On February 24, Mike Spinella joined JSTOR as Executive Director. After a transition period during which Kevin Guthrie will work alongside Mike to share organizational history and knowledge, Mike will assume responsibility for all operational activities of the organization. Kevin will continue to be involved in JSTOR, but in a new role as Chairman of the JSTOR Board of Trustees.

Mike is known to many of JSTOR's participating libraries and publishers from his work at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), where he held a variety of positions since 1990. AAAS is the non-profit publisher of the journal Science. At AAAS, Mike played an important role in developing site licensing and access models for Science Online. He also was instrumental in the decision to include Science in JSTOR's General Science Collection back in 1998.

Prior to his work at AAAS, and after receiving his B.A. in English and Philosophy from the College of William and Mary, and his M.A. in English Literature from the University of Virginia, Mike learned the publishing business managing the circulation department of a small, but fast-growing, publisher of trade titles in Washington, DC. While at AAAS, Mike also completed his M.B.A. at The George Washington University.

Although he has been at JSTOR just a few days, we thought a brief Q & A would be a useful way to introduce Mike and allow him to share his impressions of JSTOR as he assumes his new position.

Q. You had a very successful tenure at AAAS. And lately you've been enjoying building a publishing consultancy. So, what attracted you to JSTOR?

A. I've been involved with JSTOR, as a publisher participant, since 1998. In observing JSTOR's activities during that time, I've admired the way the organization has conducted itself in the community. I've also been impressed with the continuing high quality of the archive as it has grown. JSTOR has been a leader and has made a difference. Coming to an organization like JSTOR represents a wonderful opportunity to have a positive impact on the scholarly community.

I especially appreciate JSTOR's "win-win" approach to the communities it serves. The partnership we developed between AAAS and JSTOR to include Science in the General Science Collection proved to be a great success for AAAS and for the scholarly community as a whole. JSTOR provided a well-considered model for addressing the long-term preservation of Science while at the same time offering enhanced access to Science backfiles for the scholarly community - a service that resonated with AAAS' mission to disseminate the work of scientists. JSTOR also collaborated with us to enable individual AAAS members to access Science backfiles - a member benefit that proved to be very popular.

In addition to my positive impressions of and experience with JSTOR, I am inspired by JSTOR's mission. It is exciting to come to an organization that has worked effectively and closely with librarians and publishers to address the challenges of the transition from print to electronic dissemination while building collections of real significance. Some of the work preserved digitally by JSTOR is so old that pages are deteriorating and the materials could be lost. In other cases, there may be only a handful of copies still extant and available to the scholarly community. JSTOR's efforts have saved them from physical destruction or obscurity, and in fact made them far more accessible to scholars everywhere. Because of my academic background in English Literature and my work experience in the life sciences, I am also inspired by the breadth of disciplines covered by the JSTOR collections. I would be glad if I could help to expand that coverage even further, with the guidance of our library and scholarly participants.

Q. JSTOR has worked hard over the past 8 years to take a system-wide approach in building this archive of important scholarly literature, taking into consideration the needs of the library community, the publishing community, and the scholars themselves. You obviously bring a publisher perspective to JSTOR. How do you see that perspective impacting the organization?

A. I think JSTOR's system-wide perspective is one of its great assets and is one of the keys to its success. I have been working closely with the library, scholarly, and publishing communities for many years and expect to deepen those relationships at JSTOR. I will not lead JSTOR into a more publisher-centric model, but I hope that my understanding of the economics of scholarly publishing can enrich the dialogue among the communities that JSTOR serves and help lead those communities to realistic solutions to some of the key challenges facing academia. I understand that the goals of publishers, libraries and scholars are not always perfectly aligned, but I believe that the community has more in common than is often recognized.

Naturally, I expect JSTOR will continue to emphasize the importance of preserving and archiving scholarly work over the very long term, as well as the need for broad accessibility of scholarship to an international and diverse readership, since these are the fundamental components of our mission. But I will also look for areas where JSTOR's perspective on important issues can help us to make a constructive contribution to the community. For example, JSTOR recently raised community awareness about the access control problems that can occur in networks that include, intentionally or not, open proxy servers. This is not a problem specific to JSTOR but it is a problem with broad and potentially very damaging implications, so I am impressed that JSTOR chose to take a leadership role in addressing the problem. In the appropriate circumstances, this strikes me as a valuable role for JSTOR to play.

Q. What do you see as the greatest challenges for JSTOR as you assume the position of Executive Director and begin to focus on JSTOR's future activities?

A. As I see it, the main challenges for JSTOR revolve around growth, stewardship and functionality. I'll explain what I mean by these shortly, but I should first acknowledge that the leadership transition we are now embarking on is the most immediate challenge for the organization. Obviously, given the fact that I am here and Kevin is moving to a governance role on the Board of Trustees, we are entering a new phase in JSTOR's existence. Having met the terrific JSTOR staff and participated in my first Board of Trustees meeting, I feel comfortable saying we are off to a good start.

I mentioned that growth is one of our strategic challenges. JSTOR has over 2 million articles in its collections - an impressive start - but there is much more that can and should be done. There is ample scholarship that still needs to be digitally preserved and made available online. The community that has come together to make JSTOR successful will naturally raise its expectations about the breadth and functionality of JSTOR collections. Consequently, we must manage our growth very carefully, improving the comprehensiveness of the subjects we cover, adding new disciplines, and simultaneously pushing to adopt or invent new ways to enhance the benefits JSTOR offers to scholars, librarians, and publishers. Another dimension of growth is reaching out to new communities of scholars. By making scholarly literature more readily available in developing countries and more accessible to vision-impaired scholars, for example, we could significantly expand the value of the archive to the community as a whole, since scholars thrive on networking and sharing information across geographic and other boundaries.

When I note that stewardship is a key challenge, I am referring to our commitment to preserve and protect the archive over long periods of time and through the many changes in technology. JSTOR is about to embark on a significant and complex infrastructure upgrade. Migration to new platforms and technologies is part of our core mission and mandate as an archiving organization. While we have certainly conducted projects of this type before, the infrastructure change now facing us is probably our most ambitious migration to date. We expect to be working collaboratively here, as well, to help develop a base technological infrastructure for archiving digital materials that can be shared by our community.

Now that a large and valuable digital collection is in place at JSTOR, the next stage of development will require much more coordination and cooperation among different stakeholders. We already link current content from some publishers' sites to the articles archived in JSTOR (and vice-versa). Next, we need to engage the community in dialogue about what the next generation of features should be, and work with our constituents to prioritize and implement the most valuable ones.

I am excited about working with the talented people on the JSTOR team to help make these possibilities a reality. While there are complex challenges ahead, JSTOR has a bright future, a committed staff and leadership, and deep, productive ties within the community. I look forward to continuing JSTOR's tradition of collaborative creativity!

Last updated on September 8, 2006