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, scholarly publishing, technology, and business. 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
Director of the Digital Publishing Collaborative, Wayne State University Library; Secretary-Treasurer of K|N's Board of DirectorsCheryl E. Ball is Director of the Digital Publishing Collaborative at Wayne State University Library. In 2010, Ball received tenure at Illinois State University with the first open-access, all-digital portfolio. Since 2006, Ball has been editor of the online peer-reviewed open-access journal Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, which exclusively publishes digital media scholarship and is read in 180 countries. Her recent research in editorial workflows and digital publishing infrastructures can be found in multiple journals and edited collections, as well as on her personal repository. During the 2013-2014 academic year, she served as a Fulbright Scholar at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, studying research mediation practices and teaching academic literacies to Ph.D. students. She is the Project Director for Vega, an open-access multimedia academic publishing platform, and serves as the executive director of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Ball has an M.F.A. in poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she completed the school’s first electronic, interactive thesis, and a Ph.D. in rhetoric and technical communication from Michigan Technological University.
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Robert Hilliker
Director of Research Engagement and Scholarship, Rowan University LibraryRobert Hilliker currently serves as Director of Research Engagement and Scholarship in the Rowan University Library. His “turn” to libraries began when he realized, midway through his thesis, that the librarians he knew led the most balanced lives of any academics. A brief stint working on the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded Modernist Journals Project showed him that he could marry cutting-edge technology with librarianship and the deal was sealed. Robert has previously held positions at the Hotchkiss School’s Edsel Ford Memorial Library, Columbia University’s Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, and the Rutgers University Libraries. He 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. (Honors) in English from the University of British Columbia. He can be followed on Twitter at @infomnivore.
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Christopher Long
Dean of the College of Arts and Letters , Michigan State UniversityChristopher P. Long is dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University. His extensive publications in Ancient Greek and Contemporary Continental Philosophy include three books: The Ethics of Ontology: Rethinking an Aristotelian Legacy (SUNY, 2004), Aristotle on the Nature of Truth (Cambridge, 2010), and an enhanced digital book entitled Socratic and Platonic Political Philosophy: Practicing a Politics of Reading (Cambridge, 2014); the digital platform of the enhanced digital book enables readers to engage directly with the author in an online community. He is also co-founder of the Public Philosophy Journal, a project that has received over $780,000 of funding from the Mellon Foundation to create an innovative online space of digital scholarship and communication, and is the editor of the Journal of General Education. Long completed his bachelor’s degree at Wittenberg University in Ohio and his master’s and doctoral degrees at the New School for Social Research in New York. He blogs at www.cplong.org, is the host of the Digital Dialogue podcast, and can be reached on Twitter at @cplong and @deancplong.
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Sara Rouhi
Director of Strategic Partnerships, PLOSSara Rouhi is the Director of Strategic Partnerships at PLOS, focusing on developing new business models for sustainable, inclusive open-access publishing. She previously managed business development at Digital Science for both the Altmetric and Dimensions platforms. She writes and speaks frequently on metrics, open access, and diversity in scholarly communication. She is also a comedian and improviser in Washington, DC, and tweets all things politics, open science, improv, and #scholcomm on Twitter at @RouhiRoo.
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Polly Thistlethwaite
Chief Librarian, CUNY Graduate Center; Chair of K|N's Board of DirectorsPolly Thistlethwaite is Professor and (since 2011) Chief Librarian at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). In the pre-Internet 1980s, at the beginning of her career in academic libraries, she joined the activist group ACT UP and channeled activists and people with AIDS (PWAs) into libraries, then the only places where medical information was available. Since then, medical journals have been digitized and made available beyond the dedicated library computer terminals that governed access in the late 1980s. Thirty years later, scholarly work is digitized, but it is still mostly locked behind paywalls away from public view. Scholars who write to be read by the broadest possible publics persist in signing over copyrights to publishers who sell their work at high prices to a small number of academic libraries and their privileged constituents. Thistlethwaite cares passionately about all of this. She was a co-PI of the Graduate Center’s 2013–2015 JustPublics@365 Project that aimed to connect scholars’ work with wider audiences. She is the co-author, with Jessie Daniels, of Being a Scholar in the Digital Era: Transforming Scholarly Communication for the Public Good (Policy Press, 2016). Thistlethwaite can be followed on Twitter at @MissReadings.
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.