Open publishing
Publishing systems, open access, research repositories, data publishing, and durable pathways for scholarly work beyond the article.
Open Publishing Exchange
Open scholarship · data infrastructure · computational biology
David C. Molik
I build the systems, standards, and communities that make research easier to publish, verify, preserve, and reuse.
Associate Professor and Department Head, Open Publishing Exchange · Kansas State University Libraries
Based at K-StateWorking across publishing, data, computing, and the life sciences.
About me
Research is only as durable as the infrastructure around it.
I am an associate professor and department head of the Open Publishing Exchange at Kansas State University Libraries. My work focuses on scholarly communication, research cyberinfrastructure, FAIR and AI-ready data, persistent identifiers, computational reproducibility, data publishing, and cyberbiosecurity.
I lead efforts in data curation, publishing, and open access while working with researchers to make scholarly outputs more accessible, trustworthy, and useful over time. I also contribute to agricultural and biodiversity informatics through AgBioData, i5k, and related national research-data initiatives.
My training is in computational biology and bioinformatics. Before joining K-State, I worked as a computational biologist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service and as a scientific informatics developer at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. That path still shapes how I approach scholarly infrastructure: as something that must work for both people and machines.
A path into the work
Systems first, then the scholarship around them.
My route into scholarly infrastructure crossed information technology, scientific software, computational biology, federal research, and academic publishing.
I started by building systems, then learned to ask what makes those systems legible, reproducible, and durable. That mix still defines the work: technical enough to make infrastructure real, institutional enough to make it last, and collaborative enough to make it useful.
What I work on
Connecting scholarship from computation to publication.
I work across the boundaries that usually separate research computing, data stewardship, and scholarly publishing.
Research infrastructure
Repositories, workflows, persistent identifiers, provenance, and services that support reproducible and executable research.
Visit the labData communities
FAIR and AI-ready data, biocuration, community standards, and shared infrastructure for agricultural and biodiversity science.
Research themes
How I approach the work
Open is an operating model, not a final checkbox.
Good infrastructure has to preserve context, distribute credit, support verification, and remain usable after a project team moves on.
That means treating metadata, documentation, governance, licensing, accessibility, and long-term stewardship as part of the research itself. I am especially interested in the places where a technical system succeeds only because a community can understand and sustain it.
Read the research statement
Selected recent work
Standards, infrastructure, and reproducible science.
ORCID remains the authoritative record for my publications and other scholarly outputs.
Collaboration
Working on a research-data or publishing problem?
I collaborate on research infrastructure, data and metadata strategy, reproducible workflows, scholarly publishing, biocuration, and cyberbiosecurity—especially where a project needs technical systems and community practice to meet in the middle.