Laura Brown
Laura Brown is the Executive Vice President of Strategy and Research for ITHAKA, and Managing Director of Ithaka S+R. Ithaka S+R supports innovation by working with universities, libraries, professional societies, museums and archives, and scholarly initiatives to develop sustainable business models, and by conducting research and analysis on the impact of digital media on the academic community as a whole. JSTOR, an accessible archive of more than 1,000 scholarly journals and other content, and Portico, a service that preserves scholarly content published in electronic form for future generations, are also part of ITHAKA. Laura is the author of the Ithaka report University Publishing in A Digital Age, and oversees work on a number of research programs and consulting projects, including the sustainability of academic initiatives, new models for library collaboration, changing faculty attitudes and publishing behaviors, open courseware and university-sponsored online courses, and new e-book publishing models for university presses. Prior to joining ITHAKA, Laura was the president of Oxford University Press, USA, where she spent most of her professional career. She has led a variety of publishing divisions, including scholarly, professional, reference, trade, and textbooks operations, and helped Oxford to make the transition to digital publishing. Currently an Overseer of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, Laura also serves on the Board of The MIT Press, and The Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation.