Our Team

Howard Ratner

Executive Director, CHORUS

Howard is the driving force behind CHOR Inc. and its first service, CHORUS.  Over the past two decades, he played a key role in developing innovative technology solutions that have transformed scholarly communications. He co-founded and chaired the not-for-profit ORCID – Open Researcher and Contributor ID system, and was active in the establishment of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and the founding and technical development of CrossRef and CLOCKSS. He was President of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) from 2014-2015 and served on its board from 2010-2012 and 2013-2016. He is an active member of the Metadata 2020 and SCHOLIX initiatives and the STM Future Labs. Howard received the NFAIS Miles Conrad Memorial Lecture Award in 2012. He is a frequent speaker on digital production and new technology themes

Before joining CHOR, Howard was Chief Technology Officer, Executive Vice-President, for Nature Publishing Group where he was in charge of global web and mobile development and operations, content management, production and manufacturing, and information technology across all NPG products.  Howard also held positions at Springer and John Wiley & Sons.

Tara Packer

Program Management

Tara Packer serves as CHORUS Program Manager. She joined CHORUS by way of Nature, where she led the Author and Reviewer Services and Manuscript Systems team. She has over 30 years experience in digital and print product delivery, as well as system development and technology management. She has held positions at The Scientific World and Academic Press, where she served as Managing Editor for multiple journals, managing the peer-review processes, content management systems, and website design and implementations.

Susan Pastore

Business Development Director

Susan serves as Business Development Director of CHORUS. She is charged with the business development and implementation of new services, driving membership growth; and building fundraising activities.

As a longtime member of the information services community, Susan has more than 25 years of experience in sales and sales management to libraries, research organizations and academic institutions around the world. She has sold content, databases, library management systems and services to the global information community.

Prior to joining CHORUS, Susan was Director of International Sales at the American Chemical Society managing the sales and distribution staff and strategy for the ACS international sales and market penetration efforts. Most recently, she served as Head of Enterprise Sales at Macmillan Digital Science. She has also held various positions at Kluwer Academic Publishers and Ex Libris.

Mark Robertson

Asia-Pacific Business Development Director

Mark has joined the CHORUS team to grow our activity in Asia Pacific (APAC) with funders, publishers and institutions. For 36 years Mark lead Wiley’s and Blackwell Publishing’s research journal program in APAC as Publishing Director with overall country responsibility for Australia and Japan as Executive Director. He now brings this experience and networks in the region to CHORUS.  Mark was key to our recent expansion beyond the US helping instigate the new CHORUS partnerships in Japan and the pilot in Australia while with Wiley.

His other contributions to the publishing industry have included Board appointments with the Copyright Agency Limited, the Australian Publishers Association (APA) and the International Association of STM Publishers (STM), forming and chairing the Scholarly and Journal Committee for the APA and the Japan chapter for STM.