Who We Are
Our Values
The ORFG values openness and inclusivity. Open research yields greater impact for society. Inclusivity ensures that funders of different sizes, geographies, or resource levels can participate to improve the impacts of research and scholarship through openness.
Mission
The Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) is a collaboration of funding organizations committed to the open sharing of research outputs and other forms of scholarship. ORFG explores how funders can advance open science via practices and policies that increase the sharing of data, publications, methods, research outputs, and worldwide collaborations. ORFG advocates for the coordination of funder policies that benefit society by accelerating the pace of discovery, reducing information-sharing gaps, encouraging innovation, and strengthening reproducibility.
Structure
The Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) is an initiative of SPARC, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that advances open systems for research and education that enable everyone, everywhere, to access, contribute to, and benefit from the knowledge that shapes our world.
The Open Research Funders Group was conceived in an October 2015, meeting convened by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and SPARC. This forum of open access stakeholders included representatives from more than 50 organizations. It offered a unique opportunity for participants to share experiences, concerns, strategies, and questions regarding open access and open data. For annual reports and other information, please visit our blog.
The views, information, and opinions expressed by the ORFG represent our organizational stance and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any individual members.
Members
Members of the ORFG are philanthropic organizations around the globe with an interest in supporting and improving open research, open science, and open scholarly outputs.
ORFG Leadership
The Open Research Funders Group is led by a member coordinating committee, with advice from staff.
Member Leaders
Ashley Farley
Ashley Farley is the Senior Officer of Knowledge and Research Services at the Gates Foundation. Over the past decade, she has led the implementation of the foundation’s Open Access Policy. She completed her Master’s in Library and Information Sciences through the University of Washington’s Information School. Much of her work advocates for knowledge as a global good, and she has a deep passion for open access, believing that freely accessible knowledge can and will improve and save lives.
Daniel Lee
Daniel Lee is a Senior Program Scientist in the Office of the President at Schmidt Sciences, where he supports science strategy and leads initiatives in open science and scholarly infrastructure. Previously, he created and led programs at Schmidt Sciences and Schmidt Futures across AI, climate science, and scientific talent. Before philanthropy, Dan was a research scientist with more than 20 publications spanning neuroscience, materials science, chemical engineering, and genetics. He holds a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Johns Hopkins and serves on the National Academies’ Action Collaborative on the Future of Research Communication, as well as steering committees for open research and public data initiatives. He still enjoys studying complex systems; he has simply changed model organisms.
Michele Avissar-Whiting
Michele is the Director of Open Science Strategy at HHMI, overseeing the Open Access Policy and initiatives focused on improving research communication. Prior to joining HHMI as a program officer in 2022, she held various roles at Research Square Company, serving as Editor-in-Chief of their preprint platform from 2020 to 2022. She earned a PhD in Medical Science from Brown University, where she studied the epigenetic mechanisms of carcinogenesis associated with environmental exposures.
Ross Mounce
Ross is Director of Open Access at Arcadia—family charitable foundation founded in 2002. He is a Software Sustainability Fellow (2016 inauguration) of the Software Sustainability Institute. He was previously a postdoc in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, and an Open Knowledge Foundation Panton Fellow for open data in science. Ross gained his doctorate at the University of Bath, where his thesis focused on the role of morphology in analyses of evolutionary relationships that include fossil species.
Staff
Emily Ford
Emily is Director of the Open Research Funders Group (ORFG). In this role, she oversees the coalition of nearly two dozen philanthropic organizations around the globe involved with charitable, educational, or other activities serving the public good and committed to open sharing of research outputs.
Heather Joseph
Heather Joseph is Executive Director of SPARC. She leads SPARC’s strategic work, which has resulted in a fundamental shift in public policy towards open knowledge sharing, including the establishment of the landmark White House Memorandum requiring open access to all U.S. federally funded research outputs in 2023.
