the Biophysical journal is one of the benefits of membership. I do not see many individuals who are involved in biophysical research who would not have such access to the journal.”

Keeping it fair and square

In relation to Professor Egelman’s comments, it is important that we discuss the element of pricing. Currently, Elsevier charges a standard charge for sponsorship of $3,000 across our journals, with Cell Press and The Lancet being the only exceptions. We do not differentiate our pricing according to journals, nor in different disciplines of science and medicine. This is something that we are evaluating and we would ask you to provide feedback to your publishing contact on the appropriate pricing of this option within your field.

Further to this, and to expand on our discussion about 'double dipping' in the article Open Access: Developing New Publishing Models, it is important that we distinguish and account for revenue we receive from subscriptions and from sponsored articles within the same journal. To do this, we have developed an approach to ensure that revenue from sponsored articles is taken into consideration when setting journal prices.

First, we correct our prices across the overall Elsevier list price, so the average price is corrected in relation to this additional revenue. Next, as there are significant differences in uptake of sponsored articles at journal level, we correct journal prices at individual journal level too, so the higher the percentage of sponsored articles in a particular journal, the higher the correction to that individual journal’s price. We believe this is a fair way to ensure we do not double dip and, even though open access article option uptake remains a very low percentage of our total revenue (less than 1%), we take this no double dipping policy extremely seriously. As the uptake increases, this may have a more profound influence on our journal pricing moving forwards, but we have not seen a huge growth in uptake and, consequently, this correction remains at a low level.

This is a topic on which we would greatly appreciate the opinion of our Editors. You can post your comments below, or please feel free to raise it with your publishing contact.

Peer Review and Open Access

There have been some questions around the continued quality of peer review in an open access environment, as several 'mega journals' have been launched by other publishers. These journals often operate under a 'sound science' perspective, which does not assert a quality seal in accordance to the aims and scope of a journal.

Elsevier remains firmly committed to upholding the principles of quality peer review. To us, whether a journal is subscription or open access is not of any significance when it comes to assuring the publication of the highest quality articles within our journals. We continue to support industry initiatives such as CrossCheck, which screens published and submitted content for originality. We are also committed to the development of our own peer-review initiatives and pilots - more information on these will be available in the next issue of Editors’ Update.

Author Biography

David Tempest

David Tempest
DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF UNIVERSAL ACCESS
David’s role focuses on the development of a wide range of strategies and implementation of access initiatives and he is a key contact between Elsevier and funding organizations, universities and research institutions around the world. He has worked at Elsevier for more than 15 years, including periods in both editorial and marketing positions, and spent the majority of his career managing the scientometric research and market analysis department within the company. David speaks frequently at various global events about the development of new universal access initiatives and technologies, as well as publishing matters in general.  He has a BSc in pharmacology from the University of Sunderland and an MBA with distinction from Oxford Brookes University.

The importance of protecting content

But what about copyright in an open access world? Does it make a difference that articles are being made available to all and should we be concerned? The answer is…well, yes and no.

To all intents and purposes, the fact that journal articles are being made available to all through open access, or to subscribers under the subscription model, should not really affect things.  Issues can arise, however, as there is a common misperception that open access means anyone can do anything with an article  – in fact, the rights in the content must still be understood and upheld.

In addition, from an editorial perspective, copyright helps to prevent elements such as plagiarism, multiple submission and fraud in journal articles, and whilst is does not actually detect these elements, it acts as a protective measure to uphold the quality of journals.

Within open access publishing there seems to be a dilemma over copyright and the three choices facing an author: retain copyright, share it or transfer it. Elsevier believes that it remains a fundamental role of a publisher to act on the author’s behalf and by continuing to transfer copyright, we can ensure and uphold the rights of the author and handle all subsequent permission requests. If copyright is retained, then this process remains with the author and, if it is shared, there is a greater risk that fraudulent use may occur, which is why we continue to advocate the transfer of copyright for our journals.

Clearing up the confusion

Some believe that in an open access world these factors become blurred and journal articles are easier to copy and incorporate into other works. For example, open access journals offer additional usage rights which may introduce some confusion in relation to copyright. These factors may threaten the rights of the author and make it difficult for publishers to enforce copyright policy. However, if it is clear where copyright lies through consistent application, the usage rights of the article in question become independent of the publishing model and work for both subscription and open access content.

Of course, one of the main issues with copyright in general is that it is often widely misunderstood and interpreted in a different way by each individual. A study published by JISC in 2005¹ investigated the level of understanding of researchers towards copyright. It found that from a pool of 355 respondents, 30% of researchers did not know who initially owned the copyright of their own research articles and a further 26% of the respondents indicated that they had a low interest in the copyright issues of their own research articles! Clearly, this continues to be one of the important roles a publisher must embrace: ensuring that it is clear and easy to understand what can be done with content.

¹ Towards good practices of copyright in Open Access Journals: A study among authors of articles in Open Access journals, Esther Hoorn, University of Groningen, Faculty of Law, Maurits van der Graaf, Pleiade Management & Consultancy, 2005-08-05

Author Biography

David Tempest

David Tempest
DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF UNIVERSAL ACCESS
David’s role focuses on the development of a wide range of strategies and implementation of access initiatives and he is a key contact between Elsevier and funding organizations, universities and research institutions around the world. He has worked at Elsevier for more than 15 years, including periods in both editorial and marketing positions, and spent the majority of his career managing the scientometric research and market analysis department within the company. David speaks frequently at various global events about the development of new universal access initiatives and technologies, as well as publishing matters in general.  He has a BSc in pharmacology from the University of Sunderland and an MBA with distinction from Oxford Brookes University.