Scholarly publishing tech provider HighWire has appointed publishing veteran Byron Russell as EMEA Sales Director.
The firm, founded in 1995, has offices in Brighton, Belfast and is headquartered in California.
The firm describes itself as an ‘ePublisher’, providing digital publishing solutions across the publishing life cycle, including content management and hosting, eCommerce, analytics, access and identity management, manuscript submission and tracking.
Born out of Stanford University, the firm is backed by Stanford and private equity firm Accel-KKR.
It said that Russell will bring over 30 years’ experience in the publishing industry. Russell began his career at Oxford University Press’ ELT division in Italy.
He has held senior positions in sales and marketing with Pearson, Berlitz and Macmillan Learning, focusing on future-facing digital content delivery systems.
Before moving to HighWire, Byron headed the aggregation platform Ingenta Connect and was responsible for launching Ingenta Open, a new referatory and hosting platform exclusively for open access content.
He was responsible for driving the development of services, technology and business, and managed account management and client support teams based across the UK and US.
Alongside HighWire’s UK-based teams, Byron will work closely with Miles McNamee, VP of global sales, and Matt Pedersen, who joined HighWire as director of relationship management earlier this year.
Commenting on his appointment, Russell said he was excited to support a renowned community of publishers in the EMEA region.
“HighWire has rich technical understanding of the scholarly publishing landscape, the strongest solutions on the market and a highly experienced team who forge great partnerships and continue to innovate to keep publishers at the cutting edge of digital,” he said.
McNamee added: “It’s a pleasure to welcome Byron, whose wealth of experience will make a huge impact to our customers and our business. Byron’s appointment continues our approach to delivering industry-leading technology coupled with the best people in the sector.
“I’m proud of the customer and commercial team we’ve evolved this year and energised about the growing digital portfolio we’re delivering for our longstanding and new customers.”