Prof Virginia (Ginny) Barbour is the Editor-in-Chief of the Medical Journal of Australia and Director of Open Access Australasia. She is an Adjunct Professor at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and was previously co-lead of the Office for Scholarly Communication at QUT.
She trained in the UK in medicine at Cambridge University and University College and Middlesex Hospital medical schools, specialising in haematology. She went on to do a DPhil at Oxford University and post-doctoral research in the US on globin gene regulation.
She joined The Lancet in 1999, leaving in 2004 to be one of the three founding editors of PLOS Medicine. In 2015 she joined Open Access Australasia (previously the Australian Open Access Strategy Group) and has led its growth from nine university members to 22 university members and 6 affiliate organisations.
She has been involved in many international open access, innovative scholarly communication and publication and research integrity initiatives. She was involved in the final drafting of the UNESCO Open Science Recommendation in 2021. She was previously Chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). She is currently Vice-Chair of the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) Steering Committee, a Plan S Ambassador, a member of Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)’s Executive Board and a member of the Australian NHMRC’s Research Quality Steering Committee. She was an editorial advisor to medRxiv in the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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