The Board of Directors of the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) has announced that Clare Appavoo has been reappointed as Executive Director of CRKN. Appavoo’s appointment is for an additional five years, effective January 1, 2023.
Clare joined CRKN as Executive Director in 2012 and was reappointed in 2018. During this time, Clare has strengthened the value of the organization to CRKN’s 84 members and provided strong and collaborative leadership as the organization has continued to evolve to meet member needs. As we emerge from the unpredictability of the COVID-19 pandemic, under Clare’s direction, CRKN continues to provide value to members through collective negotiation for licensed content, support for Open Access initiatives, and enhanced infrastructure for access and preservation of digital Canadian heritage content. Through Clare’s long-term leadership, CRKN has become a strong voice for the Canadian academic library community.
Under Clare’s leadership, CRKN’s licensing program has continued to ensure that its member institutions can leverage their collections budgets as effectively as possible while taking bold collective action to transform scholarly communication and to help build and support an open research ecosystem in Canada and internationally. From saving members substantial money on traditional licensing deals, to signing new transformative agreements enabling members to support open access publishing in the journals chosen by their researchers, and developing ground-breaking partnerships with independent Canadian publishers, CRKN, under Clare’s direction, continues to champion open access to knowledge.
Collaborating with the Board and CRKN members, Clare was instrumental in the merger between Canadiana and CRKN in 2018, successfully integrating the Canadiana brand into CRKN’s identity and developing robust governance structures to ensure organizational sustainability. Reaffirming CRKN and its members’ commitment to open knowledge, in 2019, CRKN removed the paywall to access Canadiana content. Clare has been working with her team and the member community to develop a long-term vision for Canadiana as open scholarly research infrastructure and to build sustainable funding to bring this vision to fruition.
Through her service as Chair of the Governing Council of SCOAP3 and as Treasurer on the ORCID Board of Directors, Clare enhances CRKN’s participation in global open scholarship initiatives. Under her leadership, CRKN has built a persistent identifiers program, providing administrative leadership for ORCID-CA and Datacite Canada and advocating for an open and connected Canadian digital research landscape.
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