Organization
Our Mission
K|N Consultants partners with academic institutions and organizations, academic, national, and public libraries, learned and scholarly societies, scholarly publishers and university presses, government agencies, private foundations, and other mission-driven organizations to foster broad knowledge infrastructure transformation through innovative, collaborative solutions that result in more efficient and nimble systems of knowledge creation and dissemination and in expanded and more sustainable educational opportunities for disadvantaged populations.
Board of Directors
K|N’s Board of Directors is comprised of leaders in academic institutions and libraries, learned societies, and scholarly publishing. The Board of Directors supports K|N’s strategic activities and monitors the direction and impact of the organization.
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Cheryl Ball
Independent Publishing Consultant; Executive Director of Council of Editors of Learned Journals; Secretary of K|N's Board of DirectorsCheryl E. Ball is an independent publishing consultant and Executive Director of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Her consulting work helps academics and other professionals accomplish their dream projects while rebuilding their relationship with work. She is Senior Editor for the diamond open-access journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, which has been publishing scholarly multimedia content since 1996. In 2010, Ball received tenure at Illinois State University with the first (she could find) open-access, interactive portfolio. Her research in editorial workflows and digital publishing infrastructures can be found in multiple journals and edited collections, as well as on her personal repository. Ball has an M.F.A. in poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she completed the school’s first electronic, interactive thesis in 2000, and a Ph.D. in rhetoric and technical communication from Michigan Technological University.
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Robert Hilliker
Associate Provost for Library Information Services, Rowan University; Treasurer of K|N's Board of DirectorsRobert Hilliker is the Associate Provost for Library Information Services at Rowan University and Vice Chair of VALE, New Jersey’s academic library consortium. He has been working in the open scholarship and culture space for over a decade, starting with his time as the manager of Academic Commons, Columbia University’s institutional research repository; continuing through his contributions to the Koha community during his time as Director of the Edsel Ford Memorial Library; and, over the last four years, his work on New Jersey’s Open Textbook Collaborative, a US Department of Education-funded project to remove barriers to education in STEM-intensive, high-growth areas of study. Most recently, Hilliker has been working on a Lyrasis-Catalyst grant-funded project to improve electronic resource licensing workflows and outcomes for academic libraries. Hilliker has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Brown University, an M.L.I.S. in digital libraries from Rutgers University, and a B.A. (Hons) in English from the University of British Columbia.
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Christopher Long
Provost and Senior Vice President, University of OregonChristopher P. Long is the provost and senior vice president at the University of Oregon. Recognized for values-enacted leadership, Long is committed to the transformative power of liberal arts research and teaching by enriching graduate and undergraduate education, recruiting and retaining world-class faculty, and creating new opportunities for leading-edge research. Long has more than 20 years of academic leadership experience in the public research universities of Michigan State University and Penn State. As provost at Oregon, he is responsible for the programs, policies, and priorities that shape the university’s academic life. Long is also an expert in both ancient Greek and contemporary continental philosophy, and his extensive publication record includes four books. He has multiple Mellon Foundation-funded projects, including the Less Commonly Taught and Indigenous Languages Partnership with the Big 10 Academic Alliance, a participatory research initiative and teaching framework developed in reciprocal partnership with Indigenous communities and institutions across the Big 10; the Public Philosophy Journal, an innovative online publication for accessible scholarship that deepens understanding of publicly relevant issues; and HuMetricsHSS, a values-enacted initiative committed to transforming higher education by aligning indicators of academic excellence with core personal and institutional values. Long received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research in New York and his B.A. from Wittenberg University.
To learn more about Provost Long’s administrative approach and his research visit his personal website or reach him on Mastodon at @cplong@hcommons.social.
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Polly Thistlethwaite
Professor, Mina Rees Library, CUNY Graduate Center; Chair of K|N's Board of DirectorsPolly Thistlethwaite is Professor in the Mina Rees Library at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, having served there as Chief Librarian 2010-2020 and as CUNY’s interim Dean of Libraries in 2020. Queer archival work and AIDS activism starting in the late 1980s primed Polly’s focus on open, widely accessible, and networked collections. In the pre-digital era, library entrance policies prevented access to knowledge for those who desperately sought it. Now, with access to research brokered by electronic publishers through library subscriptions, we continue to deny the greatest part of access to scholarship. Higher education must square reader online access policies with professed missions to serve the public good. Academic publishing serves the narrowest of purposes if only elite readers can reach a text to read it.
Bylaws and Financial Information
K|N is governed by a Board of Directors that supports K|N’s strategic activities and monitors the direction and impact of the organization. The following documents provide a framework for and summary of K|N’s operational activities.