Nick Shockey, Associate Executive Director
Nick Shockey serves as SPARC’s Associate Executive Director. Nick works to further SPARC’s strength as a membership organization to advance knowledge sharing as a human right and to ensure that SPARC’s strategies are effective in a rapidly changing environment.
Since joining SPARC in 2009, Nick’s role within the organization has evolved and grown. A through line in this work has been connecting the people within institutions and supporting them in identifying and pursuing where they can contribute to advance knowledge sharing.
Nick’s efforts have helped to develop and encourage the next generation of leaders within SPARC’s issue areas. He led the launch of SPARC’s OpenCon community, which brought together over 10,000 early career leaders across five global conferences and more than 100 satellite events in 44 countries. The connections formed through OpenCon continue to have a positive impact in advancing open research and open education.
Nick is responsible for a wide variety of programs to support SPARC members and for identifying emerging strategic areas where SPARC can be a catalyst for action. Among these is SPARC’s Negotiation Community of Practice, which has made a tangible impact in addressing power imbalances with publishers, creating savings for libraries, and better aligning spend with values. Similarly, Nick led the launch of SPARC’s Privacy & Surveillance Community of Practice, recognizing that privacy is fundamental for systems that prioritize community over commercialization. In this capacity, Nick has co-authored multiple detailed analyses of vendor privacy practices that effectively highlighted the undermining of library privacy standards.
Over his 15 years at the organization, Nick has also been deeply involved in SPARC’s policy efforts, which have helped to deliver landmark federal policy in the United States opening up access to publicly funded research. He also helps to shape SPARC’s policy work in emerging areas, including privacy and platform regulation.
Nick serves on the governance bodies of a variety of organizations and projects, including OA.Works, the Budapest Open Access Initiative, and ONEAL (Open Negotiation Education for Academic Libraries). He has also been featured in PhD Comics’ Open Access Explained! and the documentary Paywall: The Business of Scholarship.