Kevin Smith

As Duke University’s first Scholarly Communications Officer, Kevin Smith’s principal role is to teach and advise faculty, administrators and students about copyright, intellectual property licensing and scholarly publishing. Kevin began his academic career with graduate studies in theology at Yale University and the University of Chicago, and then decided to move into library work. He holds a Masters of Library Science from Kent State University and has worked as an academic librarian in both liberal arts colleges and specialized theological libraries. His strong interest in copyright law began in library school and he received a law degree from Capital University in 2005. Before moving to Duke in 2006, Kevin served as the Director of the Pilgrim Library at Defiance College in Ohio, where he also taught Constitutional Law. He is admitted to the bar in Ohio and North Carolina. Kevin serves on the Intellectual Property Board and the Provost’s Digital Futures Task Force at Duke, as well as on the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Scholarly Communications Committee and the faculty of the Association of Research Libraries’ Institute on Scholarly Communications. He has written several articles on copyright issues in higher education, and maintains a highly-regarded web log on scholarly communications (http://library.duke.edu/blogs/scholcomm/) that discusses copyright and publication in academia. He is a frequent speaker on those topics.