Rick Johnson is the director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), an international library alliance built as a constructive response to market dysfunctions in the scholarly communication system. Since becoming SPARC's first director in 1998, Rick has initiated a wide range of publishing collaborations and communications programs that demonstrate open or affordable scholarly communication alternatives.
Rick has developed SPARC e-publishing partnerships with numerous scientific societies, university presses, other publishing initiatives based in academe, and various independent start-ups. He is the co-founder of BioOne, a non-profit corporation that is successfully aggregating, digitizing, and distributing society-published journals in ecological and environmental sciences. Under Rick's leadership, SPARC has rapidly built a global coalition membership-including the recently organized SPARC Europe. He has represented SPARC to the broader community and is a frequent expert source for national and industry media, including The New York Times, Science, Nature, Library Journal, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Rick currently serves on the Governing Board of Cornell University Libraries' Project Euclid and on the Board of Directors of BioOne. He was recently named to the PubMed Central National Advisory Committee.
Before joining SPARC, Rick was a marketing and product development executive with Congressional Information Service (CIS) and University Publications of America, divisions of LEXIS-NEXIS that serve the academic market. As Senior Vice President of CIS, Rick sponsored creation of the company's first Web-based products, including Academic Universe, and built CIS's successful international marketing program.
Kevin M. Guthrie is an executive and entrepreneur with expertise in high technology and not-for-profit management, and a diverse background that includes experience in professional sports, broadcasting, and the film industry. Currently, Guthrie is the President of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping the scholarly community take advantage of information technologies. As president, Guthrie is responsible for overseeing all aspects of a rapidly growing enterprise that has built a fully searchable electronic archive of the backfiles of core academic journals that can be accessed through libraries via the Internet. JSTOR, headquartered in New York with production facilities in Princeton, NJ, and Ann Arbor, MI, presently has 1,453 participating libraries and institutions in 70 countries, and 181 participating publishers. Currently, almost 11 million pages are online in the archive.