Carly Robinson, Director of Open Research
Carly Robinson serves as SPARC’s Director of Open Research. In this role, she is SPARC’s strategic lead with U.S. federal agencies and institutions in supporting open research and open infrastructure policy development and implementation, collaborating with member libraries to address challenges and develop good practices. In addition, she is SPARC’s lead for the U.S. Repository Network (USRN).
Carly joined the SPARC team in 2025, as a Senior Policy Fellow. She led SPARC’s efforts to advance policies related to persistent identifiers (PIDs) and metadata standards and contributed more broadly to SPARC’s policy work on open research.
Prior to SPARC, Carly worked for nearly 10 years in the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), serving as Assistant Director for Information Products and Service from 2019-2025. She was a representative on the White House National Science and Technology Council’s Subcommittee on Open Science, co-chairing subgroups on both persistent identifiers and open science infrastructure and providing PID subject matter expertise. She also serves on governance bodies, working groups, and advisory committees for various open infrastructure organizations.
She’s a former AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow serving in the U.S. Senate and then the DOE Office of Science where she helped develop DOE’s first policy for digital research data management. Carly also has past experience working in the Office of Government Relations at the University of Colorado’s DC office.
Carly has a Ph.D. and master’s degree in atmospheric chemistry from the University of Colorado, and a bachelor’s degree in applied physics from Michigan Technological University.