Melanie Gainey

As a STEM librarian, I support the life science departments at Carnegie Mellon by providing guidance, instruction, and resources on topics such as information literacy and research data management. In recent years, a major area of my work has been helping researchers understand and meet funding requirements from the NIH related to data sharing and open access publishing. I’m also trained in evidence synthesis methodologies and collaborate with researchers across campus in this area.

My other role is serving as Director of the Open Science Program. In this capacity, I work on strategic initiatives designed to help our researchers and the larger community make their work more accessible, transparent, and reproducible. This work includes creating training modules, organizing community-building events such as the Open Science Symposium and the Open Unconference, and hosting hackathons in which all outputs are shared publicly for reuse. Making research open is still challenging in a number of ways, and I really enjoy making the transition to a more open workflow a little bit easier for our researchers wherever I can. I also model these practices with my own research so I can be a more effective advocate for them.