Dr. Jeffrey Spies is the founder of 221B LLC, a strategic consulting firm combining expertise in research technology and methodology, data analysis, and open access/data/science policy to accelerate projects across higher-ed. His clients have primarily included academic libraries and library consortia, academic research units and centers, and private philanthropic foundations. Since 2019, Jeffrey has been leading or supporting negotiations between academic libraries and journal publishers. Finalized in late 2022, he led negotiations for 44 Texas institutions of a $26M/year contract with academic publisher Elsevier, resulting in savings of $4.5M/year, open access discounts, highly improved contract terms, and a pilot project to revert copyrights to original authors. Jeffrey currently leads negotiations for the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries in their 2023 negotiation with Elsevier.

Prior to 221B, Jeff co-founded and served as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Center for Open Science, a non-profit formed to maintain his research workflow management and sharing platform, the Open Science Framework. He has a Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology (i.e., behavioral statistics) from the University of Virginia and a background in computer science. Over the past decade, Jeffrey has raised nearly $38M in philanthropic and federal funding, designed and co-led the large-scale methodological effort the Reproducibility Project: Psychology, and published on topics including the psychology of scholarly incentives. He has been the primary architect and developer of tools that have served millions of users. Jeffrey is regularly invited to speak about openness, reproducibility, and the role of technology in scholarship, which includes testifying on these topics at a United States House congressional hearing.