“Reimer, who began his tenure as University Librarian and dean of the University Library on April 22, approaches his job by bearing in mind the needs of faculty, students, staff and other scholars. By incorporating this perspective, he champions a philosophy of a library as not only a service provider, but a research partner that offers its own expertise and intellectual agenda.
That includes prioritizing openness in scholarship to better share data and research….
Working with partners across the campus, we need to make it as easy as possible for faculty and students to manage and share their data and publications, reducing the complexity in areas like open access, funder reporting and research information management….
Possibly the most important contribution to scholarship is rethinking the library collection as open data, alongside the wider role libraries are playing in making content across the world findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. Research libraries provide and support crucial infrastructure for knowledge sharing globally, and we enable open access to an ever-growing number of scholarly publications….
By focusing on improving workflows for and with faculty, we [at Imperial College London, under his leadership] achieved all these aims, for example, increasing the annual upload of open access publications to the university repository from around 300 in 2012 to about 11,000 in 2016. I’d love to see something similar at the University of Chicago! …”
