About Me

Photo: FWF/APA-Fotoservice/Thomas Preiss

My name is Peter Kraker. I am the founder and chairman of Open Knowledge Maps, a charitable non-profit dedicated to dramatically improving the visibility of scientific knowledge for science and society alike. As part of our mission, we operate the world’s largest visual search engine for research, which enables a diverse set of stakeholders to openly explore, discover and make use of scientific content. For our work on Open Knowledge Maps, we were awarded with the Austrian Prize for Free Knowledge and the Open Minds Award.

I am a long-time open science advocate – I am a member of the GO FAIR executive board, coordinator of the GO FAIR Implementation Network “Discovery”, and a member of the Financial Sustainability Task Force of the EOSC Association.

You may also know me for the following reasons:

I coined the term “Open Methodology”, one of the core principles of open science, in the 2011 paper The case for an open science in technology enhanced learning with D. Leony, W. Reinhardt and G. Beham.
I started the #DontLeaveItToGoogle campaign to raise awareness for the need of open scholarly infrastructures.
I am the lead author of The Vienna Principles, a widely acclaimed vision for scholarly communication in the 21st century.

I formerly was a core team member of the Open Science Network Austria, and an advisor to innoSci – Forum für offene Innovationskultur of Stifterverband, the Office for Scholarly Communication at University of Kent, and the Open Science Fellows Program of Wikimedia Germany.

Prior to founding Open Knowledge Maps, I was a senior researcher at Know-Center (Graz University of Technology), Austria’s leading research center for data-driven business and big data analytics, managing the topic of Open Science. In my research, I focused on visualizing scholarly communication on the web, open science, and alternative metrics for science and research (altmetrics). You can find a list of my publications and research outputs here, and slides to a number of selected talks here.

I received my doctoral degree in Social and Economic Sciences (Dr. rer. soc. oec.) with honors from University of Graz in 2014. I also hold a master’s and a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from University of Graz as well as a bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering and Business from Graz University of Technology.

I have worked in a number of EU-funded projects studying online scholarly communication, including the Network of Excellence STELLAR, the Marie Curie project TEAM, and the Horizon 2020 project OpenUP. Currently, I am task leader in the large-scale H2020 EOSC project TRIPLE. For my work, I was awarded a Panton Fellowship of the Open Knowledge Foundation and a Marshallplan Scholarship of the Austrian Marshallplan Foundation, which I spent at the Personalized Adaptive Web Systems Lab of University of Pittsburgh. For my dissertation, I have received the GOR Thesis Award 2016 and the GRAWE Promotional Award 2014.

I serve as a reviewer on several editorial boards and program committees (among others the open access journals Research Ideas and Outcomes (RiO) and Frontiers in Library and Information Science). Between 2016 and 2018, I was a mentor for the Open Science Fellows Program of Wikimedia Germany. From 2015 to 2018, I was a community coordinator of the Open Science Working Group of Open Knowledge Austria. From 2011-2013, I acted as chairman of the Knowledge Management Forum in Graz. I have also been involved in the organization of the Science 2.0 & Open Science Track at i-KNOW, as well as several editions of Barcamp Graz, and the JTEL Summer School.

If you want to contact me directly, please send an e-mail to: pkraker@openknowledgemaps.org