For Open Access Week 2019 (October 21 – 27, 2019), the UVM Libraries are featuring the work of some of UVM’s most passionate open access champions. The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resource Coalition (SPARC) defines open access as the “free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.” The open access movement seeks to reduce barriers and promote access to scholarly information and research.

The Libraries host ScholarWorks @ UVM, an institutional repository featuring research by UVM faculty and students. Email us to contribute or to learn more about how to get involved in the work to promote open access.

Penny Bishop

College of Education and Social Services

Penny Bishop is Professor of Middle Level Education at UVM, where she teaches future middle grades educators and conducts research on schooling for young adolescents. As founding director of the Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education, Dr. Bishop has served as Principal Investigator on numerous projects, bringing over $13 million dollars to Vermont schools to improve the learning and lives of middle grades students. She is a co-editor of the open access, peer-reviewed journal Middle Grades Review, which is published on the University of Vermont’s ScholarWorks @ UVM platform.

Gary Ward

Larner College of Medicine

Gary Ward teaches and studies parasite cell biology at UVM’s Larner College of Medicine. Ward’s research is focused on how the human parasite Toxoplasma gondii interacts with the people and animals it infects. He has been a champion for public access to scientific research, most recently serving as chairman on the Board of Directors of the Public Library of Science, a non-profit open access publisher that seeks to accelerate scientific progress by transforming the way research results are communicated, organized and evaluated. He was heavily involved in advocating for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) public access policy, and subsequently served on the National Library of Medicine’s Public Access Working Group AND chaired the PubMed Central National Advisory Committee.

Tina Escaja

College of Arts and Sciences

Tina Escaja is a University Distinguished Professor of Spanish and the Director of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. She has published extensively on gender, technology and representation at the turn-of-the-twentieth-century and their connections with the current turn-of-the-millennium in Latin America and Spain. Escaja is also an accomplished poet, writer and digital artist, sometimes working under the name Alm@Pérez. Her creative work transcends the traditional book form, leaping into digital art, robotics, augmented reality, and multimedia projects. These works have appeared in galleries, museums, literary publications, and open web platforms, including her extensive website.

Meredith Niles

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences

Meredith Niles is an assistant professor and faculty with the UVM Food Systems Program, where she examines food systems sustainability and policy. Niles is a passionate advocate for the open access movement to make research more publicly available, “to maximize the potential of science and its benefits for society.” She serves of the Board of the Public Library of Science (PLoS). She is a co-author of two recent articles that investigate the role of impact factors and public good in the reappointment, promotion, and tenure process. This eye-opening research received coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Science Magazine, and Nature.

President Suresh Garimella

Office of the President

College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences

Suresh Garimella was honored with Purdue University’s Open Access Award in 2017, while serving as Executive Vice President for Research and Partnerships and the Goodson Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering. At Purdue, Garimella was a leader in open access publishing. He posted over 400 works from his research group to Purdue’s institutional repository and his scholarship was downloaded more than a quarter of a million times from this platform. In July of 2019, Garimella joined the University of Vermont as President. "I am deeply committed to making the products of our scholarly research widely available, as an essential element of our land-grant mission. Digital innovations make it possible to expand our reach globally. I am honored to be recognized as one of UVM's open access champions."