Subbiah Arunachalam (M S Swaminathan Research Foundation)

Subbiah Arunachalam trained as a chemist and found his calling in information work. He is an Honorary Fellow of CILIP, an Honorary Member of ASIST and a life member of IASLIC. He is on the editorial boards of Current Contents (USA), Journal of Information Science (UK), Current Science (India), and Scientometrics (Hungary). He is a member of the International Advisory Board of IICD, The Hague; a member of the Executive Committee of Global knowledge Partnership (GKP), Kuala Lumpur, the chairman of the Board of Trustees of OneWorld South Asia, New Delhi, and on the Governing Council of the International Society of Scientometrics and Infometrics (ISSI). Currently he is a volunteer with the Chennai-based M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, an NGO devoted to sustainable development. Until April 1996, he was with the Indian CSIR where he was a laboratory scientist, editor of a journal and a teacher of information science. For two years, 1973-75, he was the Editor of journals and Executive Secretary of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore. His current interests include ICT-enabled rural development and poverty reduction, improving access to information for researchers and the rural poor, and science and technology in developing countries. He has been an active supporter of the open access movement and has conducted several workshops in India.

Lars Bjornshauge ( Director of Libraries, Lund University, Sweden)

Lars Bjornshauge obtained a masters degree in Public Administration from Roskilde University in Denmark in 1983 and has 14 years subsequent experience in management positions in academic libraries. From 1986-1992 he was professor at the Royal Danish School of Librarianship, Copenhagen, Denmark. From 1992-2000 he has held positions as Director of Finance, Deputy Director and Director at the Technical Knowledge Center & Library of Denmark (DTV), Lyngby, Denmark. In 2001 he became Director of Libraries at Lund University, Sweden. A former President of the Association of Danish Research Libraries, Lars has focused on various areas in his professional career: the development of digital library services, reengineering library services, consortia building, scholarly communication, and open access.

George Botz ( Max Planck Society, Munich)

Georg W. Botz was born in 1962 and grew up in Bielefeld, Germany, where he studied physics. He received his PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Heidelberg in 1993. It was here that he first came upon "open access", but was not aware of the meaning of this expression – as no one was in those times. All but the very first article he (co)authored have been published as a preprint on Paul Ginsparg's server, which is nowadays well known and famous. George has worked as an acquisition editor and as product manager for scientific publishers and since 2002 he has been a member of the Executive Board of the German Physical Society. He is a member of the steering committee of the Open Access Journal "New Journal of Physics" www.njp.org. In July 2004 he took over his new position at the administrative headquarters of the Max Planck Society in Munich, where he is in charge of coordinating open access policy issues.

Michael Erben-Russ (Head, Dept Information Management, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft)

Born in 1955, Michael studied chemistry at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich from 1974 to 1981 and performed his PhD Research in the field of radiation chemistry. He gained IT experience in several software development projects (processing of experimental data) and worked with several German research institutes. In 1989, he started work at the headquarters of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, in Munich. His task was to support the use of standardized IT equipment, networks and software for all Fraunhofer institutes. In the mid-90s WWW services were introduced into the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft. Since 2001 Michael has been head of the department for information management whose task is to provide corporate web services for Fraunhofer as well as access to web-based scientific information for all the scientists of Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, thereby supporting the libraries of our research institutes.

Johannes Fournier (Programme Officer, DFG LIS)

Johannes Fournier studied German language and literature, history, and philosophy at the University of Trier (Germany) and, as Visiting Student in 1992/93, at Oriel College Oxford. After his PhD in 1997 – his doctorate thesis comprised an edition of and examinations on a translation of the four gospels from Latin into Middle High German rhymed verses – he encoded the four major Middle High German dictionaries according to TEI guidelines for their publication on CD-ROM as well as on-line. In 2000, he became deputy director of a Center for Electronic Publishing in the Humanities at the University of Trier and was responsible for the coordination of various projects mostly on retrodigitizing reference works. Since August 2003, he has been programme officer at the German Research Foundation's (DFG) Academic Libraries and Information Systems division (LIS) where he is in charge of information systems for the Middle Ages, German language and literature, arts and art history, and contact person for open access matters.

Fred Friend (Honorary Director Scholarly Communication, University College London)

Fred Friend was born in war-time U. K., grew up by the sea in Dover, read most of the books in his local public library, and with the help of supportive parents went to study history at Kings College London. He had the good fortune to enter academic libraries at a time of growth. His first post was in Manchester University Library as a SCONUL Trainee and then as Assistant Librarian. Fred moved from university to university in the UK and obtained his first library director post at the University of Essex. This was followed by a move to University College London, where he was library director for 15 years before moving into a role as Honorary Director Scholarly Communication, a role which enables him to explore new developments in information services. Fred is involved in many initiatives through work for organizations such as JISC in the UK and international organizations such as the Open Society Institute. He is one of the authors of the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

Paola Gargiulo (Information Resources Specialist, CASPUR)

Paola graduated in Philosophy at University of Naples in 1978 and obtained a Post-Lauream diploma in Library Science at University of Naples in 1980. She was awarded an MLIS at University of California, Berkeley in 1981. She is presently working in an Italian interuniversity Supercomputing consortium - CASPUR as electronic information resources specialist. Her current job includes liaison activities with 26 Central and Southern Italian university library consortia (CIBER) on electronic resources acquisition, conducting analysis on academic e-publishing market, and organizing public services and support activities to end users on"Emeroteca Virtuale", the digital platform run by CASPUR which aggregates over 4000 current academic e-journals . In the last two years she has been involved in promoting OA in Italy. Paola is a speaker on library consortia issues, electronic resources and user services, scholarly communication, and OA in Italy and occasionally abroad. She is actively involved with INFER, the Italian National Forum on Electronic Resources and with SELL, the Southern European Libraries Link, and collaborates with SPARC-Europe promoting SPARC activities in Italy.

Stevan Harnad ( Chaire de recherche du Canada à l'université du Québec à Montréal and Southampton University )

Stevan Harnad was born in Hungary, did his undergraduate work at McGill University and his graduate work at Princeton University and is currently Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science at University of Quebec/Montreal and Adjunct Professor at Southampton University. His research is on categorisation, communication and cognition. Stevan is the Founder and former Editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences (a paper journal published by Cambridge University Press), Psycoloquy (an electronic journal sponsored by the American Psychological Association) and the CogPrints Eprint Archive in the Cognitive Sciences. He is Past President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and author and contributor to over 150 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) and Icon, Category, Symbol: Essays on the Foundations and Fringes of Cognition (in prep).

Tony Hey (Professor of Computation, University of Southampton and Director, e-Science Programme, Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council)

Tony Hey is Professor of Computation at the University of Southampton and past Head of the Department of Electronics & Computer Science and Dean of Engineering & Applied Science. Since 2001 he has been seconded to the EPSRC and DTI as Director of the UK's Core e-Science Programme. Tony has worked in the field of parallel and distributed computing since the early 1980s. He was instrumental in the development of the MPI message-passing standard and in the Genesis Distributed Memory Parallel Benchmark suite. In 1991, he founded the Southampton Parallel Applications Centre in 1991 that has played a leading technology transfer role in Europe and the UK in collaborative industrial projects. His personal research interests are concerned with performance engineering for Grid applications but he also retains an interest in experimental explorations of quantum computing and quantum information theory. As the Director of the UK e-Science Programme, Tony is currently excited by the vision of the increasingly global scientific collaborations being enabled by the development of the next generation ÔGrid' middleware. The successful development of the Grid will have profound implications for industry and he is much involved with industry in the move towards OpenSource/OpenStandard Grid software. Tony is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE), the British Computer Society (BCS), and the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE). Professor Hey is European editor of the journal ÔConcurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience' and is on the organising committee of many international conferences. He is also the author of two popular science books: 'The Quantum Universe' and 'Einstein's Mirror'. Most recently he edited the 'Feynman Lectures on Computation' for publication, and a companion volume entitled 'Feynman and Computation'.

Bill Hubbard (Project Manager, SHERPA)

Bill Hubbard is the Project Manager of the institutional repository project SHERPA, based at the University of Nottingham. This is supporting the establishment of a network of open access repositories in 20 institutions in the UK. Project outputs include advice on advocacy, standards, IPR and partners' experiences of repository development. The project also runs the SHERPA/RoMEO database of publisher copyright policies. Bill has a background in HE and IT, in particular in work aiming to embed IT into university functions and working practices. Most recently, he worked as a manager in a commercial virtual reality production company with educational and heritage applications. Before this he was a senior lecturer at De Montfort University, leading a BA degree course in Multimedia Design. He has also worked in IT roles at Aston and Sheffield universities building the use of multimedia and networked services in teaching and learning.

Derek Law ( Head of Information Resources Directorate, Professor in the Department of Computing and Head of the Centre for Digital Library Research, University of Strathclyde)

Derek has worked in several British universities since 1970 and has published some 200 book chapters, articles and conference papers since then, some of them republished in seven other languages. Most of his work has been to do with the development of networked resources in higher education and with the creation of national information policy. Recently he has worked on the use of wireless technology in developing new methods of teaching and learning. He has been involved in the Open Access debate since 1995. He was awarded the Barnard prize for contributions to Medical Informatics in 1993, Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1999, an honorary degree by the Sorbonne in 2000, the IFLA medal in 2003 and honorary fellowships of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in 2005.

Yuko Nagai ( Zoological Society of Japan)

Yuko's academic background is in Indian history. After her studies her first job was as a librarian. She then moved to the Zoological Society of Japan, where she works for the secretary general. She is involved with collaborative work with the National Institute of Informatics, and on the SPARC/JAPAN project. As part of the SPARC/JAPAN project, the UniBio Press has been launched. UniBio Press is a collection of online journals in the biological sciences.

Alberto Pepe (CERN Document Server Team)

Alberto Pepe studied Astrophysics (BSc) and Computer Science (MSc) at University College London, UK. He holds a Marie Curie fellowship hosted by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. He currently works in the IT department, within the CERN Document Server team (CDS). He is involved with the development and implementation of new functionalities into CDSware, a suite of applications providing the framework and tools for running an autonomous digital library server. Before CERN, he worked as fellow researcher in the field of scientific visualization at CINECA, Italy's super-computing consortium.

Hans Pfeiffenberger ( Helmholtz Association, Germany)

Since receiving his Ph.D in physics in 1987, Hans Pfeiffenberger has been working at the IT-department of Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research. This department provides infrastructure and services to a community which comprises biologists as well as climate modelling oceanographers. His current responsibilities involve all kind of web-based services, especially those supporting AWI's publication activities. Currently, he is speaker of a working group of the Helmholtz Association, which was to formulate an implementation plan for Helmholtz's commitment to the Berlin declaration.

Simone Rieger is research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and since 2002 coordinator of the open access initiative ÒEuropean Cultural Heritage OnlineÓ (ECHO). As a linguist and philosopher, she was part of several interdisciplinary research projects, e.g. on semi-automatically character recognition of Chinese characters, on analysis of spoken and written special languages in engineering sciences, and on creating an internet-based edition of unpublished manuscripts on science, technics and medical science of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. At the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, she was part of the project on creating the prototype of an Internet representation of Galileo's notes on motion. Within the ECHO initiative, which aims at creating an infrastructure to bring cultural heritage online, she is coordinating the integration of seed collections, the network building, and the creation of user-friendly workflows to bring historical source material and scholarly data online. Within the ECHO initiative with its strict open access policy, she is dealing with legal problems to present cultural heritage open accessible on the Internet.

Eloy Rodrigues (Librarian, Director of the Documentation Services of Minho University)

Eloy Rodrigues is the Librarian and Director of the Documentation Services of Minho University. In recent years he has devoted much of his work to the development of digital libraries, education and training of librarians and library users and the study of the scholarly communication system. In 2003, Eloy lead the project to create RepositoriUM – the institutional repository of Minho University, and he has directed the project ever since. At the end of 2004 he drafted the formal policy of Minho University on open access to its scientific output. The other main focus of Eloy's current activity is promoting and advocating Open Access and institutional repositories in Portugal and Brazil.

Laurent Romary (CNRS Scientific and Technical Information (STI) Officer)
Born in 1964, Laurent Romary got his PhD in computational linguistics in 1989 and his Habilitation thesis in 1999. For several years, he has lead the Langue et Dialogue research team (http://www.loria.fr/equipes/led/) at Loria laboratory and conducted various projects on man-machine dialogue, multilingual document management and linguistic engineering. He has participated in numerous national and international projects related to the representation and dissemination of language resources and on man-machine interaction, and in particular coordinated the MLIS/DHYDRO and IST/MIAMM projects. He was the editor of ISO 16642 (TMF – Terminological Markup Framework) under TC37/SC3, and is the chairman of ISO committee TC37/SC4 on Language Resource Management. He is also a member of the TEI council (Text Encoding Initiative — http://www.tei-c.org).

[cancelled/flu] Urs Schoepflin (Director, MPIWG Research Library, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

Urs Schoepflin is director of the MPIWG Research Library of the Max Planck Institut efo rteh History of Science. He teaches regularly at the Institute for Library Science of the Humboldt University, Berlin. He was a member of the taskforce initiating new directions for electronic information management in the Max Planck Society (MPG).  Representing the Institute as a pilot institution, he is now active in workgroups testing and evaluating tools developed at the Center for Information Management of the MPG. As a digital library specialist, he was a member of the project team of the EU funded project "European Cultural Heritage Online".  As director of the Library, he is responsible for the development of the Institute's computer supported source collection for the history of science, a research environment which makes available digitized microfilmed source material and high-end scans of major printed sources and manuscripts, both held at the Library or provided in cooperation with other libraries or archives. He does research in historical and quantitative aspects of scholarly communication as well as in research evaluation on which he has published several papers. He is active in the International Society for Scientometrics and Infometrics. He served as editorial advisor to the journal "Scientometrics" (until 2004).

Alma Swan (Director, Key Perspectives Ltd )

Alma Swan obtained a degree in zoology in 1974 and a PhD in cell biology in 1978 from Southampton University. After research fellowships funded by the Cancer Research Campaign at Southampton General Hospital and St. George's Hospital Medical School (London), she took a position as Lecturer in Zoology at the University of Leicester. Her research was in medical cell biology and she taught a range of courses from vertebrate biology to the biology of cancer. In 1985, she moved into science publishing as managing editor of a Pergamon Press (later Elsevier Science) biomedical research indexing service, published both in print and online. In 1996, she jointly founded Key Perspectives, a consultancy serving the scholarly publishing industry. Though she has worked in the commercial sphere for 20 years, she retains links with academic life: for four years she was tutor and consultant for the Open University Business School's MBA programme and since 1991 has been tutor for two business strategy courses on Warwick Business School's MBA programme. She holds honorary roles as business mentor and teacher for the Institute for Entrepreneurship (part of the School of Management) at Southampton University. Alma has an MBA from Warwick Business School and is a Member of the Institute of Biology.

Tanveer ul Haq (Director IT and PERN [Pakistan Education and Research Network], Higher Education Commission, Pakistan)

Tanveer ul Haq has 21 years of experience in engineering and research in microwave, wireless, data, and optical communications. He got his PhD from Purdue University, USA in 1995. He has worked as Assistant Professor in University of Delaware USA and College of Aeronautical Engineering, PAF. He has authored more than 20 papers in refereed conferences and journals. He also has to his credit two US patents. Dr. Tanveer ul Haq worked at Lucent Technologies Bell Labs from 1997 to 2003 in the area of Wireless Networking. He was responsible for design, optimization and network performance management of CDMA, TDMA and 3^rd Generation Networks. He achieved rare distinctions of being appointed Distinguished Member of Technical Staff and later Consulting Member of Technical Staff at Lucent Technologies Bell Labs for his contributions in TDMA and CDMA technologies. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and is currently Director IT and PERN (Pakistan Education and Research Network) Higher Education Commission.

Françoise Vandooren (Université Libre de Bruxelles)

Françoise Vandooren has been working in the Libraries' Head Office at the Université Libre de Bruxelles since 1999. She got her Master Degree in Linguistics in 1986 and started Ph. D. research in computational linguistics and natural language processing. She entered the Libraries in 1996 and was involved in various European R&D projects dealing with image databases, access and payment of electronic information. She is now coordinating the digital image collections service as well as various working groups in the Libraries dealing with digitization projects, institutional repositories and smart cards. Her focus of interest currently lies in scholarly communication issues; she recently organized for UNICA (network of the Universities from the Capitals of Europe), in Madrid in 2002 and in Vienna in 2004, two seminars devoted to these topics, and is involved in the study on the economic and technical evolution of the scientific publication markets, funded by the European Commission DG Research.

Jens Vigen (Scientific information officer, CERN)

Jens Vigen has been a scientific information officer at CERN since 1994. Stimulated by the strongly demanding high energy physics community, he has been deeply involved in developing electronic services at CERN. His work includes identifying and developing new or alternative business models, in collaboration with commercial partners: letting libraries access validated information has for many years been one of his main interests. Coming from a community with a well established self archiving culture, Jens is now focusing on how huge laboratories like CERN can contribute to the launch of OA journals, possibly based on author submission fees. Before joining CERN Jens held a position at the library of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He has a masters degree in civil engineering; geodesy and photogrammetry.

Joanne Yeomans (Scientific information officer, CERN)

Joanne Yeomans is a Scientific Information Officer at CERN Library in Geneva. She arrived in Geneva from the UK in 2003 to work for a year on special projects (including the organization of the OAI3 workshop in 2004) but has now started a longer contract and is currently working in the Document Management section. Before CERN she spent five years as the Maths and Physical Sciences Faculty Team Librarian at Leeds University where she focused particularly on faculty liaison and developing the user education programmes across the library. She completed a degree in Mathematics and Physics at Warwick University before studying at Loughborough University to become a librarian.

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last changed: Jan 11, 2005