As Penn's inaugural Scholarly Communications Librarian, Shawn Martin has his work cut out for him. Our growing institutional repository (IR), Scholarly Commons@Penn, recently issued mandates for open access initiatives by Harvard and NIH, and the shifting tide in academic publishing models have made his appointment a key position in Penn Libraries.

Faculty, administrators, and librarians should look to Shawn as a partner in defining the role of institutional repositories at Penn, and as an advocate for their interests in the field of scholarly publishing. In a recent interview with Library Journal Academic Newswire Shawn sketched out his strategy for promoting understanding of critical issues in scholarly communication. As he put it, "We need to figure out what the IR's role is in terms of the larger system of research, teaching, peer review, publication, and dissemination of scholarship."

Shawn, who holds a BA from Ohio State University, and an MA in History from the College of William and Mary, comes to Penn from the University of Michigan, where, as project librarian at the Text Creation Partnership, he worked with publishers and academic libraries around the world to create searchable text for commercially available image databases of early English and American printed books.

For more information:
Shawn Martin, Scholarly Communication Librarian