Marilyn S. Billings

Marilyn S. Billings is the scholarly communication and special initiatives librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a position she has held since 2006. As head of the Office of Scholarly Communication, she provides campus and regional leadership and education in alternative scholarly communication strategies and gives presentations on author rights, new digital publishing models, and the role of digital repositories in today's research and scholarship endeavors as well as providing oversight to the UMass Amherst digital repository ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. Marilyn is actively involved in regional and national workshops on these topics, most recently the Academic Library Futures Symposium at Rice University in September 2012, the Living the Future Conference at University of Arizona in April 2012, and the international Scholarly Publishing and Resource Coalition (SPARC) OA workshop held in Kansas City in March 2012. Her most recent activity has focused on her work as a campus leader and national speaker on the topic of alternatives to high-cost textbooks, the use of open educational resources, and coordinator of the Open Education Initiative (OEI) launched at UMass Amherst in spring 2011.