Anita de Waard has a background in experimental physics. She joined Elsevier as publisher in physics and neurology in 1988, and currently works as a VP for research collaborations, with a focus on establishing collaborations between Elsevier and academic groups in information and computer science. From January 2006 onwards, she has been working on this topic as a part-time researcher at the University of Utrecht, funded by a Casimir project grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. She is a co-founder of Force11, a multi-stakeholder organisation to invent the future of scholarly communications, and since 2020 has helped lead a series of conferences on Scholarly Document Processing. She currently works on research collaborations with academic and research partners across the globe.