SPARC 2014 Open Access Meeting Speakers Accounced

For immediate release
January 16, 2014

For more information, contact:
Stacie Lemick
stacie [at] arl [dot] org

Dr. Philip Bourne to keynote; meeting will explore intersection of “open” movements.

Washington, DC – SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) is pleased to announce a strong slate of speakers for its upcoming Open Access Meeting, to be held March 3 and 4 in Kansas City, MO. Dr. Philip Bourne, the newly-appointed Associate Director for Data Science at the National Institutes of Health, will deliver the opening keynote address.

There is growing momentum on many fronts of the burgeoning movement towards "open." Advances in the areas of open access to articles, data, and educational resources have grown exponentially since the last SPARC Open Access Meeting was convened in 2012.  As this push for greater openness continues, these three fronts are intersecting in interesting and potentially transformative ways.  The 2014 SPARC Open Access Meeting will delve into this theme of "convergence”.

The opening keynote will tie together what is happening in these "open" movements from a practical and policy standpoint; how this will directly impact academia, the research community, and society-at-large; and examine where the larger “open movement” might be headed.  Dr. Bourne is uniquely qualified to lead this discussion.  Prior to joining the NIH earlier this year, he was the Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Industry Alliances of the Office of Research Affairs at the University of California San Diego.  Dr. Bourne also served as Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at UCSD. He has also been the Associate Director of the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB) Protein Data Bank (PDB).

Dr. Bourne has worked on open access, open data and open educational resources from the perspective of an administrator, a researcher, and now in his role at NIH, as a research funder.  He has long been committed to furthering the free dissemination of science through new models of publishing and better integration and subsequent dissemination of data and results. 

The Program Committee is also pleased to announce our full roster of speakers for our program: 

Advocacy & Policy

• Donna Arnett, Chair, Department of Epidemiology, University of Alabama-Birmingham School of Public Health
• José Cotta, Head of Unit for Digital Science, European Commission Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content & Technology
• Nick Shockey, Director of Student Advocacy, SPARC
• Timothy Vollmer, Public Policy Manager, Creative Commons

Blue Sky & The Big Picture

• Brett Bobley, Director, Office of Digital Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities
• Kelvin Droegemeier, Vice President for Research, University of Oklahoma
• Dave Ernst, Executive Director, Open Academics Textbook Initiative
• David Wiley, Co-Founder and Chief Academic Officer, Lumen Learning

Practical Implementation

• Richard Baraniuk, Founder and Director, Connexions and OpenStax College, Rice University
• Cameron Neylon, Advocacy Director, Public Library of Science
• Terri Shelton, Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development University of North Carolina at Greensboro
• Herbert Van de Sompel, Digital Library Research & Prototyping, Los Alamos National Library

Professional Development

• Connie Broughton, Director of eLearning and Open Education, Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges
• Jill Emery, Collection Development Librarian, Portland State University
• Erin McKiernan, Researcher in Medical Sciences, National Institute of Public Health, Mexico
• Jeffrey Vitter, Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor, The University of Kansas

Full biographies and photos for each of our speakers will be available shortly.

SPARC is also accepting proposals for our 2014 Innovation Fair through January 17, 2014.  Please visit the submission page. 

The SPARC Open Access Meeting is generously supported by: @mire, bepress, Co-action Publishing, Public Library of Science (PLOS), Symplectic and University of Kansas. For more information on sponsorship opportunities please contact Stacie Lemick at [email protected]

Register now! Early bird rates expire January 17, 2014.

Hotel reservations are available for the conference rate of $144 per night and must be made by February 6, 2014.

For more information, visit the meeting website.

###

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) is a library membership organization that promotes expanded sharing of scholarship. SPARC believes that faster and wider sharing of outputs of the research process increases the impact of research, fuels the advancement of knowledge, and increases the return on research investments. SPARC is supported by a membership of over 800 academic and research libraries worldwide. SPARC is on the Web at http://www.sparc.arl.org