Octopus - a radical new approach to scientific publishing: Dr Alex Freeman

The guest for this week’s INSPIRING STEM PODCAST episode, is Dr Alex Freeman. Alex is the Executive Director of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, a role she took up in 2016. She previously spent 16 years working for the BBC, primarily as a producer and director for BBC Science.

In 2019, Alex was one of the winners of the Royal Society's ‘The Pitch’ competition hosted as the conference titled ‘Research culture: Changing expectations'. Alex’s pitch was for Octopus Science – a radical new approach to scientific publishing which subsequently received funding and will be launched this summer.

In August 2021, the UK Government's science minister, Amanda Solloway, announced that Octopus Publishing, in collaboration with Jisc, will receive £650,000 over three years from Research England’s emerging priorities fund.  Octopus aims to formally launch in June 2022.