David Sutcliffe Email & Phone Number

My career has centred on academic publishing and research support, mostly at the University of Oxford. In essence, I like working with academics, building things, and working efficiently. And writing, of course.Having started in academic publishing (OUP, Nature), I am increasingly moving into research facilitation (University of Oxford). At the Oxford Internet Institute, I led the scoping, consultation and drafting of our first Research Strategy and Action Plan (2022). This involved close working with faculty, management, support staff, and students, both to define what we want to achieve as a research department, and how we will get there in practice. As part of this, I am leading on the research culture and impact aspects, and am Secretary to the department's Research Data and Computing Working Group -- reflecting my interest in the mechanics / application of academic research.Much of how I approach things draws on my experience of publishing, i.e. very close working in teams, proper tracking of everything, and metrics. As the first Managing Editor of Policy & Internet (Wiley-Blackwell) I helped build a high quality peer-reviewed journal from scratch. I managed the review process, and worked very closely with the authors, editing their papers, and discussing their findings on our blog. I also co-convened our (very popular, very fun) interdisciplinary conferences, reviewed the submissions, and organised the academic programme. After an awful lot of (generally extremely enjoyable) work, we achieved a very respectable Impact Factor of 2.763.All the strategy and building aside, my main interest and motivation is still fundamentally about working with, and helping our academics. As the OII's Senior Scientific Writer I help our faculty with drafting, editing and reviewing of grant applications. I also edit research articles, reports, and books, and helped draft our REF2021 impact cases. Fundamentally, this is a very social exercise -- I am in this area because I enjoy talking to academics about their work, their ideas, and helping them to define, refine, and frame things clearly. As part of a longstanding interest in research communication, I produce the department's "Research in Conversation" blog series, which explores our faculty's findings in an accessible way.I actually find it very difficult to describe what I do, to define what is essentially a non-standard set of interests and skills -- certainly not normal to find in a university department. But when I eventually manage to stumble out a description, academics usually say "I want one of you!"

Listed skills include Writing, Editing, Academic Publishing, Communications Management, and 13 others.

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  University Of Oxford

  Biology/Biological Sciences, General