The bepress community has always played an instrumental role in shaping bepress's direction, through informal pilot groups, user meetings, and close working relationships. Over the past months, the community has called for increased transparency and accountability; in response, bepress is pleased to announce its first formal Advisory Board. The initiative aims to give the library community a more direct line of communication and influence into all things bepress. We are thrilled to finally have the resources to make this possible.
The eighteen board members will meet for the first time at ALA Midwinter. The board, which comprises bepress users from all different sizes and types of institutions, will report back to the community throughout the year with recommendations to benefit bepress users and to keep bepress accountable. Initial mandates to discuss will be:
- Retain, refine, and strengthen the core guiding principles and commitments that bepress needs to make to its users
- Identify directions for product innovation and provide feedback on upcoming product development
- Help bepress scope and advocate for initiatives to populate bepress repositories with full-text articles using sources both within and outside of Elsevier's product portfolio
- Support the bepress community in growing its open access collections
Advisory board members:
- Amy Badertscher, Associate Vice President of Library and Information Services and Library Director at Kenyon College
- Todd Bruns, Institutional Repository Librarian at Eastern Illinois University
- Sheila Cheung, Senior Assistant Librarian at Lingnan University
- Stephanie Davis-Kahl, Scholarly Communications Librarian at Illinois Wesleyan University
- Lee Dotson, Digital Initiatives Librarian at University of Central Florida
- April Gilbert, Institutional Repository Coordinator at San Jose State University
- Isaac Gilman, Director of Libraries at Pacific University Oregon
- Marci Hoffman, Associate Director of the Law Library, University of California, Berkeley
- Heather James, Scholarly Communications Librarian at Marquette University
- Daniel Kipnis, Life Sciences Librarian at Rowan University
- Anne Linton, Director, Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library at George Washington University
- Deborah Ludwig, Dean of Libraries at Fort Hays State University
- Michael Organ, Manager – Repository Services at University of Wollongong
- Paul Royster, Coordinator of Scholarly Communication at University of Nebraska—Lincoln
- Joyce Rumery, Dean of Libraries at The University of Maine
- Roger Weaver, Scholarly Communications Librarian at Missouri University of Science and Technology
- Sheila Yeh, Assistant University Librarian at The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
- Janet Zimmerman, Medical Library Director at Beaumont Health
How can you participate? Stay tuned for a community webinar for bepress users after the board's first meeting at ALA Midwinter. This will be an opportunity to hear the board members' goals and provide feedback.
