Ira H. Fuchs (born December 1948) is an internationally known authority on technology innovation in higher education and is a co-founder of BITNET,[1] an important precursor of the Internet.

Since 2012 he has been President of BITNET, LLC a consulting firm specializing in online learning and other applications of technology in higher education.

In the mid-1980s BITNET connected millions of users from more than 1,400 institutions of higher education, government laboratories, and IBM's VNET network.

It was the first academic computer network to connect the United States to Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Israel, the USSR, and most of western Europe.

In 1994, he was a co-founder of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to archiving and providing access to important scholarly journals.