Oya Y. Rieger

Oya Y. Rieger is a senior strategist on Ithaka S+R’s Libraries, Scholarly Communication, and Museums team. She spearheads projects that re-examine the nature of collections within the research library, help secure access to and preservation of the scholarly record, and explore the possibilities of open source software and open science.

Prior to joining Ithaka S+R, Oya worked at Cornell University for 25 years. For the past ten years she served as Associate University Librarian, leading strategic initiatives, building partnerships, and facilitating sustainable and user-centered projects. During her tenure at Cornell, her program areas included digital scholarship, collection development, digitization, preservation, user experience, scholarly publishing, learning technologies, research data management, digital humanities, and special collections. She spearheaded projects funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Studies (IMLS), the Henry Luce Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Simons Foundation, and Sloan Foundation to develop ejournal preservation strategies, conduct research on new media archiving, implement preservation programs in Asia, design digital curation curriculums, and create sustainability models for alternative publishing models to advance science communication.

From 2009 – August 2019, Oya led the operations, governance, sustainability, and strategic development of arXiv.org, the open access preprint service for research papers in physics, mathematics, computer science, electric engineering, system science, and economics. She continues to serve an an advisor for arXiv.

Oya has held  numerous leadership positions with national and international organizations, including with Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), HathiTrust, OpenAIRE Sustainability Project, National Digital Stewardship Residency, Portico, and Project Euclid. Throughout her career, Oya has published widely on a range of topics such as institutional and subject repositories, digital preservation, and developing sustainable business models for new forms of scholarly communication. At Cornell, she taught courses on visual research and scientific collaborations at the communication and architecture departments.

With an undergraduate degree in economics, she holds an M.S. in Public Administration (University of Oklahoma), an M.S. in Information Systems (Columbia University), and a Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction (Cornell University). Her doctoral work focused on how information and communication technologies support research and scholarly discourse of humanities scholars. She was guided by the principles of grounded theory and social informatics in gathering and analyzing data about scholars’ perceptions and accounts of technology use.