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About

Unglue.it is a service provided by Gluejar, Inc. It's a place for individuals and institutions to join together to liberate specific ebooks and other types of digital content by paying authors and publishers to relicense their works under Creative Commons licenses.

What does this mean?

You can learn more about us in our FAQs and our press page.

Team

eric
Eric Hellman, President of Gluejar, is a technologist, entrepreneur, and writer. After 10 years at Bell Labs in physics research, Eric became interested in technologies surrounding e-journals and libraries. His first business, Openly Informatics, developed OpenURL linking software and knowledgebases, and was acquired by OCLC in 1996. At OCLC, he led the effort to productize and expand the xISBN service, and began the development of OCLC's Electronic Resource Management offerings. After leaving OCLC, Eric began blogging at Go To Hellman. He covers the intersection of technology, libraries and ebooks, and has written extensively on the Semantic Web and Linked Data. Eric has a B.S.E. from Princeton University, and a Ph. D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University
amanda
Amanda Mecke is an expert in literary rights management. Before founding her own literary agency, Amanda was VP, Director of Subsidiary Rights for Bantam Dell, a division of Random House Inc. from 1989-2003, where she led a department that sold international and domestic book rights and pioneered early electronic licenses for subscription databases, CD-ROMs, audiobooks, and ebooks. She was also a co-leader of the Random House/SAP Contracts and Royalties software development team. Prior to joining Bantam Dell, Amanda ran the New York marketing office of the University of California Press. While there she served the board of the American Association of University Presses and was President of Women in Scholarly Publishing. Amanda has been a speaker at the Frankfurt Book Messe Rights Workshop, NYU Summer Publishing Program, American Independent Writers conference, and the International Women’s Writers Guild. She has a B.A. from Pitzer College, Claremont, California and a Ph.D. in English from UCLA. Amanda continues to represent original work by her literary agency clients.

Amanda will be spending much of her time reaching out to authors, publishers, and other rights holders and identifying works that will attract financial support from book lovers who want to see the ebooks available for free to anyone, anywhere. Her experience in both trade and academic publishing, together with her keen insight into the world of book rights, stood her above a lot of great people who expressed interest in working for Gluejar.
raymond
Raymond Yee is a data architect, author, consultant, and teacher. He is author of the leading book on web mashups, Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services (published by Apress and licensed under a Creative Commons license), and has numerous blogs at his personal site. At the UC Berkeley School of Information, he taught Mixing and Remixing Information, a course on using APIs to create mashups. An open data and open government afficionado, he recently co-wrote three influential reports on how the US government can improve its efforts to make data and services available through APIs. Raymond served as the Integration Advisor for the Zotero Project (a widely used open source research tool) and managed the Zotero Commons, a collaboration between George Mason University and the Internet Archive. Raymond has been an invited speaker about web technology at the Library of Congress, Fashion Institute of Technology, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, American Library Association, the Open Education conference, Code4lib, Educause, and NISO. While earning a Ph.D. in biophysics, he taught computer science, philosophy, and personal development to middle and high school students in the Academic Talent Development Program on the Berkeley campus. Raymond is an erstwhile tubaist, admirer of J. S. Bach, and son of industrious Chinese-Canadian restaurateurs.

Recently, Raymond has been teaching a course at UC Berkeley's School of Information science on working with Open Data; with any luck, the textbook he's working on will be a subject of a future ungluing campaign!
raymond
Luc Lewitanski is a student at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study concentrating in Modernizing Intellectual Property for the Global Era. Born and raised in Paris, Luc has always considered himself a child of many cultures, illuminated by their juxtaposition. As a speaker of French, English, Spanish and German, he has incredible insight into the various ways in which similar phenomena get interpreted through the prism of language.

Luc is joining Gluejar as a paid intern, and feels tremendously privileged to work on a project that celebrates Creative Commons and disruptive publishing models.

Past Team

Andromeda Yelton was one of Unglue.it's founding staff members; she's gone on to pursue another passion, teaching libraries to code. She blogs at Across Divided Networks. Check out her web site if you think she can help you!
Design Anthem helped us make the site pretty.
Jason Kace wrote code. Ed Summers wrote some more code. Both of them helped us write even more code.
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