Dean of UNT Libraries, Dr. Martin Halbert, received the 2014 Texas Digital Library (TDL) Scholarly Communications Award at the annual Texas Conference on Digital Libraries (TCDL). This award honors the work of an individual or group in a Texas academic library who has made significant advances in our understanding of the issues surrounding scholarly communications and/or in developing innovative solutions to address the current academic publishing system.

The contributions of Dr. Halbert to the landscape of scholarly communication and open access are significant and far-reaching, not just in Texas, but nationally and internationally. Local noteworthy accomplishments include his leadership in the adoption of the UNT Open Access Policy, our UNT Scholarly Works open access repository, and the annual UNT Libraries’ hosted Open Access Annual Symposium. Dr. Halbert has also played an instrumental leadership role with the MetaArchive, the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, the DataRes research project on data management, the ETD Lifecycle Management project, and the Chronicles in Preservation project, as well as establishing the Aligning National Approaches to Digital Preservation (ANADP) international conference on digital preservation. These initiatives offer a sampling of Dr. Halbert’s many achievements in the field of scholarly communication and open access.

We congratulate Dr. Halbert on the 2014 TDL Scholarly Communications Award and thank him for his tremendous efforts.

Article by Laura Waugh

Photos by Daniel Alemneh