Dr. Lorraine Haricombe is the Vice Provost and Director of the University of Texas Libraries at the University of Texas at Austin. She previously served as Dean of the Kansas University Libraries (2006-14), where she was the Provost’s designate for implementing the Open Access policy at KU, the first public university in the USA where faculty adopted an institutional policy on Open Access.  

Haricombe holds doctoral and master’s degrees in library and information science from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.  She has published and presented widely on the strategic importance of open access for the academic enterprise, and on the transformational role of library professionals in the modern research university. 

Haricombe has served in the past as president of Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) and as chair of the Advisory Council of PubMed Central. She is currently chair of the Steering Committee of the Scholarly Publications and Academic Resources Council (SPARC) and was recently appointed to the Board of Directors for the Association of Research Libraries.  Since joining UT in 2015, Haricombe has worked closely with stakeholders and advocates on campus to raise awareness and to begin develop policies to support the growth of OA at the university.