Virginia Barbour

Professor Virginia (Ginny) Barbour is the Editor-in-Chief of the Medical Journal of Australia. She is an Adjunct Professor at QUT and was previously co-lead of the Office for Scholarly Communication at QUT and Director of Open Access Australasia.

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 led its growth from nine university members to 32 university members and seven 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 Co-Chair of the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), a Plan S Ambassador, 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.