T. Scott Plutchak is Director of Digital Data Curation Strategies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). In that capacity he works with units throughout the university to develop institutional policies and services for the management and curation of research data. From 1995 to 2014 he was the Director of UAB’s Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences. Prior to that he was Associate Director and then Director of the Health Sciences Center Library at St. Louis University. He received his Master of Arts Degree in Library Science from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh in 1983, and was a post-graduate Library Associate Fellow at the US National Library of Medicine. From 1999 through 2005 he was the editor of the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA). He presently serves on editorial boards for The Journal of eScience Librarianship, JMLA, and The BMJ. In 2001 he received the Medical Library Association (MLA) Estelle Brodman Academic Librarian of the Year award, and in 2009, the Outstanding Alumni Award from the University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley. In May 2011 he delivered the Janet Doe Lecture at the annual meeting of the MLA, Breaking the barriers of time and space: the dawning of the great age of librarians.
He is a founding member of the Chicago Collaborative, a group dedicated to finding common ground among the librarian, publisher and editorial communities. In 2009 he was a member of the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable, which submitted a report to the US Congress in January 2010 with recommendations on providing public access to federally funded research results. The Roundtable’s key recommendations were incorporated into the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum directing US Federal funding agencies to develop policies making the publications and data resulting from federal grants and contracts publicly available. He is a frequent speaker to publisher and library groups on topics ranging from intellectual property to scholarly communication to the future of librarianship, and leads the international librarian rock band, The Bearded Pigs.