[avatar user=”Karin Wulf” size=”thumbnail” align=”left” /]
As chair of the Nominating Committee and in my final year of service as a member of the Board of Directors for ORCID, I am delighted to announce the slate for ORCID’s 2021 Board election.
We received a total of 13 nominations for member Board seats with an excellent variety of skills and geographies represented. We were particularly pleased to have a number of nominees with experience in the areas that we had specifically requested. Sincere thanks to the Nominating Committee for their hard work and wisdom: Mohamed Ba-Essa (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology), Veronique Kiermer, Andrew Preston, and Wen-Yau Cathy Lin (Tamkang University). Thanks also to the ORCID staff for their proactive support.
Following the August 15 deadline for nominations, the Nominating Committee reviewed all of these nominations, and the 11 nominations received for a potential additional researcher position, very carefully. We assessed the skills and experience of each nominee, and also considered how the proposed slate of nominees might complement the existing Board members. With this proposed slate of nominees, we have aimed for diversity of representation in terms of skills, experience, organization type, geographical location, and gender–a balance that we believe will strengthen the ORCID Board in its critical role of overseeing the management and performance of ORCID, as well as serving as community advocates for ORCID. We were also keenly attuned to this year of transition for ORCID, and the need for both stability and reinvigoration of the Board.
The Nominating Committee therefore recommends the following nominees for election to the ORCID Board for the three-year term as per the bylaws, from January 2021 to December 2023:
The 2021 Slate
Clare Appavoo, Executive Director, Canadian Research Knowledge Network
As Executive Director of the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, Clare Appavoo leads a team of 25 in the delivery to Canada’s university libraries of $135M of licensed digital content annually while also providing digitization of, access to and preservation of Canadian heritage content for researchers and the public. Previously, she was the North American Sales Director for an academic monograph supplier. She has served as Chair of the Executive Committee of SCOAP3. In collaboration with other members of the Canadian research infrastructure community, she contributed to the development of the ORCID Canada consortium.
Paul Gemmill, Program Director, UK Research and Innovation
Paul Gemmill has had a varied career since the late 1980s ranging across the public, private and voluntary sectors, dedicated since the early 2000s to the public sector and research. He is now the Director of UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Reforming our Business programme with a focus on releasing researchers and innovators from unnecessary bureaucratic burdens. He studied modern history at the University of Oxford and later augmented my skills through an MBA from London Business School. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, recognising his contributions to the biological sciences in the UK through his work at the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and The Pirbright Institute (previously the Institute for Animal Health).
Lisa Hinchliffe, Professor & Coordinator for LISI, U Illinois Library
Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe is Professor as well as Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction in the University Library and Affiliate Professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was previously the Library Instruction Coordinator and Assistant/Associate Professor at Illinois State University and a faculty Reference Librarian at Parkland (Community) College. Lisa currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Society for Scholarly Publishing Board and has previously served as President of the Association of College and Research Libraries. Lisa has consulted, presented, and published widely on scholarly communications, publishing, copyright literacy, the value of libraries, strategic planning, organizational innovation, emerging technologies, program evaluation, library assessment, inclusion and equity, information literacy, and teaching and learning.
Calvin Johnson, Chief, High Performing Computing and Informatics, NIH
Dr. Calvin Johnson (Operations Research) serves as Senior Advisor to the Director, Office of Research Information Systems (ORIS), Office of Extramural Research, National Institutes of Health. He provides guidance and expertise on natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, artificial intelligence, “big data,” and predictive analytics toward the mission of ORIS, which is to provide data and reporting support for the management of NIH grants. Previously, he served for many years as the Chief of the High-Performance Computing and Informatics Office in the NIH Center for Information Technology’s Office of Intramural Research, supporting intramural NIH investigators through expertise in state-of-the-art data science arising in biomedical research.
Alison Mitchell, Chief Journals Officer, Springer Nature (Returning for a second term)
Dr. Alison Mitchell (Molecular Biology) serves as Chief Journals Officer for Springer Nature, responsible for the publication of almost 3,000 scholarly journals covering the life sciences, medicine, physical sciences, applied sciences and the humanities and social sciences. Previously, she was Chief Publishing Advisor at Springer Nature and Publishing Director for the Nature Research Journals. Alison joined Macmillan Magazines in 1996 as a News and Views Editor for Nature. In 2000, she served as Launch Editor of one of the first three journals in the highly successful Nature Reviews series: Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, and served as Publisher of the Nature Reviews journals from 2003. From 2006-2016, she was a member of the Transfer Working Group under UKSG (and latterly NISO) including a period from 2011-2016 as co-Chair of this group, and currently serves on the ORCID Board of Directors.
Daisy Selamatsela, Executive Director of the Department of Library and Information Services, UNISA (Returning for a second term)
Dr. Daisy Selematsela (Information and Knowledge Management) is the Executive Director Library & Information Services at the University of South Africa (UNISA) with 27 years’ experience in the Higher Education Sector and the National System of Innovation. A Professor of Practice of Knowledge Management of the University of Johannesburg, she has been instrumental in championing the Open Access Mandate and Research Data Management in the South. Her role in academic citizenship involves board memberships of not for profit organizations and serving on the Board of Directors of COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories), CODATA (Committee on Data of the International Science Council) and ORCID. On the national level she is a Board Member of ITOCA (Information Training and Outreach Centre for Africa), SANLiC (South African National Licensing Consortium) and the Chairperson Elect of CHELSA (Committee for Higher Education Librarians of South Africa). She previously served on the Board of the National Library of South Africa and Council of the National Archives of South Africa.
Voting Procedures for ORCID Board of Directors Elections
All ORCID members in good standing as of October 1 are eligible to vote. Online voting will be open from October 29–November 30, and full instructions will be sent to the official contact at each member organization by October 29. Members also have the option to propose write-in candidates for the Board within 30 days of the slate being announced (by October 28) – full information can be found in our bylaws, Section III, Article 2.