With more than 25 years of experience in product and platform development in scholarly communications and STM publishing, Chris Shillum is now helping industry groups formulate product and technology strategy in a time of rapidly changing business models, new technology, and increasing expectations from users and customers.
Chris previously held a number of leadership positions at Elsevier where he touched many parts of the organization. Early in his career, he was asked to join the launch team working on what became ScienceDirect, one of the industry’s leading online platforms. During subsequent years, he gained broad experience by leading change programs for most of the major components of digital information platforms, including content management, search, identity and access management, big-data and personalized recommendation systems.
Chris has also played a significant role in the broader STM industry and is a strong believer in the power of community-wide collaboration to solve tough problems and drive progress. He was a co-author of the original paper which led to the use of DOIs for reference linking, going on to spend 20 years working with Crossref, including 10 years as a board member. He was a founder member of the ORCID board, helping that organization grow from start-up to become a sustainable part of the scholarly infrastructure landscape. Chris was part of the committee which oversaw the NISO/NFAIS integration, and he continues to serve on the NISO Board. Over the past few years, Chris has devoted much time to solving the access problem in research information, co-chairing the RA21 project, and building a coalition of industry organizations to operationalize those recommendations as SeamlessAccess.org.
Chris holds a Masters in Electronic Systems Engineering from the University of York in the UK.
