Berkeley Electronic Press names CEO

Berkeley, CA, March 12, 2008 – Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) announced today that its board of directors has named Gordon Tibbitts to serve as the company’s chief executive officer.

Tibbitts comes to bepress after seven years as President of Blackwell Publishing, where he grew the company into the world’s leading society publisher, and led the effort to develop an online platform for Blackwell journals. Tibbitts first entered the publishing field in 1980 as Director of Information Systems at Aster Publishing (later Advanstar), before moving to the Thomson Corporation in 1993, where he served as a vice-president until 1999. He holds a BS degree in Computer Science and an MBA from the University of Oregon.

“Gordon Tibbitts is a great match for Berkeley Electronic Press,” said Chairman and Co-founder Aaron Edlin. “The past years have seen some great successes at bepress, and we are poised for substantial growth. Gordon is the right person to make it happen—a dynamic, energetic leader with valuable technical and publishing experience and vision.”

In addition to his 25 years of experience at major publishing firms, Tibbitts is a founder and board chair of CLOCKSS and board member of LOCKSS, and has served on the Google publishing advisory board and as an advisor to ScholarOne and Atypon Systems, Inc. He frequently speaks and moderates at publishing, library, and technology meetings.

“bepress is an exciting place to be right now,” Tibbitts commented, “It has a unique position in the scholarly communications marketplace, because it combines a library-friendly model for subscription journals with next-generation open-access publishing services. This combination has contributed to record growth, and sets the stage for the future: an array of tools and services that allow scholars and institutions to disseminate their research in the ways they really need.”

In the next few months, Berkeley Electronic Press will exhibit and present at several major conferences. We invite you to visit us there and get to know more about us. To find out where, see http://www.bepress.com/events.

About The Berkeley Electronic Press

Founded by professors in 1999, Berkeley Electronic Press is both a publisher of peer-reviewed electronic journals and a software developer, having created Digital Commons, the world’s leading hosted institutional repository that powers the University of California's eScholarship Repository, and those of over fifty other universities, societies, and other organizations. The company produces tools to improve scholarly communication via innovative and effective means of content production and dissemination. Bepress has a portfolio of products and services that reduce the costs of and barriers to access.

For additional information on bepress, please see: www.bepress.com