Editor’s Note: The post below is adapted from the address that Heather Staines, outgoing Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) President made to the organization’s Annual Meeting, May 2025.

Good afternoon.

I’ve struggled over the past weeks, months even, about speaking to you today, how to give a speech during a time that seems only comparable to riding a bucking bronco or trying to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. To come up with something to say that reflects both the gravitas of the occasion, but is also representative of me and the weirdo you’ve come to expect. How does one give a speech that is neither woe is us or the sun will come out tomorrow? Did we ever think that an SSP session would have to declare that it is under Chatham House Rules? So, I did what I do. I waited for the universe to come to me and let it tell its remarks through me. It’s a tale involving a few personal anecdotes, some history, some literature, and a few fictional characters.

Little could we have known a year ago, six months ago even, the uncertain and unprecedented situation we’d face during these moments. A time when the very foundation of what we believe in as scholarly publishers is under attack. I don’t consider myself a natural optimist. My family used to joke that our motto was: Things can only get worse. And that our family crest was a person with their head in their hands. There’s no time for that way of thinking now. I find myself having to dig deep. As Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen said in her April 16 Scholarly Kitchen post, it’s a tough time to be human (and I’d add, or an animal, vegetable, or mineral).

We’ve overcome a lot in recent years, the continuing shift to more openly available content, more ethical and transparent research, an onslaught of bad actors trying to game the system. We survived the early days of Covid to get to… whatever you might choose to call this time now. Those of us who already worked remotely are still hard pressed to understand just how jarring the shift to remote was, as well as the essential personnel who weren’t able to make that zag and had to take risks on behalf of all of us. As I’ve said many times before, I feel so for the early career professionals who started out on their journeys during and in the aftermath of such tumultuous changes. I would say to them: We need you and your contributions. How can we instill in you the love that we all feel for this profession? What will it take to keep you?

It has been one of the honors of my life to serve you as SSP President. One of my activities during the past two years has been working on the SSP Strategic Plan, and sitting on the diversity sub-group to help identify a few actionable areas where our committees and volunteers can take that pillar forward. This is an area close to my heart. 

Some of you know that I grew up attending a public school system in Columbus, Ohio, during court ordered desegregation in the late 1970s. Our junior high school, and our elementary school before that, was predominantly minority with a large African American student population and a wide array of immigrants and first generation Americans from Southeast Asia, Ukraine, Armenia, and many other countries across Southern and Eastern Europe. This meant, under that desegregation order, that our school was the recipient of students from a wealthier and much whiter district. It was a fraught situation, with neither group wanting the other around. 

Some students were only  attending our school for a year and would return to the high school they always expected to attend, their neighborhood school, one where their siblings had gone, but most would have to stay with us and make new friendships and traditions.  If we felt somehow invaded, they felt completely upended. I’m pleased to say that, for the most part, we made it work, and by the time we graduated five years later, you’d be hard-pressed to figure out by looking at who hung out with who or who participated in what activities or sports whether it was their original school or not. Last summer, we celebrated our fortieth high school reunion, so I’m dating myself. Classmate after classmate remarked how lucky we were to have been nurtured in that diverse environment, that somewhat unique laboratory that junior high and high school always are, and how jarring it had been for some upon entering “the real world,” whether college or work, to learn that things were different on the outside. From my perspective, I feel strongly that, however imperfect we found the wider world, knowing how things could be and being appalled that they weren’t more inclusive and more equitable, was better than never having experienced that example at all.

I think about this now with the generation just leaving college, which includes my two boys. Their high school and college years, in addition to being disrupted by Covid, were marked by the social justice protests that followed the murder of George Floyd some five short years ago. With so many people, including their peers, taking to the streets and fighting for justice, there must have been a strong sense for them that things were moving in the right direction. How do they find the subsequent developments, I wonder? Do they feel like the world has failed them? Do they feel like we all failed them?

As an historian, I’m not sure how I feel about the notion that the arc of history bends towards justice, referencing both the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker and later Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. History is indelibly marked by leaps forward followed by periods of harsh backlash. Positive developments don’t happen just as a matter of course. You have to fight for them. You have to follow in the footsteps of the fighters who have come before and undertook their fight in times that were objectively speaking much much bleaker than even how these times appear to us. It always feels like it’s the worst when it is happening to you. 

Technology marches on. We find ourselves in an AI maelstrom, as new tools transform but also threaten our industry. For quite a while, AI was something that was always coming, incrementally, slinking up on us in a way that we didn’t even always recognize. As UC Davis librarian Peter Brantley said once in a Charleston plenary I moderated, something stops “being AI” when it no longer impresses us. And then in November 2022, ChatGPT came along, and it and its LLM cousins seemed to be everywhere all at once. We attempt now, not only to find instances of plagiarized text, but to try to identify text created by one of these AI tools. Higher ed is also questioning how to deal with teaching a population where AI is the calculator we were all told in school that we needed to get along without because it wasn’t going to be in our pocket. Typically, some students are being warned that they aren’t allowed to use it at all, and so their use of it also leaves them paralyzed, uncertain, and fearful.

A recent New Yorker article by D. Graham Burnett, “Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence”, looks at this strange new world. On campus, we are told, many are pretending that this revolution isn’t happening, something Bennett describes as “pointing at daisies along the train tracks as an actual locomotive screams up from behind.” A scholar in the “history of attention” – isn’t that a great area? Maybe I should reinvent myself as a scholar of the history of inattention – but maybe all history is the history of that. 

In any case, Bennett attempted to flip the script, loading his 900 page course reader into an AI instance and assigning his students to have a conversation with a chatbot about “the history of attention.” The results were fascinating and inspiring, an experience Bennett refers to as one of the most profound in his career, the experience of: “watching a new kind of creature being born, and also watching a generation come face to face with that birth.” One student exploring the emotional connection with music, asked the bot to write a song that would make him cry. Unsurprisingly, it failed. Another told Bennett that the assignment had for her felt like an “existential watershed.” The machine was not a person and in conversing with it, she found herself strangely liberated by not having any responsibility towards it at all. After the assignment, some of the students asked Bennett how they should choose what to do with their lives, if these machines could do so many things faster and better, could get the answers, or seemingly so. “But to be human is not to have answers,” he notes. “It is to have questions — and to live with them.” 

And this is indeed a time of many questions, so many shocks to the systems of publishers, societies, universities, libraries, researchers, students, and all. Traveling a few weeks ago to meet the newest addition to my family, I found myself engrossed in an Atlantic article called “History will judge the Complicit” by Anne Applebaum – it turned out, when I checked the date halfway through, to have originally been published in July/August 2020 – always check the dates people! However, it was eerily relevant to our environment today. 

The bulk of the article looks at why people go along with things they don’t agree with, why they collaborate – in the French Vichy sense of the term, one that implies betrayal of one’s values. Applebaum provides numerous reasons behind such decisions, ranging from ideological fervor to strictly personal gain. The author visits a woman named Marianne Birthler, who was an activist in the 1980s against the East German Communist regime. Why do people collaborate, Applebaum asked, but Birthler countered that the more interesting question was why do people not collaborate? In a time when it seems that so many areas of our society are complying in advance – to put it kindly – or rolling over – to put it bluntly, it is an interesting question. Fear, of course, is a main reason for going against your moral values, but being afraid shouldn’t obscure the fact that fear has consequences. 

That summer 2020 article, noting denial of Covid and ongoing attempts at voter suppression, acknowledged that worse could follow. From that point it largely loses its contemporary value to us, as we know the next chapter. But the question still resonates. How does one find the courage to stand up for values, noting that, for many, the risk of public action may be way too high to pay. Activist Birthler notes that the choice to become a dissident can easily be the result of “a number of small decisions that you take” until one day you find yourself irrevocably on the other side. 

This process often involves role models. In this challenging time, I am not surprised by the actions of some dedicated public servants. The Alt National Park Service, which actively chronicles on social media, sometimes cryptically, what’s happening in the wake of the many Executive Orders. The Library of Congress and the US Copyright office, currently also fighting back, refusing access to administration officials and filing suit for unlawful dismissal. I can honestly say that I am not surprised one bit that the park rangers and the librarians lead the charge. I have park rangers in my family, and, of course, some of my best friends are librarians. 

I stand before you today, passing the presidential reins to Rebecca McLeod, not knowing the course events will take in the coming year. I’ve known Rebecca for more than a decade, and I know that her deep experience and thoughtful consideration mean that I’m leaving you in good hands. SSP is a strong organization, made sturdier by its varied membership that spans disciplines, types of organizations, from many areas around the world, and all career levels. Under Rebecca’s leadership, SSP will continue to pursue equity and diversity. Because we know, directionally, the way my classmates and I and many before us learned, the way we believe things must go.

It is hard to be human, and to ask those questions that distinguish us from the AI. I questioned myself about this milestone in my life. My personal SSP journey over the years has been both humbling and gratifying. I easily found a home here. Recent remarks by the commencement speaker at the University of Maryland, Kermit the Frog, inspire me to reflect upon what SSP has done for me, what Sesame Street did for Kermit. It has helped me “learn what I am good at,” and it has provided for me an environment where I feel that “I am always among friends.” 

From this unique and precious community, we can gain courage and seek counsel. We must work with our key constituencies to create a kind of scholarly communications “mutual aid society,” recognizing that, for very good reasons, we are not all at liberty to speak out or act up in the same manner. But we must show up. To quote Retraction Watch’s Ivan Oransky at the Council of Science Editors meeting earlier this month, referencing another cartoon character, “This is not the time to disappear Homer Simpson-style into the hedge.” The stakes are simply too high.

Those who know me, know I’m an avid reader of science fiction, in particular, dystopian novels. Certainly, it’s not fun to find yourself trapped in one. Have you ever wondered what you’d do when confronted with an existential crisis, like a zombie apocalypse or an alien invasion? (It’s okay if you haven’t. I said I was weird.) I’m not a strong fighter, and, realistically, as a diabetic, I wouldn’t last long taking to the hills either. But when confronted with a war against knowledge, a campaign against science, an attack upon basic human decency and compassion, I think, in this struggle, I must be a fighter. In defense of our values and those who rely on their continued existence, at the risk of adding a third cartoon character into the mix – the last one, I promise, like Jessica Rabbit who told the police inspector in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.” I am no longer willing to sit idly by, “I’m not drawn that way.” 

In conclusion, I am discouraged, but not dissuaded. I am horrified, but not hopeless. I have faith in us. I have faith in you. I thank you for putting your faith in me. Together, we are SSP. 

Thank you.