Eric Hellman

Eric Hellman is Executive Director of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. After 10 years doing physics research at Bell Labs, Eric got interested in electronic publishing, started an e-journal, started a company, built linking technology for libraries, joined OCLC for a few years, started writing (at Go To Hellman), and has since been trying to make free ebooks work better for libraries and everyone else.

e-mail: eric௫hellman.net
Networks:

Family

• Karen
• approximately 6,500 blood relatives.

Publications

My blog is called Go To Hellman. I write about things that interest me.

Recentish articles published elsewhere:

• "Scholarly Link Specification Framework (S-Link-S)", Eric Hellman, http://www.openly.com/slinks/SLinkS.html , (1998-2006).
• "OpenURL: making the link to libraries", Eric Hellman, Learned Publishing 16(3) 177-181.
• "OpenURL COinS: A Convention to Embed Bibliographic Metadata in HTML" Eric Hellman http://ocoins.info/ (2005).
• "Linking Service to Open Access Repositories", Shigeki Sugita, Kunie Horikoshi and Masako Suzuki, Hokkaido University; Shin Kataoka, E. S. Hellman, and Keiji Suzuki, D-Lib Magazine, (March/April 2007). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march07/sugita/03sugita.html
• Open Access eBooks, (2012) ISBN 978-1-938616-00-6 https://archive.org/details/OpenAccessEbooks.
• “The Author as Entrepreneur: Changes in technology and the law are transforming the way authors finance their books”, Publisher's Weekly (May 24, 2013) https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/57403-the-author-as-entrepreneur.html
• “Towards the Post Privacy Library?”, American Libraries Digital Supplement, https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2015/06/16/toward-the-post-privacy-library/ (June 2015).
• “The Open-Factor: Toward Impact-Aligned Measures of Open-Access eBook Usage”, E. S. Hellman, J. Electronic Publishing 22, 1 (2019). DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0022.104

A list of my semiconductor physics papers is available on my publication list.

My Ph. D. Dissertation was entitled "Hot Electron Resistance and Magnetoresistance in High Purity Gallium Arsenide".

HyperResume

• I did my undergraduate work at Princeton University where I worked with Steve Lyon on photoconductivity of amorphous silicon.
• I worked for a year at Intel working on ultra-thin tunnel oxides for EEPROM's.
• I got my Ph.D. with Jim Harris at Stanford University doing GaAs MBE and related things.
• I did a post-doc with Mac Beasley and the KGB doing MBE of High Tc materials.
• I worked at Bell Labs in Physical Science Research from 1988 to 1998.
• I was Founder and President of Openly Informatics, Inc. from 1998 through 2005
• I was Director, OCLC Openly Informatics Division which became OCLC New Jersey from 2006 to 2009.
• Since 2009, I have been President of Gluejar.
• Since 2016, I have been President of the Free Ebook Foundation.

Patents

• Article comprising a superconductor/insulator layer structure, and method of making the article
• Article comprising heteroepitaxial III-V nitride semiconductor material on a substrate
• Retrieval of digital objects by redirection of controlled vocabulary searches

Activities

• I was a member of the Standards Development Committee for NISO Z39.88
• I was the creator and Journalmaster of the MRS Internet Journal of Nitride Semiconductor Research
• I run.

Humor

Laws of Meta-Science

The Irrelevance of Chemistry Rule

If Chemistry's important, then you're in big trouble.

The Irrelevance of Chemistry Corollary

If you think Physics is important, then you're overlooking some Chemistry.

Corporate Research Lab Sociology

• Bell Labs researchers and IBM researchers are very similar. They're like diodes, because information only flows in one direction. It's just a different direction.
• Reasons to listen
  • You should always listen carefully to what an IBM researcher has to say-- He's a world's expert!
  • You should always listen carefully to what a Bell Labs researcher has to say--You're an idiot!

last revision 1/1/2026