Since 2003, Paula Callan has been actively engaged in encouraging the uptake of innovations in scholarly publishing, particularly those related to open access, at the institutional, national and international level.  In 2004, she led the implementation of QUT’s  very successful open access repository, QUT ePrints.  At the time, it was the first such repository in the world to be backed by an institution-wide open access ‘mandate’. Similar policies now exist at many other universities around the world.

In 2008, Paula was appointed by the ARC (Australian Research Council) to be a member of the Indicators Development Group for the first round of ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia).

In collaboration with members of the  OAK Law Project Team, Paula was involved in the development of OAKList; a publicly available database of information about publishers’ open access policies and the rights retained by authors under the terms of the copyright transfer agreements used by Australian scholarly publishers. When it was released in 2009, OAKList was an important resource for Australian academic authors and repository managers.  Subsequently, the data was transferred to Sherpa-RoMEO, an international version of OAKList.

Between 2008-2013, Paula was QUT Library’s eResearch Access Coordinator.  While in this role, she helped develop and implement the University’s first training program on research data management.  The program was designed to provide researchers with the tools and knowledge needed to ensure their data was not just safely stored but also could (where appropriate) be made discoverable and accessible.

In her current role as Scholarly Communications Librarian, Paula still has oversight of QUT ePrints but also supports a number of other open access publishing related services including the eJournal Hosting Service which supports a number of high-quality peer reviewed open access journals published here at QUT.