Steering committee
Subbiah Arunachulam
Arun is a Distinguished Fellow with the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, and an ardent advocate of open access to science and scholarship. In the past Arun had been an editor of scientific journals, laboratory researcher, teacher of information science and secretary of the Indian Academy of Sciences. His research interests include scientometrics and ICT-enabled development. He is a trustee of the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development and Voicing the Voiceless Foundation and a member of the International Advisory Board of IICD, The Hague. He is on the editorial boards of several journals.
Dr Leslie Carr
Leslie Carr is a Senior Lecturer in the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia group at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics & Computer Science. Since the 1980's he has experimented with multimedia information systems, novel ways of constructing hypertexts, digital libraries and knowledge management systems. Les is a fellow of the Web Science Research initiative and co-director of the Web Science Doctoral Training Centre, the technical director of the EPrints Repository software team and was chair of Open Repositories 2008 conference. He is the manager of the ECS repository and blogs about the experience as RepositoryMan.
Heather Joseph
Heather Joseph joined SPARC as director in July 2005. Heather is responsible for SPARC’s overall program development. She determines and implements SPARC goals; leads SPARC’s advocacy efforts to support widespread adoption of open access to scholarly research; identifies and negotiates partnerships with scholarly publishers; builds coalitions of support; and generally represents the interests and values of SPARC to the stakeholders in scholarly communication.
Before joining SPARC, the culmination of Heather’s career in scholarly publishing was serving as President and Chief Operating Officer for BioOne, a SPARC publisher partner. Under her leadership, BioOne focused on helping small scholarly societies in the biological sciences remain independent and competitive in the electronic arena, while maintaining academy friendly access policies. For her work in successfully launching and establishing BioOne, Heather was awarded the 2002 Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers’ Award for Services to Not-for-Profit Publishing. She also served as elected president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing for the 2004–2005 term.
Iryna Kuchma
Iryna Kuchma is an eIFL-Open Access program manager. In the eIFL.net her responsibilities include advocacy of open access to research results and support in developing open access policies, training and support in setting up and interconnecting open repositories, organising workshops and other knowledge sharing and capacity building events. Previously Iryna Kuchma worked as an Information program manager at the International Renaissance Foundation (part of Soros Foundation network in Ukraine) and coordinated the Arts and Culture Program there. She has advocated in Ukraine for open access issues leading to setting up institutional and subject repositories and introducing the law of Ukraine on open access to publicly funded research.
Professor Peter Suber
Peter Suber is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, Senior R
esearcher at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), and Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College. His Ph.D. in philosophy and J.D. are both from Northwestern University. He edits the Open Access News blog, writes the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, and was co-founder of the Open Access Directory. He was the principal drafter of the Budapest Open Access Initiative and sits on the Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation, the Steering Committee of the Scientific Information Working Group of the U.N. World Summit on the Information Society, and the boards of several other groups devoted to open access, scholarly communication, and the information commons. He has been active in promoting open access for many years through his research, speaking, and writing. For more information, see his home page
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/
Advisory Board
Gerald Beasley
Gerald Beasley is University Librarian and Chair of the Open Access Working Group at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. Beasley has masters degrees from Oxford University and the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at University College, London, England. He has been Head Librarian at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal (1999-2004) and Director of the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York (2004-8). For more information, see Canadian Who's Who (U. of Toronto, 2010).
Via a Senate Resolution on Open Access passed in April 2010, Concordia became the first Canadian university to adopt an institution-wide "green" OA mandate. Open access was also celebrated as a major theme for events and panel discussions at the Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Canada's largest annual academic gathering, which Concordia hosted one month later. Beasley continues to promote open access initiatives on the Concordia campus and beyond. Contact him at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Robert Kiley
Robert Kiley is Head of Digital Services at the Wellcome Library (Wellcome Trust). In this role Robert is responsible for developing and implementing a strategy to deliver electronic services to the Library’s users – both in person and remote. Key developments over the past few years include the Medical Journals Backfiles Digitisation Project, developing a Web Archiving programme, and ensuring that the Library’s automated systems are fully interoperable.
Currently, Robert is taking a leading role in the implementation of the Trust’s open access policy and as such is responsible for liaising with publishers with regard to the Trust’s OA policy. Work has commenced on exploring the possibility of transforming UK PubMed Central (http://ukpmc.ac.uk ) into a single, Europe-wide OA repository for biomedical research papers. Robert is also helping to scope out a major digitisation programme to provide free, universal access to the Wellcome Library’s unique and important collections.
Barbara Kirsop
Following an early career in microbiology, Barbara Kirsop became the Curator of the UK National Collection of Yeast Cultures (NCYC) at the Institute for Food Research, Norwich, UK. She was active in the UK Federation for Culture Collections, co-founded the European Culture Collections Organisation and subsequently became the President of ICSU’s World Federation for Culture Collections, serving in that capacity between 1986 – 1994. Following retirement from the NCYC, she co-founded Bioline Publications, a Brazil/UK non-profit partnership providing open access and global exposure to bioscience journals published in developing countries (now transferred to the University of Toronto as a Canada/Brazil service and renamed Bioline International). In 1996, she co-founded the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (EPT) that works with publishers and research authors in developing countries to support access to and distribution of research publications. The EPT is particularly concerned with raising awareness of the benefits of open access, and maintains a web site and blog. Barbara is currently a Trustee and the Secretary of the EPT.
EPT Web Site http://www.epublishingtrust.org
EPT Blog http://www.epublishingtrust.blogspot.com
Melissa Hagemann
Melissa Hagemann manages the Open Access Initiative within the Information Program of the Open Society Institute and Soros Foundations Network. Since convening the meeting in December 2001 that led to the development of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, OSI has been active within the Open Access movement, which advocates for the free online availability of peer-reviewed literature.
Melissa has held several positions within OSI, including managing OSI's Regional Library Program (1995-1997) in Budapest, as well as the Science Journals Donation Program (1998-2001). She currently sits on the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia as well as other leading open content projects, and has served on the Member of Experts' Group of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Global Library Initiative. She was profiled as a SPARC Innovator in December 2006 for her work within the Open Access movement.
Prior to joining OSI, Hagemann received an MSc from the London School of Economics and worked in the European Parliament in Brussels.
Dr Mark Patterson
Having graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1982, Mark Patterson obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester in the laboratory of John Rosamond, where he worked on yeast cell cycle genetics. Mark then moved into human genetics and carried out post-doctoral research in the laboratories of Kay Davies (Oxford University) and Gilbert Chu (Stanford University, USA). In 1994, after four years as a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, Mark made the move into scientific publishing as the editor of Trends in Genetics. In 1999, he was appointed as the biology reviews editor at Nature and was subsequently involved in the launch of the Nature Reviews Journals as the editor of Nature Reviews Genetics. Mark joined the Public Library of Science in 2003. He established the European PLoS office, helped launch PLoS Biology and several other PLoS Journals, and was appointed as the Director of Publishing in 2005.
Dr Eloy Rodrigues
Eloy Rodrigues is the Director of the University of Minho Documentation Services. In recent years he has devoted much of his work to the development of digital libraries, education and training of librarians and library users and Open Access. In 2003, Eloy Rodrigues led the project to create RepositoriUM, the institutional repository of Minho University, and he has directed the project ever since. At the end of 2004 he drafted the formal policy of Minho University on open access to its scientific output. In 2008 Eloy Rodrigues proposed and led the RCAAP project, and he’s currently leading the second phase of that project.
The other main focus of Eloy's current activity is promoting and advocating Open Access and institutional repositories in Portugal and the Portuguese-speaking countries, namely through the ALemPLus (Acesso Livre em Países Lusófonos) initiative. Eloy Rodrigues has also extensive experience as invited speaker and trainer on OA and repositories in Portugal, Spain, Brazil, Mozambique, Czech Republic and UK.
Professor Xiaolin Zhang
Professor Stevan Harnad
STEVAN HARNAD was born in Hungary, did his undergraduate work at McGill University and his graduate work at Princeton University. Currently Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science at Universite du Quebec a Montreal and Professor in Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University, UK, his research is on categorisation, communication and cognition. Founder and Editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences http://www.bbsonline.org/ (a paper journal published by
Cambridge University Press), he is Past President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, External Member of the Hungarian Academy of Science, and author and contributor to over 300 publications, including Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech (NY Acad Sci 1976), Lateralization in the Nervous System (Acad Press 1977), Peer Commentary on Peer Review: A Case Study in Scientific Quality Control (CUP 1982), Categorical Perception: The Groundwork of Cognition (CUP 1987), The Selection of Behavior: The Operant Behaviorism of BF Skinner: Comments and Consequences (CUP 1988), Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing (1995), Essays on the Foundations and Fringes of Cognition (in prep) and Cognition Distributed: How Cognitive Technology Extends Our Minds (Benjamins 2008)
Professor Harnad is a leading member of the EPrints research team at Southampton University which has been at the forefront in the critical developments in OA across the past decade. The team:
-- hosted one of the first OA journals, Psycoloquy (since 1994)
-- hosted the first journal OA preprint archive, BBSPrints (since 1994)
-- formulated the first OA self-archiving proposal (1994
-- founded one of the first central OA Repositories, Cogprints (1997)
-- founded the American Scientist Open Access Forum (1998)
-- created GNU EPrints, the first software for creating OAI-compliant Institutional Repositories (now in use at over 200 universities
worldwide) (2000)
-- co-drafted the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) and its self-archiving FAQ (2001)
-- created the first citation impact-measuring search engine, Citebase (2003)
-- designed the first OAI standardised CV Template for UK Research Assessment (2002) and proposed that the RAE convert to metrics (2003), which the RAE announced it would do 2007
-- compiled the BOAI EPrints Software Handbook (2003)
-- formulated and promoted the model self-archiving mandate for departments and institutions, now being adopted worldwide (2003)
-- created and maintains ROAR, the Registry of Open Access Repositories worldwide (2003)
-- collaborated in the creation and maintenance of the ROMEO directory of journals' OA self-archiving policies, (2004)
-- created and maintains ROARMAP, the Registry of Open Access Mandates (2004)
-- piloted the paradigm of collecting, analysing and disseminating data on the magnitude of the OA impact advantage and the growth of OA across all disciplines worldwide (2004)
-- consult worldwide on institutional and funder Open Access policy-making (2006)
-- designed the methodology for validating RAE metrics and using them to measure and maximise research usage, impact and productivity (2007)
Professor Arthur Sale
John Wilbanks
As VP of Science, John Wilbanks runs the Science Commons project at Creative Commons. He came to Creative Commons from a Fellowship at the World Wide Web Consortium in Semantic Web for Life Sciences. Previously, he founded and led to acquisition Incellico, a bioinformatics company that built semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical research & development. Previously, John was the first Assistant Director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and also worked in US politics as a legislative aide to
U.S. Representative Fortney (Pete) Stark . John holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Tulane University and studied modern letters at the Universite de Paris IV (La Sorbonne). He is a research affiliate at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the project on Mathematics and Computation. John also serves on the Advisory Boards of the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central, the Open Knowledge Foundation, the Open Knowledge Definition, and the International Advisory Board of the Prix Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities awards. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Fedora Commons digital repository organization.
Dr John Willinsky
Professor John Willinsky is Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University and director of the Public Knowledge Project at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University, as well as Stanford. Much of his work, including his book, The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (MIT Press, 2006), as well as PKP's open source software for journals and conferences, is free to download through the project's website (http://pkp.sfu.ca).
Dr. Hussein Suleman
Hussein Suleman is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Cape Town, where he directs the research of the Digital Libraries Laboratory. He completed his undergraduate degrees and MSc at the then University of Durban-Westville and, with a Fulbright scholarship, finished a PhD at Virginia Tech in the USA in 2002, in the area of component-based digital libraries. He actively advocates for Open Access in South Africa, and is a current board member of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD), which promotes/supports the adoption of electronic theses and dissertations and generally digital libraries worldwide. Hussein's main research interests are in digital libraries, information retrieval, Internet technology and high performance computing.
