Ms. Maria Cotera is a former academic librarian with a degree in library and information sciences from University of Granada, Spain. She is a Chartered Member of CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in the United Kingdom, and a Standing Committee Member of SCORE, the scholarly communications Section of IFLA: the International Federation of Library and Information Associations and Institutions, where she has been an active member for over twenty years.

Since March 2022 she is Partnerships Development Manager at Figshare. Maria supports open science and responsible research by developing strategic relationships which bring Figshare data and institutional repositories to universities and research institutes across Africa, the Middle East and Southern and Eastern Europe.