Jennifer Beamer, Ph.D., is the Head Scholarly Communication and Open Publishing at The Claremont Colleges, a consortium of seven liberal arts colleges in Southern California. She leads the library’s open publishing program by building collaborative relationships with partners within the library and across the campuses. Additionally, Jennifer provides leadership, outreach, and education on the scholarly communication ecosystem, including open access advocacy, open science practices, open educational resources, copyright and fair use, and research impact. Jennifer would like to be a member of the SPARC Steering Committee. She is passionate about open access advocacy and open infrastructure, having recently completed a doctoral dissertation on how organizations like SPARC support open access infrastructure.
Jennifer is an active member of the Scholarly Communications Community. She is Vice-Chair of the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC) Scholar Communications Committee and Chair of the SCELC IR Subcommittee; both serve a SCELC membership of 110 private institutions. Jennifer is also a Presenter for the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Scholarly Communication Roadshow. Furthermore, as an Alumnus of the SPARC Open Education Program 2019-2020, OpenCon 2014, and 2016, Jennifer’s career as a librarian has been committed to advocating for policy that would help faculty participate in open access in alternative ways.
Before joining the Claremont Colleges, Jennifer served as a Digital Initiatives Librarian at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She led efforts at UHM to help faculty comply with the university’s open access policy and assisted their Graduate Student Organization in creating a resolution to include themselves in the faculty Open Access policy. Jennifer holds a doctorate in Communications and Information Science, an MLISc. Degree from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and a Master of Science degree from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.