معرفی
Demmy Verbeke serves as Senior Lecturer in Open Research at KU Leuven's Faculty of Arts while simultaneously holding leadership positions within KU Leuven Libraries. He heads Artes, the department responsible for collections and services for Humanities and Social Sciences, contributing to the strategic leadership of KU Leuven Libraries as a whole through his membership on the management team.
Verbeke earned his PhD in Linguistics and Literature: Latin and Greek from KU Leuven in 2005 with a dissertation on Latin letters and poems in 16th-century music editions. Prior to joining the library in 2012, he worked as a project manager in the heritage sector and as a postdoctoral researcher focusing on Renaissance humanism in the Low Countries and British Isles, multilingualism, book history, and the classical tradition.
His research centers on scholarly communication and digital scholarship in the humanities, with particular emphasis on non-profit and community-driven forms of academic publishing. Verbeke's work explores how libraries can adapt to evolving scholarly communication models while maintaining equitable access to knowledge. He investigates the role of academic libraries in supporting open science infrastructure and sustainable publishing models that serve scholarly communities rather than commercial interests.
Analysis of his recent publications reveals a consistent focus on transformative library practices, open access funding models, and the evolving role of academic libraries in scholarly communication. His work spans theoretical examinations of open scholarship principles and practical implementations of fair open access initiatives, with growing attention to cybersecurity challenges facing digital library infrastructure.
Verbeke actively contributes to open science governance as a member of KU Leuven's Open Science Task Force, coordinator of the Open Science working group on scholarly publishing futures, and co-manager of the KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access. He serves on national and international advisory boards including Open Library of Humanities and Open Book Collective, demonstrating significant influence in shaping open access infrastructure.
As head of Artes, he leads library services specifically tailored to humanities scholars while advancing digital scholarship initiatives. His dual appointment uniquely positions him to bridge library practice and academic research, fostering collaborations between library professionals and humanities scholars to develop innovative research support services that address the specific needs of humanities scholarship in the digital age.
