RE: Andrew Waller, University of Calgary - BMC's OA Advocate of the Year

["Bev Acreman" <Bev.Acreman@biomedcentral.com>]

London 6 May 2011

Last night, at an awards ceremony in London, Andrew Waller from 
the University of Calgary 
(http://library.ucalgary.ca/profiles/andrew-waller) was awarded 
BioMed Central's OA Advocate of the Year Award.  Previously 
awarded to institutions, the judges felt that Andrew's personal 
commitment to, and efforts on behalf of, OA justified an 
individual award.  Quoting from the citation read out last night 
by leading science journalist, Vivienne Parry:

"He is the Open Access Librarian in the Scholarly Communication 
Centre, part of the Libraries and Cultural Resources unit at the 
University of Calgary, Canada. Andrew is responsible for the Open 
Access Authors Fund, which has made possible over 170 articles 
for University of Calgary authors since its inception in 2008. 
This fund was the first of its kind in Canada. It is one of 
several programs in the University of Calgary's outstanding open 
access "suite".  It includes an institutional repository; an 
expansive digitization program; OA journals and monographs in the 
University of Calgary Press. Andrew has regularly written on and 
spoken about open access over the last several years. He is one 
of the people behind the OA Librarian blog and is a Canadian 
editor for the open access repository for library and information 
science, E-LIS"

More information on our awards and the other winners can be found 
here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/researchawards/previousawards

BioMed Central is delighted to honour Andrew in this way as 
librarians are vital advocates of open access and supporters of 
us here at BMC. For more information please don't hesitate to 
contact me at: bev.acreman@biomedcentral.com

Bev Acreman
BioMed Central