At her desk and in the gym, Ashley Farley is drawn to difficulty. She tackles intractable problems within the academic publishing industry in her role at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and her favorite weightlifting move is the notoriously technical and humbling snatch. 

In both pursuits, progress is incremental. “I love the challenge of the snatch,” she said. “If you improve your lift by, maybe, one pound a year, you’re excited.”

This mindset drives Farley’s work at the Gates Foundation, where she advocates for accessible and freely disseminated scholarship. As senior officer of knowledge and research services, Farley crafts policies and oversees their implementation, and she also leads communication and marketing strategies for open-access advocacy.

The academic publishing industry, however, is a labyrinth, said Helene Williams, iSchool teaching professor and Farley’s mentor. Fine print and patriarchal norms support steep profit margins of publishers like Elsevier as well as inequitable tenure processes at universities. This system has been able to resist robust reform, she continued, because “librarians have been told that academic libraries aren’t here to make change, that we’re just here to serve students. But actually, the way to serve students and faculty is to make change.” 

Farley, MLIS ’17, has been recognized for her trailblazing efforts to transform academic publishing and create a model for sustainable open access scholarship with this year’s Graduate of the Last Decade (GOLD) Award, which acknowledges recent iSchool graduates for significant contributions to information fields. 

Disrupting the status quo in academic publishing is as much a moral imperative as it is a professional challenge for Farley. Early in her MLIS studies, she developed an interest in library acquisitions and subscriptions, especially in the financial dynamic of nonprofit libraries dealing with for-profit publishing entities. “I learned that there’s such a need to completely overhaul that system. It’s so blatantly a drain on our resources, time and energy. Knowledge should not be a commodity,” she said. 

For-profit academic publishing relies on paywalls — gatekeepers of critical information — and squeezes academic library budgets with exorbitant fees to access journals. But the problem spans further than that, according to Farley. The traditional peer-reviewed system is in crisis in part because it relies on unpaid labor from academics. The writing is dense and jargon-heavy, alienating broader audiences who have a right to the information. Many of the most prestigious and expensive publications suffer from issues with reproducibility and article retractions.

The data is also not openly or readily available in the peer-review process. COVID-19 created an urgent need for health-care research and data to be shared widely and quickly. But “the traditional publishing system really couldn’t adapt well to needs during the pandemic,” Farley said, “and we have many other crises in the world that feel very similar to the pandemic.” Climate change, for instance, presents an urgent need for research and data to be accessible as well as quickly and broadly disseminated in a way that the current system could not support.

“This is all constraining what we could actually accomplish in how we communicate and reuse information, and I’d love to see us transcend that,” Farley said. 

But she admits a complete overhaul of academic publishing is not likely to happen anytime soon. Even though nearly 50 percent of research papers published now are open-access, remnants of a print- and prestige-based system impede progress. Some journals charge hefty fees for removing paywalls, shutting out those who can’t afford to pay to make their work freely accessible, said Farley. 

As of 2025, the Gates Foundation will no longer pay these article processing charges. Furthermore, Gates-funded research papers must be published as open-access preprints as quickly as possible, and the underlying data must be immediately accessible. 

This kind of forward-thinking work wouldn’t be possible without her MLIS training, Farley said, which emphasized the power that a single voice can have in an organization. It also wouldn’t be possible without the visibility and resources of the Gates Foundation. Farley’s connections in the online MLIS program are what afforded her the opportunity for a Gates Foundation internship during her studies. She then drew up and successfully submitted a full-time employment proposal, essentially building her current role. 

Jennifer Hansen, the director for open data policy and strategy at Microsoft, worked with Farley during her internship at the Gates Foundation. She recalled Farley’s intrepid approach. “Ashley was not a wallflower,” said Hansen. “She didn’t ask, ‘Can I do this?’ Instead, she approached the work with determination to move it forward in an actionable and meaningful way. She has a steel backbone, and she believes in what she’s doing.”

Williams and Hansen echoed each other as they described the work of going up against a system that is resistant to meaningful change: It’s grueling and can be demoralizing. But Farley thrives because of her ability to absorb obstinacy or even animosity from some publishers and researchers. She operates with grace, and she sees herself as an educator prioritizing relationships and collaboration.

“Often policy gets a bad rap,” said Farley. “It could be seen as heavy-handed, forcing somebody to do something they don’t want to do. So I try to take an educational standpoint for our open-access policy compliance and carefully give justification and emphasize benefits.”

In addition to directing open-access policy and communication at the Gates Foundation, Farley writes and peer-­reviews scholarly articles, runs the foundation’s library services, and remains connected with the MLIS community at the iSchool. She gives talks, sits on panels, and contributes to podcasts. She is mindful, though, of the pressure that younger professionals feel to throw themselves into their work and outpace their peers.

“While I feel really passionate and love the work,” she said, “it shouldn’t be my sole identity. Doing CrossFit and getting out and enjoying the beautiful world that we live in — that balance is really important.”