Ralf Schimmer leads the licensing strategy of the Max Planck Digital Library, serving the Society’s 80+ advanced research institutes. A champion of open access in scholarly communications, his White Paper, “Disrupting the subscription journals’ business model for the necessary large-scale transformation to open access”, was a foundational document to the Open Access 2020 Initiative which unites research performing organizations from around the world in strategies to transition today’s scholarly journals to open access. He has chaired the Governing Council of SCOAP3 (2014-2016) and serves on many international boards in the domain of scholarly publishing.