John Cox read law at Oxford University and then qualified as a barrister. But he has spent forty years in publishing, with The Open University, Butterworths and Scholastic. He joined Blackwell in 1990 as head of the subscription agency and then as Managing Director. He was Managing Director of Carfax from 1994. He left Carfax when it became part of Taylor & Francis in November 1998 to set up his own consultancy, John Cox Associates, which specializes in scholarly and research publishing. His clients include trade associations, academic libraries and commercial and non-profit publishers, ranging from the largest commercial publishers to small learned societies.