User:Michael Jon Jensen

In 2002, Michael Jon Jensen was appointed Director of Web Communications for the National Academies, while remaining Director of Publishing Technologies at the National Academies Press, which makes more than 3600 books (more than 650,000 pages from the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council) fully browsable and searchable online for free (www.nap.edu). This site receives more than a 1.5 million visitors per month, and boasts of some of the most advanced search and discovery tools available on any publisher's site, most of which were initially developed by Mr. Jensen. In 2001, he received the National Academies' "President's Award," its highest staff honor.

Previously, Michael Jensen was Electronic Publisher at the Johns Hopkins University Press, and Electronic Media Manager at the University of Nebraska Press. He has been involved in publishing on the Internet since 1989 and is a frequent speaker and consultant on electronic publishing issues. He has directed or guided such projects as the first searchable online publisher's catalog (a Telnet application), a dozen major CD-ROM products, the late-80s Gallery of the Open Frontier, the online publication of several large reference works for Johns Hopkins University Press, the first edition of The Johns Hopkins Online Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism (winner of the Association of American Publisher's 1997 "Best Electronic Product – Internet – Social Sciences/Humanities" award), and Walker's Mammals of the World Online, as well as the pioneering online journals project of the Johns Hopkins University Press, Project Muse, which made more than 5,000 articles from 42 journals available for institutional online subscription in HTML format, and innovated within the campus IP-range subscription model.

Mr. Jensen, with the Academies, remains (as of mid-2006) technical partner of the History Cooperative (http://www.historycooperative.org), which makes the works of the most prestigious journals in History available online to subscribing institutions.

Jensen was an early promoter of open access models of publishing, as well as a speaker who recognized the potential of the Internet prior to Mosaic's unveiling... that is, during the Telnet and Gopher days, as well as the HTML and Web 2.0 days.

His early-90s work with nonprofit publishers in Eastern Europe helped publishers in Prague, Tallinn, and Warsaw become more digitally aware. His public engagement with proto-Web business models, and his continuing public engagement with the responsibility of nonprofit scholarly publishers to engage with new technologies, are indicative of his philosophical approach to nonprofit open access publishing models.

For more than seven years, Jensen has been partnering with Jim Poyser on Apocadocs, the first humor site grappling with the horror of environmental collapse, from 2007 to the present. Since 2008, Poyser has been a Solutionary in Indianapolis, Indiana, and is now Executive Director of Earth Charter Indiana.