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Rebecca Kennison Named Visiting Program Officer for SHARE

Rebecca Kennison
Rebecca Kennison

ARL has appointed Rebecca Kennison, Director of Columbia University Libraries’ Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, as a visiting program officer to help develop the SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE). SHARE is a joint initiative of ARL, the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) to collaboratively build a cross-institutional coordination framework for the long-term management and preservation of—and expansion of access to—the results of academic research. The initiative was made urgent by the February 22, 2013, memorandum from the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) directing federal agencies to develop draft plans for the public deposit of research articles and data sets associated with federal funding.

Kennison will work with lead consultant Greg Tananbaum and ARL program director Judy Ruttenberg to coordinate the efforts of four SHARE Working Groups: Technology and Standards; PI Workflow; Repositories; and Communications. Kennison’s main role will be to ensure cohesive communication and decision-making input within and among the working groups. In the coming months, she will also work on behalf of SHARE to engage the university, library, research, funding, technology, intellectual property, and publishing communities to develop the project roadmap. While many aspects of SHARE can be implemented now, its vision is ambitious and requires a thoughtful and inclusive implementation process. 

For more details about Kennison’s background, see the Columbia University Libraries news release. For more information about the SHARE initiative, visit the SHARE webpage and follow SHARE on Twitter and Facebook.


The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 125 research libraries in the US and Canada. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the web at https://www.arl.org/.

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