To go beyond the confines of academia and engage with the community to improve their lives through research, Ventura R. Pérez launched an interdisciplinary open-access journal dedicated to the study of violence and the impact it has on society. A biological anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Pérez adopted an open-access model to share insights into the causes of violence directly with the communities affected, in addition to making the research available to scholars. For his efforts, Pérez is honored as the first Innovator of 2011 by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).