Jennifer Beamer, VPO for U.S. Repository Network
Jennifer Beamer is the Visiting Program Officer for the U.S. Repository Network. She convenes an expert group of library/repository professionals as well as the broader U.S. repository community to help develop a strategic vision for U.S. repositories.
In addition to serving in this part-time appointment at SPARC, Jen works at California State University, San Bernardino as the Senior Assistant Scholarly Communications Librarian. Previously, she was Head of Scholarly Communications and Open Publishing at Claremont College Library.
From November 2023 to June 2024, she was a Fulbright scholar working at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo.
Jen served on the SPARC Steering Committee from 2022-24 and is an alum of OpenCon, which she credits with changing the trajectory of her career as an activist for open access. She was also part of the 2019-20 OER Leadership Program.
Jen has a doctorate in Communications and Information Science from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she studied open access Infrastructure including the relationships among social, technical, and public policy networks in the United States and Japan. She also has a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, a Master of Science in Human Ecology from the University of Alberta, a Bachelor of Communication Studies from the University of Calgary, and a Bachelor of Home Economics from University of Alberta.