Nicole Allen is the Director of Open Education for SPARC. In this role she leads SPARC’s work on the issue area of Open Education, with a dual focus on public policy and engaging the library community to advance this issue on campus.

Sarah Baker is a User Services Librarian and an Assistant Professor at California State University, Los Angeles. She has an MLIS from San Jose State University. Her diverse research interests include educational technology, student information seeking behavior, open access issues, and young adult literature.

Chealsye Bowley is the Scholarly Communication Librarian at Texas Woman's University where she works with the campus community to increase understanding of Open Access and author's rights, and advocate for sustainable publishing models. Her own research is within sociology of science and focuses on the publishing practices and identities of academic scientists. She is also the Communications Lead for the Open Access Button.

Warren Burggren is a Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of North Texas, a research intensive university of 37,000 students just north of Dallas, Texas, USA.  He received his B.Sc. degree from the University of Calgary, Canada, and his PhD from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.  His career as a researcher and educator has included faculty positions at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the University of North Texas.  Additionally, Burggren has been a visiting researcher at universities in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Mexico, Panama and Taiwan, and has given hundreds of hundreds of invited lectures, including fifteen plenary lecturers, in more than a dozen countries.  

Douglas Burns is the GIS Librarian at the University of North Texas. In this role, he provides reference and technical support to students and faculty. One current project is getting a GIS Data Repository up and running at UNT. He is also actively engaged in community outreach programs in Denton to support nonprofit services using GIS. Previously, he worked at an engineering firm supporting environmental permitting, cultural resource management and infrastructure projects.

Jayati Chaudhuri, User Services Librarian, has an MLIS from the University of Rhode Island and a Master’s degree in Geography from University of Calcutta, India.  Jayati started her career at University of Tennessee Libraries as a Minority Resident Librarian and later she worked at the University of Northern Colorado for 6 years as a science librarian. Jayati contributes articles to Indian newspapers at her leisure time. She also translated library pages in different languages to make use of her multilingual skill.

Nancy has over 20 years of experience working at the nexus of publishing, higher education and technology. Her firm, BlueSky to BluePrint, helps publishers, librarians and other innovative project leaders to define, test and refine assumptions about new and existing programs and products.  While at Ithaka S+R, Nancy’s team developed provocative and insightful studies on funding models and sustainability strategies for digital initiatives, including dozens of case studies in sustainability, spanning US, Canada, UK and beyond. 

Sarah Melton is the Digital Projects Coordinator at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. As a digital humanities practitioner, Sarah is interested in digital publishing and open source advocacy movements. She is the digital publishing strategist of the open access journal Southern Spaces, a journal about the regions, places, and cultures of the US South and their global connections. In addition, Sarah is a managing editor of the Atlanta Studies Network, an open access, digital publication and resource hub for research about the city of Atlanta. She is also the community and advocacy coordinator for the Open Access Button.

Dan Morgan is Digital Science Publisher at the University of California Press, and the Publisher of Collabra, the Press’ new value-sharing OA journal. He joined UC Press in June 2014 to focus on mission-driven, not-for-profit, digital initiatives. He has worked in scholarly publishing for over 13 years, in publishing management, research, open access, and strategy roles. All of that time was at Elsevier where he ended up the head of the Psychology and Cognitive Sciences journals department, then Senior Manager for Open Access and other outreach for North America. He is a passionate advocate for open access, open science, and advancing scholarly communication. When he isn't thinking about Collabra he enjoys playing guitars in bands, films, craft cocktails, espionage novels, and dogs.

Anjum Najmi is Research Librarian for Student Engagement at Stephen F Austin State University where she provides instructional support for students, faculty and academic departments to support interdisciplinary research and discovery. She is responsible for developing, implementing and assessing library instruction services with pedagogical practices connected to the ACRL information literacy framework to promote digital fluency.

Prof. Nosek received a Ph.D. in from Yale University in 2002 and is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia. In 2007, he received early career awards from the International Social Cognition Network (ISCON) and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). He co-founded Project Implicit, an Internet-based multi-university collaboration of research and education about implicit cognition—thoughts and feelings that exist outside of awareness or control. Prof. Nosek investigates the gap between values and practices—such as when behavior is influenced by factors other than one's intentions and goals.

Daniel O'Donnell is a professor at the University of Lethbridge where he teaches Digital Humanities, Old English, and Medieval Literature. He is founding chair of Global Outlook Digital Humanities, Editor-in-chief of Digital Humanities / Le Champ Numérique, Vice President of Force11.org, and PI of the Visionary Cross Project and the Lethbridge Journal Incubator. In the past he has served as founding chair of Digital Medievalist, chair of the Text Encoding Initiative, and co-President of the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities.

Dr Rufus Pollock is Founder and President of Open Knowledge, an international non-profit using advocacy, technology and training to unlock information and see it used to create insight that drives change. He was formerly a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow and a Mead Fellow in Economics at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge and is currently an adviser on open data to several governments. He has worked extensively as a scholar, activist and technologist on the social, legal and technical challenges around the creation and sharing of knowledge.

Phillip Reynolds is the Scholarly Communications Librarian with the Center for Digital Scholarship. Phil has served as the Head of the University Web Development Office, and in the library's Research and Instructional Services department as a Library Liaison, and as the Assistant Director of the East Texas Research Center, the university archives and special collections department.

Allyson Rodriguez is the Strategic Collections Librarian at the University of North Texas where she works as part of the Collection Development Department. Her focus is on conceptualizing, creating, and maintaining open-access and born-digital resources to support the university’s curriculum, faculty, and staff.

Prof. Rooryck is an expert on the syntax of Romance languages and has served as executive editor of the journal Lingua, published by Elsevier, since 1998. In October 2015, he and five co-editors resigned their positions, effective at the end of 2015, as did all 31 members of the editorial board, in protest of the publisher’s policies on pricing and copyright.

Joslyn Sandlin is a University of North Texas Master of Library Science student and a Library Assistant at Texas Woman's University. She attended Texas A&M University--Commerce where she earned her Bachelor of Arts in English. She lives in Denton with her cat, Naran, and hopes to work to educate and empower young people throughout her career.

Kevin Stranack is the Community Services & Learning Coordinator for SFU Library’s Public Knowledge Project. His responsibilities are currently focused on leading the UX redesign process for the project’s open source software, managing the MacArthur-funded Open Access Publishing Cooperative Study (2015-2017), and directing the PKP School for building open publishing capacity. He is also an adjunct faculty member at the University of British Columbia’s School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies. Kevin received his Master of Library and Information Studies from the University of British Columbia in 2002 and his Master of Adult Education from the University of Regina in 2013.

Dillon Wackerman is the Head of the Center for Digital Scholarship at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he is actively involved in the development and management of the SFA ScholarWorks, the University's institutional repository. Dillon's recent work has focused on the library as publisher, the relationship between non-traditional research formats and institutional repositories and also 3D models and content management systems, which draws upon issues concerning incorporation, feasibility and function.

Tyler Walters is the Dean of University Libraries, Virginia Tech. Previously Walters was the Associate Dean of the Library and Information Center, Georgia Institute of Technology. He was a 2008-2010 Fellow in the Association of Research Libraries'€™ Research Libraries Leadership Fellows program. Walters is a founding Board member of the Educopia Institute and Steering Committee member of the MetaArchive Cooperative. He serves on many professional bodies such as an elected member of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (Library of Congress), Steering Committee for the International Conference on Open Repositories, Interim Governing Board for the Unified Digital Formats Registry, Editorial Board of the International Journal of Digital Curation, and the Advisory Board for the Digital Information Management program, University of Arizona.