John Simon Gabriel Simmons OBE (8 July 1915 – 21 September 2005) was a British scholar of Slavonics.
Due to his actions in August 1953, when he travelled to Moscow to propose to the director of the Lenin Library a book exchange, the University received thousands of valuable, out-of-print Russian publications.
He believed that it was these library collections along with a group of Russian academic teachers recruited by Serge Konovalov, Maurice Bowra, and Isaiah Berlin, that led to the establishment of Oxford as the only centre for Slavonic studies in England.
John Simmons remained an important figure in the field of Slavonics right to his death in September 2005.
In 1974 he held the Sandars Readership in Bibliography at Cambridge University--still the only serious English-language history of Russian printing.