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 Université du Québec à Montréal and Professor in Electronics and Computer Science at University of Southampton, UK, his research is on categorisation, communication and cognition. Founder and Editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences (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 Pr 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)

David Shulenburger is APLU’s first Vice President for Academic Affairs.  His immediate areas of concentration are on accountability and assessment in higher education and on the economics of higher education. Before joining A۰P۰L۰U in June, 2006, David Shulenburger was Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor of the University of Kansas. 

He served there as chief academic officer for thirteen years.  He came to the University in 1974 as an assistant professor and now holds the emeritus professor title. He received his Ph.D. and Masters degrees from the University of Illinois and his undergraduate degree from Lenoir Rhyne College.  He previously served as a faculty member at Clemson University and as a labor economist for the U.S. Department of Labor.

R. Michael Tanner is Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Provost Tanner joined UIC in 2002 after a thirty year career at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he was Executive Vice Chancellor for nine years, serving as chief operating officer for a campus of 11,500 students. In 2000, Dr. Tanner led the creation of the University of California Silicon Valley Center, a satellite campus for 2,000 students at the NASA Research Park in the NASA Ames Research Center, in the heart of Silicon Valley. He holds bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

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.

David Eltis is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History, Emory University. He has a Ph D from the University of Rochester, (1979). He is the author of Economic Growth and The Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 1987) which won the British Trevor Reese Memorial Prize, and The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, 2000), awarded the Frederick Douglass Prize, the John Ben Snow Prize, and the Wesley-Logan Prize. He is also winner of the John T. Hubbell Prize for best article in the journal Civil War History, in 2008.Currently co-editor of the Transatlantic Slave Trade database at www.slavevoyages.org, he is also the principal investigator of a two year NEH funded collaborative project on the origins of Africans pulled into the transatlantic slave trade.

Liz Milewicz holds a post-doctoral fellowship at Emory University, where she manages the NEH- funded African Origins Portal, an extension of Voyages that will engage public assistance in discovering the ethno-linguistic origins of Africans caught up in the slave trade. As a Research Associate with Emory University Libraries, she has worked with the DLF on inter-institutional efforts to promote use of OAI, best practices for shareable metadata and MODS, and assessment activities. She holds an MLIS and an MA in English from The University of Alabama and a PhD from Emory University, where her dissertation project explored the changing culture and soundscape of academic libraries.

Dwayne K. Buttler serves as the first Evelyn J. Schneider Endowed Chair for Scholarly Communication at the University of Louisville and holds a faculty appointment as a Professor in University Libraries. Much of his work focuses on the complex interrelationship of copyright law, licensing, and activities at the core of the university and library mission—teaching, learning, and scholarly communication.

Professor Buttler earned a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree from the Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis and holds a BA in Telecommunications from Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. Dwayne teaches mass communication law at UofL and leads numerous invited presentations on copyright and scholarly communication for administrators, faculty, librarians, and scholars in the library and the higher education communities. 

Heather Joseph has served as the Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) since 2005. In that capacity, she works to support broadening access to the results of scholarly research through enabling open access publishing, archiving and policies on a local, national and international level.

Ms. Joseph is also the convener of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, a coalition of universities, libraries, patients advocacy groups, consumer groups, and student organizations who work to ensure that results of publicly funded research are openly accessible to the public. The group has been a leading voice on U.S. open access legislation, including landmark policy issued by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Sanford G. Thatcher retired at the end of June 2009 after twenty years as Director of Penn State University Press. His most significant administrative achievement, besides stabilizing the finances of the Press, was to forge an excellent working relationship with the Penn State Libraries, which resulted in  the joint launching of the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing in Spring 2005 followed by the administrative merger of the Press into the Libraries in December of that year. Always working as an acquiring editor at the same time, he sponsored over 600 books for publication in humanities and social sciences (including a book on Mexico by UNT History Professor Aaron Navarro). His twenty-two year career earlier at Princeton University Press, culminating in his appointment as Editor-in-Chief in 1985, resulted in the acquisition of over 800 titles.

Karen Hunter is Senior Vice President at Elsevier.  With Elsevier since 1976, she has been involved for much of that time in corporate strategy and with the journal migration from print to electronic.  The earliest e-efforts were in the late 1970s and she was the team leader in creating ScienceDirect, Elsevier's principal online platform, in the mid-1990s. She has specialized in the research library market and in policies affecting that market.

Deborah Kahn has been closely involved with the changing scholarly communications landscape since, whilst Journals Publisher for Chapman & Hall in the early 1990s, she was responsible for publishing one of the first electronic journals -  launched as a beta test of Adobe Acrobat.  As Product Development Director within the Thomson Corporation (now Thomson Reuters) and subsequently whilst running Publishing Directions, a consultancy serving the publishing industry, she has helped organizations transform their information products to meet the needs of scientists and academics in a rapidly changing information world.

Clifford Lynch has been the Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) since July 1997.  CNI, jointly sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries and Educause, includes about 200 member organizations concerned with the use of information technology and networked information to enhance scholarship and intellectual productivity. Prior to joining CNI, Lynch spent 18 years at the University of California Office of the President, the last 10 as Director of Library Automation. Lynch, who holds a Ph.D.