Technical Advisory Group

Elena Zapryanova-Hadjinikolova

Elena is Director of Analytics for ScienceDirect and Mendeley Social Products at Elsevier. Since she joined Elsevier in 2010, Elena has worked with product and marketing teams across a number of Elsevier’s digital platforms, leveraging data and user-centered analytics to help teams develop deep understanding of how researchers use digital content. Elena is passionate about data and the power of user-centered analytics to contribute to better research outcomes.

Elena holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Mount Holyoke College, USA and an MBA from London Business School in the UK

Thomas Porquet

Thomas works as a project manager for the Services & Prospective department of the Couperin.org french consortium since 2011.

He is involved in usage statistics gathering and processing through various projects:

– Mesure (based on the JUSP portal, where COUNTER reports from publishers are harvested and published) and the CC-Plus pilot,

– ezPAARSE (to let institutions generate usage statistics based on their logs)

– ezMESURE (where ezPAARSE data is gathered and Couperin members are provided with an advanced dashboard tool).

Athena Hoeppner

Athena Hoeppner is the Discovery Services Librarian at the University of Central Florida, in Orlando, Florida. Her career in academic libraries spans over 20 years and a range of roles in public services, systems, and technical services. In her current role, she jointly oversees the eResources collection and expenditures, continuously strives to improve of discovery and access technologies, and spends too much time in email and spreadsheets. Her first love remains public service, and she spends four hours per week serving patrons via Reference and Ask a Librarian.

Athena’s work and research center on applying technology to connect users to content. Her projects explore user experience, resource discovery services, and other technologies that enhance access to information for individuals.

Ian Hayes

Ian Hayes has worked at Atypon since 2017 as the product manager responsible for its business intelligence, analytics, and compliance reporting product areas.  He brings 20+ years of experience with business intelligence products/solutions across multiple business sectors and has a long-standing interest in the development of software that enfranchises users to solve their own data analysis challenges.

Stuart Maxwell

As Vice President of Business Development for Scholarly iQ, Stuart Maxwell is responsible for shaping the client, sales, marketing and product strategies for leading data management, integration and usage analytics specialist Scholarly iQ (www.scholarlyiq.com).

With over 20 years in digital media, he has also worked with other leading analytics companies Adobe and comScore, and in data governance and data standards including the set-up of the validation and auditing requirements for Project COUNTER at ABC.

Currently also active in industry working groups with NISO, CrossRef and SSP, he is a strong advocate of the value of industry backed standards and best practices in the use of trusted, integrated and well governed data.

Melissa Belvadi

Melissa Belvadi is the User Experience & Collections Librarian at the University of Prince Edward Island, a position that encompasses acquisitions, serials, collection development, and electronic resources management responsibilities.

Her career as an academic librarian started at the University of Missouri-St. Louis in 1993, and she has been living in Canada since 2008. She is deeply committed to evidence-based practice in collections and patron services.  Her current research interests explore the long-term use trends in print and electronic monographs and their implications for access and purchase models. She received her M.L.S from UCLA in 1993, and her B.A. in Psychology from UC Santa Cruz in 1989.

Peter Vlahakis

Peter is a Senior Product Manager at ITHAKA/JSTOR, where he has responsibility for delivering platform tools for libraries and publishers. He joined JSTOR in 2010, previously worked as a Technical Services Lead, and led the development of solutions for web-scale discovery and knowledge base integration. He also oversaw product development for JSTORs next-generation data and reporting infrastructure, in support of their COUNTER Release 5 implementation.

Peter holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Western Michigan University and a Master of Science in Information from the University of Michigan, where he specialized in data science and information economics.

David S Perry

David is a Senior Programmer Analyst for the Division of Libraries at New York University, having worked there for nearly twenty years.

Among other activities he is responsible for the design and implementation of the Library Data Warehouse which collects, organizes and makes available a wide range of data related to Library activities.

He is also responsible for all things related to Counter Statistics. Starting with Counter Four, he has built programs to automatically harvest, collate and present usage data from a wide variety of platforms, and with the release of Counter Five has wholeheartedly embraced the new and improved format.

Bedřich Košata

Senior developer at Big Dig Data. He is the main architect and developer of Celus, usage statistics software tool created for the Czech national e-resources consortium.

Oliver Pesch

Oliver Pesch works as a product strategist for EBSCO Information Services where he helps set the direction for EBSCO’s SaaS and e-resource products and services. Oliver is a strong supporter of standards and is very involved in the development of standards related to usage. He has been involved with COUNTER since the outset serving on the Executive Committee, the Technical Advisory Group, and, most recently, serving as chair of the COUNTER board.

He is co-chair of both the NISO SUSHI Standing Committee and the NISO KBART-Automation Working Group. Oliver speaks regularly about usage and e-resources and is a regular contributor to Serials Librarian through his Spotlight on Standards column.

Andrew Goldthorpe

Andrew is a Digital Auditor at ABC (Audit Bureau of Circulation), the industry body for media measurement. The organisation inspires market confidence by delivering a valued stamp of trust across the media world. ABC is an approved COUNTER auditor.

Bernd Oberknapp

Bernd Oberknapp is the Head of ReDI, the service department for the Baden-Württemberg federal state library consortium at Freiburg University Library. ReDI provides services to about 80 higher education and research libraries in Baden-Württemberg and other states.

Since 1998, when the consortium was founded, Bernd was involved in or responsible for development, operations and support of services like database and library catalog hosting, link resolving, access management and usage reporting. Bernd was a member of the project team that built the German access management federation for higher education and research (DFN-AAI).

Current projects include the development of a COUNTER-SUSHI based usage reporting platform for the Baden-Württemberg and HeBIS consortia and the German National and Alliance licenses and the development of an Electronic Resource Management system for higher education and research libraries in Germany.

Bernd joined the COUNTER Executive Committee in 2015.

Kornelia Junge

As Senior Research Manager at Wiley, Kornelia is responsible for Wiley’s customer-facing and internal usage reporting.

She joined the publishing industry in 1990 and has held various positions in marketing and market research at Wiley and Springer. She has been involved with usage statistics since 2001. With a background in psychology and social sciences, focusing on statistics and methodology, her main interest is on developing meaningful metrics and ensuring data quality in the measurement of online behaviour.

Paul Needham

Paul is the Research and Innovation Manager at Kings Norton Library, Cranfield University. Paul is responsible for Application Development within JUSP. Recent projects he has worked on for JISC include ETAS (Enhanced Transfer Alerting Service), SUSHI Starters, PIRUS2, IRUS and RAPTOR-JUse. Paul is a member of the NISO SUSHI Standing Committee and the Chair of the Technical Advisory Boards of COUNTER and the KnowledgeBase+ Project.

Senol Akay

Senol Akay is the web analytics manager at the American Chemical Society. Prior to joining the digital strategy team at the American Chemical Society, Senol was a senior digital marketer with an international marketing firm where he created e-marketing strategies for global businesses.

Senol received his B.S. in Chemistry in Istanbul, Turkey and immigrated to the United States to pursue advanced studies in Chemistry. He received his M.S. in Bioanalytical Chemistry and PhD in Organic Chemistry at Georgia State University.  He focused his research on early detection mechanisms for breast cancer and drug discovery for new malaria treatments.  After completing his graduate studies in 2009, he put his analytical and data processing skills to work as an e-commerce director where he led commerce and digital marketing strategies for multiple e-commerce websites. After honing his digital strategy skills, Senol merged his research and professional experience in his current role at ACS.

Sonja Lendi

Sonja read Biology at the Radboud University in Nijmegen and has been working in the STM publishing industry since 1991. Her first assignments were in the area of journal production (copy editing and journal management). She has been involved with usage reporting on Elsevier’s electronic products since 1998. In 2011, she joined the COUNTER Executive Committee.

Within Elsevier, she is responsible for maintaining the usage reports for customers, both COUNTER and additional non-COUNTER reports, and for coordinating the annual audit of the COUNTER reports for ScienceDirect and Scopus. In addition, she provides reports and analyses for internal stakeholders, ranging from sales to higher management.

Tasha Mellins-Cohen

With two decades of scholarly publishing experience across not-for-profit and commercial publishers and publishing industry bodies, and a history of volunteering with scholarly communication bodies, Tasha understands and appreciate the changing pressures on publishers, librarians, funders, researchers and research institutions.

Data and standards are essential underpinnings for our community, from the metadata standards that help optimise discoverability to the usage metrics that are one aspect of measuring impact. Tasha’s combined roles as COUNTER’s Project Director and founder of an independent consultancy business helping publishers achieve a sustainable transition to open access both rely on that pairing of data and standards.