Chris Bourg

Chris Bourg is an American librarian, sociologist, and former officer of the United States Army. She has been the Director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries since 2015, and is also the founding director of the Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS) at MIT. Bourg is an advocate for open access and open science, serving on the Board of Directors of organizations such as the Center for Open Science, the Center for Open and Reproducible Science at Stanford's Data Science Institute (DSI-CORES), and open access publisher Annual Reviews.

Education

Bourg graduated with a B.A. from Duke University in 1987 and a M.A. in sociology from the University of Maryland in 1994. She went on to study sociology at Stanford University where she completed an M.A. and PhD. Prior to her career in libraries, Bourg spent 10 years as an officer in the United States Army, teaching for three years as a faculty member at West Point. Bourg then chaired the search committee to find a new director for the MIT Press, hiring Amy Brand effective July 2015. Bourg continues to serve on the MIT Press Management Board.

Bourg was asked to convene the MIT Ad Hoc Task Force on the Future of Libraries in October 2015, to co-chair the MIT Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT’s Research with Hal Abelson in 2017, and to co-chair the MIT Working Group on Scholarly Content and Generative AI with Claire Schneider in 2025. Bourg is a member of the Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and of the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship. In a 2018 keynote at a Code4LIb conference, she discussed diversity in software development. The talk, which referenced research by the Kapor Center for Social Impact indicating record numbers of people are leaving tech environments due to discrimination, resulted in online harassment and personal attacks. As of April 3, 2018, the Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL) and hundreds of other organizations and individuals signed the Code4Lib Community Statement in Support of Chris Bourg.

Bourg is known for talking openly about and challenging systemic racism within the library profession.

Bourg is vocal in support of open access publishing and open science.

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