An early champion of open research, Professor Barbour was trained in the UK in medicine at Cambridge University and University College and Middlesex Hospital medical schools, specializing in hematology. 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. From 2015 until 2024 she was director of Open Access Australasia (previously the Australian Open Access Strategy Group). She was involved in the final drafting of the UNESCO Open Science Recommendation in 2021 and is a Plan S Ambassador.
In addition to her work advocating for open access and open science, she has driven several innovative scholarly communication and research integrity initiatives. She was Chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) from 2012 to 2017 and is currently Co-Chair of the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and a member of the Australian NHMRC’s Research Quality Steering Committee. She was also an editorial advisor to medRxiv in the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
