New Steering Committee Members

We’re thrilled to announce the addition of six professionals to the Open Access Button Steering Committee. Our Steering Committee now holds expertise in advocacy, fundraising, copyright law, programming, governance, communications, and technology in the Global South. The Committee will provide long term perspective to the project and serve as a guide to our international student team that runs the Open Access Button.

Christine Fruin
Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Communications at the University of Florida‘s George A. Smathers Libraries

Christine leads the UF Libraries’ outreach efforts to build a scholarly communications program in support of scholarly publication reform and Open Access activities at UF. She holds a Juris Doctorate from the School of Law at Southern Illinois University, a master’s degree in library and information science from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at University of Illinois and a bachelor’s degree in political science from Knox College.

Nick Hammer
Executive Administrator for the Public Library of Science

Nick provides executive support to the CEO of PLOS and assists all staff at PLOS to achieve their goals and to ensure the success of the organization as a whole. He previously worked in a dual role as the coordinator of administration and the development officer for the Physics Department at the University of Maryland, College Park where he oversaw the day-to-day operations of the department, built partnerships between the university and external networks, and spearheaded community outreach.

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Adi Kamdar
Activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Adi specializes in patent, free speech, intermediary liability, and consumer privacy issues at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). One of his main projects is coordinating EFF’s open access advocacy on the federal, state, and university levels. He previously studied History of Science at Yale University, where he was chapter president and a member of the board of directors of Students for Free Culture, an international advocacy group dedicated to promoting sharing and openness. Additionally, he was formerly a member of the Right to Research Coalition’s steering committee, helping coordinate open access efforts on campuses around the world.

Iryna Kuchma
Open Access programme manager at Electronic Information for Libraries

Iryna collaborates with libraries and library consortia in more than 60 developing and transition countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America through her work with EIFL. Her responsibilities include advocacy of open access to research results and support in developing open access policies, training and support in setting up open access journals and open repositories, organizing workshops and other knowledge sharing and capacity building events. Previously she worked as an Information programme manager at the International Renaissance Foundation and coordinated the Arts and Culture Program there.

Victor Ng
Engineer for Mozilla Corporation

Victor got involved with Open Access because of a rare medical condition and found that he couldn’t access information to help himself. He first joined the Open Access Button project last year when he volunteered as a developer for the beta version of the Button.

Nick Sheppard
Repository Developer at Leeds Metropolitan University

Through his role as Repository Developer, Nick promotes Open Access and develops the institutional research management infrastructure comprising the publication management system (Symplectic Elements), the Institutional Repository and Open Journal Systems. He is primarily interested in sustainable models of Open Access and potential synergies with open education and Open Educational Resources. In addition to his institutional role, Nick is the Technical Officer for the UK Council of Research Repositories.

Learn more about the new members and the whole Steering Committee.