SPARC is pleased to announce Emily Ford has been selected as the new Director of the Open Research Funders Group (ORFG). In this role, she will oversee the coalition of nearly two dozen philanthropic organizations around the globe involved with charitable, educational, or other activities serving the public good and committed to open sharing of research outputs.
Ford has been at Portland State University as the urban & public affairs librarian at the Branford Price Millar Library since 2011. For the past three years, she also served as president of her labor union chapter – the PSU-American Association of University Professors.
“Through that deep justice and activist-oriented work, I honed my skills with collaboration, consensus building and working in member-led organizations,” Ford said. “I’m excited to combine that with my skills as a librarian and open science knowledge in this new position.”
In 2008, Ford co-founded In the Library with the Lead Pipe, a peer-reviewed, open-access academic journal that covers topics about libraries. “It made space for early career librarians, non-traditional ideas and real discussions within the field of library and information science that was missing from traditional publishing venues,” said Ford, who was an editorial board member of the journal until 2015.
Ford is the author of “Peer Review: A Critical Primer and Practical Course” (Portland State University, Press Books 2022) and “Stories of Open: Opening peer review through narrative inquiry,” (Association of College and Research Libraries Press, 2021). In 2016, she was a recipient of one PSU’s library faculty excellence awards for service.
She has a Master of Information Science and a Master of Library Science from Indiana University Bloomington.
Ford said she has been following SPARC’s work for years and that it is a dream to join the team and devote herself full-time to the open movement. She hopes to strengthen the engagement of ORFG members at a time when she believes private, philanthropic funders will lead the way in open science. Collectively, the ORFG members hold assets in excess of $255 billion, with total annual grantmaking in the $12 billion range.