Moriana Molchanov Garcia has joined the SPARC team in a newly created position as a Visiting Program Officer for Open Models. She will serve in this one-year role in addition to her job as a Scholarly Communication Librarian at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York.
“The University of Rochester Libraries have long made strategic investments in the community collaborations and innovations necessary to advance equitable access to knowledge,” said Lindsay Cronk, Assistant Dean for Scholarly Resources and Curation. “On behalf of the University of Rochester, it is with the utmost confidence that we share Moriana’s skills and acumen with the global research community.”
As VPO, Moriana will help SPARC increase library understanding and acceptance of funding models that provide equitable open access to both readers and authors without relying on article processing charges. The work will focus on collective and “conditional open” models, such as Subscribe to Open (S2O), that make open access contingent on library support.
“For academic libraries and publishers to work together to advance equitable access to research, a deeper understanding of the particular challenges confronting each community is imperative to establish trust,” Moriana said. “I look forward to working with the community to make sense of all the open options available to us and to direct our collective power in pursuit of shared goals.”
Moriana will be convening a working group of SPARC members interested in open models and will use SPARC communication channels to build awareness of open models. Specifically, she will work with libraries to establish criteria for assessing Subscribe-to-Open and other conditional-open models and to increase library acceptance of such models.
“SPARC is delighted that Moriana will lead our effort to increase library understanding of open funding models,” said SPARC Executive Director Heather Joseph. “Giving libraries the tools and information they need to assess conditional-open models efficiently will be critical for such models to scale and provide alternatives to APC-based models. Moriana will help us build a consensus around the criteria for successful conditional-open models and the benefits that they deliver to libraries.”
Prior to her current position, Moriana was the Science & Engineering Outreach Librarian at the University of Rochester. She has also worked as a Natural Sciences Liaison Librarian at Denison University in Granville, Ohio.
Moriana has a bachelor’s degree in pharmacy from the Federal University of Amazonas, Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil. She has an M.S. and Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of Sao Paulo, Ribeirao Preto, Sao Paulo, Brazil and an MLIS from Kent State University in Columbus, Ohio.
