Kevin Ashley has recently been appointed director of the UK Digital Curation Center. He was formerly Head of Digital Archives Department, University of London Computer Centre (ULCC). For the past ten years, Kevin's group has worked on the preservation of digital resources on behalf of other organisations. In many cases this has included providing descriptions of those resources and managing access to them. Most of these resources are archival, whether born digital or as digital surrogates, and have involved many types of information (databases, text, video and audio) with different access patterns and cataloguing requirements. Kevin represents ULCC on the board of the Digital Preservation Coalition, was a member of the Advisory Council for Erpanet and part of the RLG-NARA task force seeking to develop an audit and certification mechanism for trusted digital repositories. He speaks frequently on matters related to digital preservation and management of digital content and has contributed to training through the Society of Archivists and the DPC, as well as other organisations.

Antonella De Robbio is responsible for the Open Access Issue coordinating Institutional Repositories (Padua@research) for research papers enclosed PhD Theses and (Padua@thesis) for bachelor theses theses at the University Centre for Libraries (CAB) of the Library System of the University of Padua. She serves as the referent for the copyright and intellectual property issues for the University of Padua (author's right webpage). At CRUI (Conference of the Italian Rectors - Open Access WG) she is involved as an expert member on copyright and intellectual property policies for a specific Task Force and is member of the Italian Open Access Working Group. In 2003 she founded and implemented E-LIS, an electronic open access archive for scientific or technical documents, published or unpublished, in Librarianship, Information Science and Technology, and related application activities, named E-LIS, of which she is manager.

John Faundeen John's academic background is in Geography where he holds a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Masters of Science degree. He began his career at the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Customer Services and Information Systems Management areas in 1985. He served as a technical liaison at the USGS Headquarters in Reston Virginia for three years before becoming the Chief of Data Management at EROS in 1998. In 2001 he became the Archivist for EROS. In 2004 he served as the Acting USGS Records Officer overseeing records management activities from a Bureau perspective.

Perla Innocenti is Co-Principal Investigator in the EU-funded projects Sustaining Heritage Access through Multivalent ArchiviNg (SHAMAN) and Digital Library Interoperability, Best Practices and Modelling Foundations (DL.org). Perla has been involved in repository design and audit research as part of DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) and Digital Curation Center (DCC), co-ordinating activities and development for the Digital Repository Audit Method Base on Risk Assessment (DRAMBORA) Toolkit. Perla has also contributed to usage models research within the EU-funded project Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services (Planets), as well as to the investigation of the potential application of the DRAMBORA toolkit in the context of digital libraries within the DELOS project and to the refinement of the DELOS Reference Model in relation to digital preservation. Her research interests include digital preservation methodologies and technologies, audit and risk assessment for digital repositories, digital library design and usage models and digitisation methodologies.

Steve Knight is the Manager of Digital Strategy Implementation (DSI) at the National Library of New Zealand. The DSI team was established to ensure the long-term storage, preservation, and provision of access to New Zealand's digital cultural heritage and to enhance access to New Zealand's cultural heritage online through an increased digitisation programme. In conjunction with other business units, the team researches and facilitates the implementation of the operational and technical infrastructure for the integration of digital materials into the collections of the National Library. The DSI team is currently leading the business side of a multi-year project to establish a National Digital Heritage Archive. From a library background, Steve has had experience in a range of information management disciplines, including records management and document management. Much of this work has been in the design and implementation of electronic services. He served as Scientific Chair of the Policy Working Group until January 2010.

Hans Pfeiffenberger (physicist) is deputy head of the data processing centre at the Alfred Wegener Institute. He is involved in repository-related projects (OAI-PMH/repositories for data and grid, authentication) and is the spokesman for the Open Access working group of the Helmholtz Association. He is a member of the board of the Information Resource Center of Jacobs University in Bremen.

Seamus Ross is Dean of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Seamus was Professor of Humanities Informatics and Digital Curation, and founding Director of the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII)at the University of Glasgow from 1997 through 2008. He was Associate Director of the Digital Curation Centre in the UK , 2004-8), Principal Director of DigitalPreservationEurope DPE and a partner in Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services Planets. He was a co-principal investigator in the DELOS Digital Libraries Network of Excellence (2002-8). He was Principal Director of ERPANET, a European Commission activity to enhance the preservation of cultural heritage and scientific digital objects. His research focuses on digital preservation including work on preservation, repository design, digital library design and services, ingest, and semantic metadata extraction.

MacKenzie Smith is the Associate Director for Technology at the MIT Libraries, where she oversees the Libraries' use of technology and its digital library research programme. She was the MIT project director for DSpace, MIT's collaboration with Hewlett-Packard Labs to develop an open source digital repository for scholarly research material in digital formats, and is the Principal Investigator on a number of digital library research projects including SIMILE and FACADE. She was formerly the Digital Library Program Manager for the Harvard University Library where she managed the design and implementation of their Library Digital Initiative, and she has held positions in the library IT departments at Harvard and the University of Chicago. Her research interests are in technology applications for libraries and academia, and digital libraries and archives in particular.