Melissa Hagemann

About Melissa

Melissa Hagemann has been a leader of the Access to Knowledge movement for over twenty years. She managed the Open Society Institute’s (now Open Society Foundations) work to define Open Access through the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) and went on to support the development of the global Open Access movement. To mark the 20th anniversary of the BOAI, she spearheaded the development of new recommendations that emphasize that Open Access is not an end in itself but a means to further ends, above all, to the equity, quality, sustainability, and usability of research. Melissa co-organized the meeting that led to the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, which offered strategies for the development of the global open education movement. She facilitated the creation of open education coalitions in Brazil, the Czech Republic, Macedonia, Mongolia, Poland, and Slovakia. In addition, she supported the development of progressive copyright reform at the national and international levels. Early in her career, Melissa directed the Open Society Institute’s Library Program, based out of the foundation’s office in Budapest, which supported collection development, library automation, and management training in 24 countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. She has served on numerous boards, including the Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as the newly launched Open Climate Campaign.

In the course of her fellowship, Melissa will examine the current challenges faced by the movement advocating for open access to research and how they are dealt with. She will explore how these challenges are being addressed in the Majority World, which is at the forefront of community-driven, not-for-profit scholarly publishing. Melissa’s work will also explore the new strategy, introduced during the pandemic when almost all COVID-related research was open access, of advocating for research in a given field to be made openly available.