About John Cox

John Cox is a publisher of 40 years experience. He is a lawyer by training and has spent his career in publishing, twenty years of which were spent as chief executive of a variety of publishing organizations. He has maintained his interest in legal issues that affect academic, scholarly and professional publishing, particularly in intellectual property law relating to licensing both individual institutional libraries and library consortia, and the commercial issues arising from the application of copyright and contract law in academic and scholarly book and journal publishing. He has considerable experience of running publishing businesses and of mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures, and brings an expertise in company structure and organization to his consultancy work.

His career started at IBIS, The Open University and Butterworths. He has spent a total of 20 years as Managing Director of publishing organisations at the OU, Scholastic, BH Blackwell and Carfax. At Carfax he worked on the acquisition of Publishers Communications Group, Current Medical Literature and Telemed and the establishment of CatchWord. He continued to manage Carfax after its acquisition by Routledge, and was a member of the Routledge Group Board. He moved on in 1998 when Routledge itself became part of Taylor & Francis, in order to set up John Cox Associates.

He has been active in public life as Chair of the UK’s Air Transport Users Council, and currently as Chair of ATIPAC, an advisory committee of the Civil Aviation Authority. He brings his experience of a different industry and of lessons to be learned to bear in his work as a consultant to the publishing industry.