Rate My Professor Matt Ruen

Matt Ruen serves as Head of Collections and Digital Scholarship and Department Head in the University Libraries at Grand Valley State University. Previously, he was Scholarly Communications Outreach Coordinator. Ruen chairs the University Libraries Faculty Assembly (2023-2026) and the Faculty Research and Development Committee (term to 2026). He has played a significant role in the Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative since its 2015 launch, working with a team to promote free, openly licensed materials that reduce student textbook costs. This initiative has supported the creation of 13 OER textbooks by GVSU faculty and contributed to over 3 million downloads from ScholarWorks@GVSU since 2008, with 171,905 book downloads from March 2012 to February 2017. Ruen has also contributed to institutional reports and strategies, including the Collections Strategy 2025-2030, and participated in the 2022 Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute.

Ruen's research focuses on scholarly communications, open access, copyright, fair use, information literacy, open educational resources, textbook affordability programs, scholarly publishing, and digital collections services. Key publications include "Open partnerships: Identifying and recruiting allies for open educational resources initiatives" (2018, co-authored with R. Cummings-Sauls, S. Beaubien, J. Smith), "The Notion and Assessment of 'Predatory' in Scholarly Publishing" (2023, co-authored with T. Schultz et al.), "Introducing RJJR" (2023, co-authored with T. Schultz), "The Case for OER as the Advancement of Knowledge/Creative Expression" (2022, co-authored with A. Dierking, S. Schlicker), and OER curations such as "BUS 201: Legal Environment for Business OER Curation" (2022, with E. L. Schiller) and "Intermediate French II: Language and Culture OER Curation" (2021, with C. Bowley). He edited "Re-think It Conference Proceedings" (2016). In 2018, Ruen received the first annual Library Publishing Coalition Award for Exemplary Service for his leadership as chair of the LPC Program Committee, which oversaw growth in the Library Publishing Forum. He has presented at events including the Library Publishing Forum, Open Education conferences, and Michigan Library Association Academic Libraries Conference, and instructed workshops on library publishing.