Stein announced as Head of Product at openRxiv

We’re excited to announce that Gabriel Stein has joined openRxiv as Head of Product. Stein has already been working with us in a consulting capacity, helping to conceptualize and launch openRxiv Labs and the first experiment, openRxiv Labs Curvenote Reader. As Head of Product, he will continue to manage the Labs program and work with our team, partners, and community to shape the future of openRxiv’s technology and oversee its development.

Tracy Teal, CEO, stated “Gabe brings a rare combination of deep experience in open science infrastructure, product leadership, and science communication that makes him uniquely suited to help shape the future of openRxiv. He understands the technical and human aspects of how research is shared and discovered, and he has a track record of building tools and communities that genuinely serve researchers. We’re thrilled to have him leading product as we work to make openRxiv an even more central foundation for open science.” 

Open Science Infrastructure Leadership

Stein brings direct experience managing open science infrastructure. Over the last decade as Head of Operations and Product at Knowledge Futures, where he will remain an affiliate, he oversaw the growth of the open research publishing platform PubPub from fewer than 100 users to hundreds of thousands, helping partners launch innovative open research projects like Rapid Reviews: Infectious Diseases, the Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, and the CrimRxiv preprint server. As a member of the leadership team, he helped the organization spin out of MIT to become an independent non-profit, raise over $10 million in grants, gifts, and earned revenue, grow from 3 to 17 employees, and establish partnerships across the open science ecosystem, including with bioRxiv and medRxiv via the Docmaps framework.

“openRxiv’s team has worked tirelessly to establish itself as vital, trusted infrastructure for biomedical preprinting, building an unparalleled corpus of open science in the process. Advancements in technology and changes to research practices are creating the opportunity for preprints to become the foundational way to share and discover not just results, but the data, code, and methods that produced them, for humans and machines,” noted Stein. 

“openRxiv is the ideal organization to steward the transition of scientific communication from sharing research through static narrative documents to maintaining a living corpus of verifiable, structured, usable outputs that the ecosystem can build the future on top of. I’m honored to be able to continue working with the team to realize this opportunity,” continued Stein.

Innovation in Science Communication and Media

In addition to his publishing experience, Stein’s background in media and technology brings unique perspectives to openRxiv that will help the organization learn from adjacent fields and explore new audiences and opportunities for innovation. In 2016, he co-founded the venture-backed science communication startup Massive Science, which taught thousands of researchers how to tell stories about their work and built an audience of millions of readers. 

Earlier in his career, he worked in technical and editorial roles at Google, Fast Company, and Upworthy, and has conducted research fellowships at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School and the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.