HighWire's John Sack honored with Top CSE Award

[Bonnie Zavon <bzavon@stanford.edu>]

2 May 2011 -

HighWire is proud to announce that its Founding Director, John 
Sack, has been awarded the 2011 CSE Award for Meritorious 
Achievement from the Council of Science Editors at their annual 
meeting in Baltimore. The award for Meritorious Achievement is 
the highest honor that the CSE bestows, highlighting the 
contributions and efforts of an individual towards improving 
scientific communication.

"I want to express my sincere respect and admiration for John's 
accomplishments," said Michael Keller, Stanford University 
Librarian and Publisher of HighWire Press. "John Sack has always 
been a big thinker, whose forte is envisioning new ways to 
improve scholarly communication by using emerging tools and 
technologies. All of us here at Stanford are delighted with this 
well deserved recognition by the CSE."

John Sack's career at Stanford goes back quite a long time. He 
came to Stanford as a graduate student in English but quickly 
became involved in information technology. In 1994, while working 
for Stanford's then provost, Condoleezza Rice, he was recruited 
by Keller to work on a project to develop an electronic journal 
service to help scholarly publishers move their information 
online - a project that evolved into HighWire Press. As one of 
HighWire's founders, John is focused on market assessment, client 
relations, technology innovation, and the kind of thought 
leadership and industry-forward thinking that has successfully 
defined HighWire's mission since 1995.

"According to our studies, researchers care more about how to 
select, extract, skim, absorb, and manage publishers' information 
into their own daily tasks and workflow than how to locate 
information," said John Sack in his acceptance speech. "Thus the 
big imaginative leap is to understand that we are a cog in 
somebody else's machine, or, more simply, that you are part of a 
workflow organized by and driven by somebody else. If we want to 
be efficient and provide excellent service, we must pay attention 
to the researcher's workflow, not just our own."

John Sack earned his M.A. in English from Stanford University, 
and a B.A. in English and Philosophy, Summa Cum Laude, from the 
University of Virginia, where he was also Phi Beta Kappa, and an 
Echols Scholar. He serves on the International Advisory Board for 
COUNTER, and the STM Library Relations Committee. He has been a 
board member of the North American Chapter of ALPSP (Association 
of Learned and Professional Scholarly Publishers), the Stanford 
Federal Credit Union and the User Alliance for Open Systems, as 
well as a member of the Coalition for Networked Information 
(CNI), EDUCOM, CAUSE, Internet Society, ACM, Uniforum, 
Computer-Human Interface (CHI), AMA, and SIM.

For the complete text of the press release:
http://highwire.stanford.edu/PR/Sack_CSE_award.pdf

Bonnie Zavon
Public Relations
HighWire | Stanford University
e: bzavon@stanford.edu