Frances Pinter Career
- Founder, SUPRR (Supporting Ukrainian Publishing Resilience and Recovery)
- Executive Chair – Central European University Press
- Visiting Senior Fellow – London School of Economics
- Senior Research Fellow – School of Advanced Study, University of London
- CEO Manchester University Press
- Founder – Knowledge Unlatched
- Founding Publisher – Bloomsbury Academic
- CEO International House Trust
- Publishing Director – the Soros Foundation/Open Society Institute
- Founder of Pinter Publishers
- Research Officer at Oxford University
At the age of 23 I was the first woman to establish her own publishing company in the UK. Pinter Publishers became a leader in the social sciences. We launched one of the first environmental studies imprints Belhaven Press and acquired the humanities imprint Leicester University Press.
After 20 years I was invited by philanthropist and financier George Soros to devise multi-million dollar programmes supporting publishing and education in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union after the fall of Communism.
I've enjoyed international experience as an entrepreneur and leader in the non-profit and commercial sectors. I've established companies, and advised others on how to set up new operations and transform existing ones.
At the turn of the last century I took a short break from publishing and was CEO of International House Trust, which supports language training around the world.
I've been a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics, acted as consultant to Creative Commons and ran a research project on alternative licencing practices in African countries for IDRC. I also ran a project looking into the international intellectual property reform agenda funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
Bloomsbury Academic, a new imprint of Bloomsbury Publishers, appointed me in 2008 as its founding publisher where I was also the publisher of the digitised Winston Churchill Archive collection online, launched in 2012.
I completed a three-year position as CEO of Manchester University Press and continued to work on Open Access issues on the boards of Knowledge Unlatched that I founded in 2012.
In 2020 I returned to the Central European University Press which I founded in the nineties as executive chair and where I launched a new open access initiative called Opening the Future.
Scholarly Publishing is in my blood and I am on the advisory boards and committees of several small university and mission driven presses on four continents.
In 2022 I instigated a multimillion dollar campaign to make more of the science around climate change and biodiversity available as open access.
In 2023 I set up SUPRR an initiative to Support Ukrainian Publishing Resilience and Recovery.
I am now working on a history of academic publishing and incorporating into it the research I conducted on book burning (the antithesis of everything academic publishing stands for) while a research fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and now with an institutional connection at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.
September 2007: Running for REDRESS, a human rights organisation that works to combat torture and to provide legal assistance to torture survivors for more info visit REDRESS