CDL Open Access Appointments: Welcome Ellen Finnie and Tran Ha!

We are delighted to announce two stellar new appointments on the CDL Collection Development Program’s open access team effective March 2020.

It is our great pleasure to announce that Ellen Finnie will be joining CDL as Open Access Publisher Agreements Manager. In this role, Ellen will be responsible for initiating, developing, and coordinating the implementation and assessment of open access publisher agreements across a broad spectrum of publishing partners in support of UC’s transformative open access initiatives, expanding our capacity to enter into such agreements and ensuring that these agreements are effectively designed, managed, and integrated into library and publisher workflows.  

Ellen is well-known throughout the library and publisher community for her leadership in scholarly communication and brings a wealth of experience and expertise to this role.   At MIT, Ellen led open access, licensing, authors’ rights, and scholarly communication transformation efforts, including open access policy development and implementation and creating a licensing program focused on leveraging contracts to enable more open and equitable access to the scholarly publishing ecosystem.  Ellen led negotiations under MIT’s open science principles as manifest in the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts, and spearheaded groundbreaking open access agreements with the Royal Society of Chemistry and ACM (the latter in collaboration with UC, Carnegie Mellon and Iowa State University).  We are thrilled that Ellen has chosen to contribute her passion, energy, and considerable talents to further the cause of open access transformation at the University of California.

Ellen will assume her position at CDL effective March 23rd and will work out of her home base in the Greater Boston area. 

We are also extremely pleased to announce that Tran Ha has accepted a position as Open Access Data Analyst at the CDL effective March 16th.  In her role as data analyst, Tran will support a growing publishing analytics program to underpin UC’s transformative open access publisher initiatives, including an expanded capacity to share our analytical methodologies and offer consulting support to other institutions engaged in similar efforts.  The position will also support analytic work for the Big Ten Academic Alliance, and we are grateful to them for providing collaborative funding for this new position.

Tran comes to us from UC Berkeley, where she was a senior business systems analyst in the Central Evaluation Unit, working to develop and maintain a multitude of reports relating to undergraduate progress towards degree completion.  Prior to her work in the CEU, Tran was integral to the implementation of PeopleSoft Campus Solutions on Berkeley’s campus, supporting data conversion from legacy systems and cleaning up transfer credit data.  Tran brings with her a remarkable capacity for tackling complex projects, a strong facility for communicating technical and data-related concepts to audiences of various levels of expertise and understanding, and a deep interest in data analysis and visualization.

A true UC product, Tran holds a BS in Managerial Economics from UC Davis and a Data Science certification from the UC Irvine Extension program.  Tran will work primarily from her home in Sacramento, CA.

Please join us in welcoming Ellen and Tran to CDL and UC!