The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announced today that Ed Pentz of Crossref will be the recipient of the 2024 Miles Conrad Award, a lifetime achievement award for those working in the information community.
Ed is the founding Executive Director of Crossref, the largest open scholarly infrastructure provider globally. As an active champion of openness in scholarly communication, he has driven or been involved in the founding and governance of a number of organizations and initiatives in this space and is a leading proponent of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) that support the long-term sustainability and availability of the infrastructure enabling research communication and scholarship. He is well known for his leadership and diplomacy in building consensus across the community to resolve some of the most challenging issues in scholarly communications.
Prior to launching Crossref, Ed held electronic publishing, editorial, and sales positions at Harcourt Brace in the US and UK. There he managed the launch of Academic Press’s first online journal, the Journal of Molecular Biology, in 1995. This work led him to join the Association of American Publishers’ Enabling Technologies Committee and participate in the DOI-X pilot project to use DOIs to enable journal article reference linking, which laid the groundwork for the creation of Crossref.
With a mission to make it possible to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse research—-from journals and books to preprints and grants—-Crossref, founded in 2000, has grown under Ed’s leadership to be an essential part of the research ecosystem, with nearly 20,000 members in 155 countries and a registry of metadata and persistent identifiers for over 150 million research objects. As Crossref has grown, Ed has focused on building a collaborative, diverse, and equitable “remote first” culture at the organization. He leads a staff of 48 people, all working remotely from 11 countries across 7 time zones.
Ed has played a pivotal role in developing important keystones of open scholarly infrastructure by co-founding ROR, a global, community-led registry of open persistent identifiers for research organizations, with an innovative operating model of being jointly run by Crossref, DataCite, and the California Digital Library. He was also a founding member of the ORCID board, serving in that capacity for 10 years (four of them as Chair) and securing start-up funding to launch the organization.
Throughout his career, collaboration and community engagement have been constant themes as Ed has led community projects and initiatives. He has guided the boards of the DOI Foundation (as treasurer for many years) and the Digital Object Naming Authority (DONA). He was also a trustee and treasurer of UKSG and served on the Steering Committee of the Coalition for Diversity in Scholarly Publishing (C4DISC).
NISO will recognize Ed’s achievement at the Miles Conrad Award ceremony and lecture, taking place during the NISO Plus 2024 conference in Baltimore at 12:00 pm ET on February 13, 2024. For more information about the conference, please visit https://niso.plus.
“We’re excited to recognize Ed’s contributions to the information community with this award,” said NISO Executive Director Todd Carpenter. “It’s difficult to overstate his impact on scholarly communications and infrastructure, not just through his work at Crossref, but also through his leadership and involvement in many groundbreaking initiatives across the community. We look forward to his lecture at the NISO Plus meeting in February.”
About the Miles Conrad Award
Miles Conrad was one of the founders of the National Federation of Abstracting and Indexing Services (NFAIS), and this award was established in 1965 in his memory. During the 1960s, Conrad encouraged NFAIS members—scholarly societies and government agencies—to work collaboratively in support of the space exploration program, in order to enhance the speed with which scientific knowledge could be disseminated, discovered, and acted upon. In the years that followed, NFAIS expanded its cross-disciplinary membership and played an important role in the development of online information services and resources, before merging with National Information Standards Organization (NISO) in 2019. NISO’s vision of a world where all can benefit from the unfettered exchange of information reflects the aims of both organizations; in awarding this prize, we are proud to continue recognizing the contributions of those whose lifetime achievements have moved our community forward. A list of previous Miles Conrad Award winners is available on the NISO website: https://www.niso.org/awards/MCA.
About NISO
Based in Baltimore, MD, NISO fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and learning. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire lifecycle of information standards. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO website (https://niso.org) or contact us at nisohq@niso.org.