Ross Mounce | Curriculum Vitae

Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge, CB2 3EA

7 ross.mounce@gmail.com r rossmounce.co.uk  @rmounce
m rossmounce ross-mounce ORCID: 0000-0002-3520-2046

Linux-loving data wrangler with a passion for reproducible research, text & data mining, and innovation in
academic publishing. Im most at home collaborating on projects in distributed, version-controlled environments
such as GitHub & Bitbucket. Background in systematics, particularly morphology-based phylogenetic analyses.

Education & Employment

University of Cambridge
Cambridge
Postdoctoral Research Associate
December 2015Present
Modelling species conservation and biodiversity of living collections in the worlds botanic gardens
Natural History Museum
London
Scientific Associate
July 2015November 2015
Text mining museum specimen data from the recent literature
University of Bath
Bath
Postdoctoral Research Associate
February 2014July 2015
PLUTo: Phyloinformatic Literature Unlocking Tools. Software for making published phyloinformatic data
discoverable, open, and reusable.
University of Bath
Bath
PhD in Evolutionary Biology
October 2009December 2013
Comparative Cladistics: Fossils, Morphological Data Partitions and Lost Branches in the Fossil Tree of Life

Natural History Museum, London

MSc (Hons) in Advanced Methods in Taxonomy and Biodiversity

London
20082009

Imperial College London

BSc (Hons) in Biology

London
20052008

Awards & Grants

Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship

Personal award to help develop my plans for biodiversity content mining,

University of Cambridge
2016

BBSRC grant with Matthew Wills

Tools & Resources Development Funding, PLUTo project

University of Bath
20142015

Panton Fellowship for Open Data in Science

Personal award for the promotion and production of open research data,

University of Bath
20122013

Kurt M. Pickett Award

Intercontinental travel grant to support promising research students,

Ede & Ravenscroft Prize Finalist

A competition to reward the best graduate research students across the university,

Santander Research Grant Award

Competitively-awarded funding to support research links with Latin America,

Systematics Association Travel Bursary

Supporting travel to the SystAss Biennial meeting,

Marie Stopes Travel Awards

Supporting travel to Willi Hennig Society meetings,

University of California, Riverside

2012
University of Bath
2012
So Paulo
2011
Belfast
2011
Honolulu & So Paulo
2010 & 2011

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Publications
In total, at least 93 citations so far | Google Scholar h-index: 5 | ImpactStory profile for altmetrics data
13. Mounce, R., Sansom, R. and Wills, M. 2016. Craniodental and postcranial characters of vertebrates often
imply different trees. Evolution DOI: 10.1111/evo.12884
12. Mietchen, D., Mounce, R., Penev, L. 2015. Publishing the research process. Research Ideas and Outcomes
DOI: 10.3897/rio.1.e7547 >1000 views
11. Mounce, R. 2015. Dark Research: information content in many modern research papers is not easily
discoverable online. PeerJ PrePrints DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.773v1 >1000 views 1 citation
10. Mounce, R. 2014. Open Data and Palaeontology. In: S. A. Moore (ed.) Issues in Open Research Data.
Pp. 151164. London: Ubiquity Press. DOI: 10.5334/ban.j
9. Murray-Rust, P., Smith-Unna, R., and Mounce, R. 2014. AMI-diagram: Mining facts from images. D-Lib
Magazine 20(11/12) DOI: 10.1045/november14-murray-rust 1 citation
8. Vos, R., Biserkov, J., Balech, B., Beard, N., Blissett, M., Brenninkmeijer, C., van Dooren, T., Eades,
D., Gosline, G., Groom, Q., Hamann, T., Hettling, H., Hoehndorf, R., Holleman, A., Hovenkamp, P.,
Kelbert, P., King, D., Kirkup, D., Lammers, Y., DeMeulemeester, T., Mietchen, D., Miller, J., Mounce,
R., Nicolson, N., Page, R., Pawlik, A., Pereira, S., Penev, L., Richards, K., Sautter, G., Shorthouse, D.,
Thtinen, M., Weiland, C., Williams, A., and Sierra, S. 2014. Enriched biodiversity data as a resource and
service. Biodiversity Data Journal DOI: 10.3897/bdj.2.e1125 6 citations & >2000 views
7. Poisot, T., Mounce R., and Gravel, D. 2013. Moving toward a sustainable ecological science: dont let
data go to waste! Ideas in Ecology and Evolution 6(2) DOI: 10.4033/iee.2013.6b.14.f 10 citations
6. Mounce R. and Janies, D. 2013. Synergistic sharing of data and tools to enable team science. In: J.
Zander & P.J. Mosterman (eds.) Computation for Humanity - Information Technology to Advance Society
CRC Press, pp. 437-447. full text
5. Mounce, R. 2013. Open access and altmetrics: distinct but complementary. Bulletin of the American
Society for Information Science and Technology 39:14-17. DOI: 10.1002/bult.2013.1720390406 36 citations
4. Garcia, A., Murray-Rust, P., Burns, G. A. P. C., Stevens, R., Tkaczyk, D., McLaughlin, C., Belin, A., Di Iorio,
A., Garcia, L., Gruson-Daniel, C., Mounce, R., Nuzzolese, A. G., Peroni, S., Spinks, J., VillazonTerrazas,
B., Corcho, O., Giraldo, O., and Wabiszewski, M. 2013. PDFJailbreak-a communal architecture for making
biomedical PDFs semantic. Proceedings of the BioLINK SIG full text 3 citations
3. Mounce, R. 2012. Life as a Palaeontologist: Academia, the Internet and Creative Commons. Palaeontology
Online full text 1 citation
2. Stoltzfus, A., OMeara, B., Whitacre, J., Mounce, R., Gillespie, E., Kumar, S., Rosauer, D., and Vos, R.
2012. Sharing and re-use of phylogenetic trees (and associated data) to facilitate synthesis. BMC Research
Notes DOI: 10.1186/1756-0500-5-574 20 citations
1. Mounce, R. and Wills, M. 2011. Phylogenetic position of Diania challenged. Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature10266 9 citations & 2 Wikipedia mentions

Invited Talks

OpenCon 2014 (Washington, D.C.)

The State of Open Research Data

Nov. 15th 2014

>500 views

TDWG (Florence)
Sharing re-usable phylogenetic data: were not there yet

Oct. 31st 2013

>500 views

Licences For Europe: Text and Data Mining (European Commission, Brussels)
Content Mining: The Researcher Point-of-View

Mar. 8th 2013

>3000 views

Society of Vertebrate Paleontology 72nd Annual Meeting (Raleigh)

Examining character congruence and compatibility of vertebrate cladistic data

Oct. 19th 2012

>300 views

NESCent seminar (Durham)

Mining phyloinformatic data from the published literature

Oct. 18th 2012

>1300 views

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International Council for Science (ICSU) workshop (Chicheley Hall)

BOAI-compliant open access/data licensing matters: content mining

British Ecological Society Annual Meeting (Sheffield)

On the Importance of Open Science and Open Data

The 6th Annual Open Knowledge Conference (Berlin)

Open Palaeontology: putting data on the web for all to see and use

Sep. 3rd 2012

>900 views
Sep. 13th 2011
>1300 views
Jul. 1st 2011
>2500 views

Selected Conference Talks

Lyell Meeting on Palaeoinformatics (The Geological Society, London)
Specimen-level mining: bringing knowledge back home to the NHM, London
Jisc Digifest (Birmingham, UK)
New Directions in Open Research [panel session]

Mar. 9th 2016

Mar. 3rd 2016

SciFri Monthtly Seminar (The Natural History Museum, London)

Museum impact: linking-up specimens with research published on them

Sep. 18th 2015

on YouTube

6th European Phycological Congress (London)

Modern Tools & Rationales for 21st Century Research

Aug. 27th 2015

>500 views

Open Data & Reproducibility Workshop (British Ecological Society, London)

Open Research Data: Licensing, Standards & Future

Apr. 21st 2015

>600 views

FOSTER Open Science (Kings College London)

The Open Advantage for Early Career Researchers

Sep. 4th 2014

>700 views

Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (Boston, MA)

The PLUTo Project: mining phyloinformatics data from the literature

Jul. 11th 2014

on YouTube

iEvoBio (Raleigh, NC)

The PLUTo Project: mining phyloinformatics data from the literature

Jun. 24th 2014

>900 views

Beyond The PDF 2 (Amsterdam)

Simple Additions to PDF Metadata
The 2nd Pro-iBiosphere Workshop (Leiden)
Deconstructing PDFs into SVG to extract semantic data

Mar. 19th
>1000
Feb. 14th
>1400

The 1st Open Knowledge Festival (Helsinki)

The OKFN Panton Fellowships: from data mining to graduate training with Kershaw S.

Sep. 19th 2012

Video

Willi Hennig Society Meeting XXXI (Riverside, California)

Partitioned Supertree Support Mounce R., Davis K., Hill J., Hughes M. & Wills M.

Jun. 25th 2012

>1300 views

The 55th Palaeontology Association Annual Meeting (Plymouth)

Methods of Determining Cranial and Postcranial Character Congruence [poster]

Dec. 19th 2011

>1000 views

Willi Hennig Society Meeting XXX (Sao Jose do Rio Preto, Brazil)
A Review of the Incongruence Length Difference test: Uses and Abuses
The 8th Biennial Systematics Association meeting (Belfast)
Nullius in Calculo: the Explicitness & Reproducibility of Cladistic Analyses
The 12th Young Systematists Forum (London)
The (continued) growth of phylogenetic information

2013
views
2013
views

Aug. 1st 2011

>1400 views
Jul. 8th 2011
>1500 views
Dec. 1st 2010
>2200 views

Professional Service
Council Member for the Systematics Association 2012-present | SRF grant reviewer 2015 & 2016
Founding Editor Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) 2015-present
Subject Editor for Biodiversity Data Journal 2013-present | Editor Data (MDPI) 2015-present
Organising Committee for OpenCon 2014 & 2015; Young Systematists Forum 2013, 2014 & 2015
Program Committee for Linking and Contextualizing Publications and Datasets 2014
Reviewer for many journal articles as detailed at my Publons reviewer profile

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Technical and Personal skills

Web / Programming Languages: Proficient in: R, Perl, Python, bash, LATEX, Markdown, HTML
Web-scraping with wget, curl, quickscrape, BeautifulSoup, and Javascript.

Specific tool expertise & experience: Unix tools & data science at the command line; IPython;
R packages including ape, phangorn, treebase, dplyr, reshape, tm, SnowballC, VennDiagram; Authorea,
Overleaf & GitHub for manuscript preparation; PAUP; TNT; MrBayes; POY; RAxML; Dendroscope;
BioPhylo; TreeSnatcher Plus; FigTree; Eclipse IDE; Mesquite; ghosts; Supertree Toolkit 2; PICA...

Wikipedia: Its the worlds go-to information resource, and Im proud to be a contributor. During a
TrowelBlazers event for Ada Lovelace Day 2014, I created new articles for Meemann Chang & Doris Mary
Kermack. I hope to contribute more to Wikipedia and Wikidata in future.

Communication Skills: Excellent presentation skills. Works well in a team. Good at technical writing for
both academic and lay audiences. Enthusiastic online communicator through webinars, podcasts, blogs
and social media. Highly-experienced with remote working: Skype, Google Hangouts, UberConference,
Etherpads, Slack, GitHub & Google Docs are second nature to me. First-rate in-person communication too.

Courses and Workshops, Taught and Attended

[Lead Instructor] ContentMine Workshop (University of Bath)
Teaching the basics of content mining tools and philosophies to biologists

Jul. 2015

[Attended] Supertree Toolkit 2 (University of Bath)

A training course on how to use the STK2 program for managing supertree data

Dec. 2014

[Taught At] Software Carpentry Bootcamp (University College London)

Teaching basic Python, Shell, Git & GitHub, Testing & Debugging

Nov. 2014

[Attended] Software Carpentry Instructor Training (TGAC, Norwich)

Learning how to teach research scientists how to program

Oct. 2014

[Attended] Phylogenetic Comparative Methods Workshop (Raleigh, SVP)

Phylogenetic uncertainty & retrodiction, correlated evolution, and rates of character evolution

Oct. 2012

[Attended] Linking Open Data in Biology using Ontologies (Hinxton, EBI)

An introduction to RDF, triples, ontologies and literature mining.

May 2011

[Attended] Data-intensive Paleobiological Research using PaleoDB (Edinburgh, NeSC)

Learning statistics, accounting for uncertainty, and methods of querying PaleoDB data.

Apr. 2011

[Taught At] Postgraduate-led Four-Day R Training Course (University of Bath)

Teaching data import/export, data manipulation, visualization, basic statistics & scripting

Aug. 2010

Popular Media
Nature News, Ive been interviewed for quotes on:
Data sharing in palaeontology 2011-03-11 ; Open Access 2013-02-06 ; Text-mining 2013-03-20 ;
Careers advice 2013-03-27 ; Secret publishing deals 2014-06-26 ; A PLOS ONE paper 2015-01-29 ;
Sparrhos literature recommendation & discovery service 2014-09-03
Journal of Ecology podcast
An interview, recorded by Scott Chamberlain on open data and open access

Apr. 2013

BBC Radio 3, live-broadcast debate on Open Access

Night Waves programme with MP David Willetts & Dame Janet Finch

Oct. 2012

Voice of Russia UK radio show

Discussing RCUK Open Access policy and academic publishing

Aug. 2012

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