Tribute · October 2025
A festschrift in honour of Geoffrey Bilder
This volume — edited by Laura J. Wilkinson and Martin Paul Eve, and published in October 2025 — celebrates Geoffrey Bilder’s enduring contributions to open scholarly infrastructure. Geoffrey was a colleague at Crossref for almost two decades, and his thinking shaped much of what the organisation—and the wider scholarly communications community—looks like today.
We are sharing the festschrift here not because Crossref published it, but because Geoffrey’s work touched so many parts of this community, and because the volume itself is a generous, collective act of acknowledgement from across that community.
About the festschrift
The volume’s title—Brown, Browsers, Back-ends, Boards, Beards, and a Bibliography—demonstrates the breadth (and the wit) of Geoffrey’s career, from his time at Brown University, through his work on early web architectures and back-end systems for scholarly publishing, to his service on boards and as an advisor across the open infrastructure community.
Contributors include Allen Renear, Amy Brand, Cameron Neylon, Dorothea Salo, Ivan Oransky, and a wide range of others working at the intersection of publishing, technology, and open infrastructure. Together, the writings showcase the range and diversity of Geoffrey’s legacy.
Read the volume
A note from Crossref
Geoffrey joined Crossref in 2007 and served as Director of Strategic Initiatives for many years. Much of how Crossref talks about persistent identifiers, the Research Nexus, and the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) carries his fingerprints. We are please that the editors and contributors put this volume together and we’re sharing it here so that more of the Crossref community can find and read it.
