The Scholarly Kitchen (TSK) hosted a panel of librarian guest authors and Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) volunteers on stage at the 2025 Charleston Library Conference. I had the pleasure of moderating this wonderful panel of experts in their engaging and wide-ranging conversation on hot topics that the scholarly communications industry faces today:

• Alexa Pearce, Gershwind and Bennett Family Associate Vice Provost for Collections & Scholarly Communications, Penn Libraries
• Michael Rodriguez, Lead Strategist for Program Operations, Content & Scholarly Communication Initiatives, Lyrasis
• Janaynne do Amaral, Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, School of Information Sciences

First, why do you contribute to TSK and/or volunteer with SSP?

Michael: ​​I’ve contributed three guest posts to The Scholarly Kitchen since 2021. One post was on the library technology market’s failure to support library needs; two were on college closures and mergers and the implications for libraries, library consortia, and vendors. I chose TSK as a venue for these topics because it is read by a broad array of information industry professionals, including people who work at libraries, library consortia, vendors, publishers, consultancies, and funders. My goal was to draw industry-wide attention to collective challenges (especially those that are emerging or hitherto overlooked) and to speak directly to the roles that each part of the information industry can play in addressing those challenges. The reception and readership of my three guest posts have been excellent, and I look forward to making future contributions.

Alexa: When I wrote the guest post about Vannevar Bush and public access, I was bringing together two things: 1) my long-standing interest in the history of scholarly communication and the evolution of perspectives on how to organize and provide access to it from the postwar period through the present and 2) the surge of interest in Bush and the Endless Frontier in spring 2025. TSK stood out to me as the venue whose readers would be most likely to have any interest in the piece. In 2025, we grappled in new ways with public access policies and with the legacy of Bush and his vision for scientific research, so it was a great moment to bring the threads together, and TSK was really the best venue to share those ideas.

Janaynne: When I was living in Brazil and pursuing my PhD in Information Sciences, I became interested in getting involved with SSP. I learned about SSP and what it does by reading TSK posts. When I was a student, I appreciated the informality of the blog posts and the hot discussions about scholarly publishing. By “hot discussions,” I mean open dialogue about intriguing topics that divide opinions among scholarly communication stakeholders.

I enjoy reading the blog posts because some of those topics are not covered by published papers, but they move the community to reflect, act, and write. Disagreements are interesting and very important to science and to academic publishing. We come from different backgrounds and realities, and what works here does not always work there. I enjoy reading posts published in informal scholarly channels, such as TSK, because they add a different layer of insight and strength to scholarly communication and to researchers and scholarly publishing professionals, an insight and strength that can help us to balance the local, national, and global in scholarly publishing, and from there make a difference.

Today, as someone who teaches students at all levels, it is a joy to browse the blog with them and observe what excites or bothers them about scholarly communication. Being a SSP member is exciting because this organization brings together professionals from all areas of scholarly publishing. I’m a person who loves to collaborate and engage with people outside my research bubble and to exchange ideas about scholarly publishing. That’s why I decided to get involved with SSP.

Funding: what’s working, what’s not, and what’s changing?

Michael: Over time, libraries’ investments have become disproportionate to the value that their communities are deriving from conventional subscriptions, especially to big journal packages. Paywalled content is increasingly available on an on-demand, per-article basis via interlibrary loan, article delivery services, preprint repositories, or even shadow libraries like Sci-Hub. More than 50 percent of scholarly articles published since 2010 are available open access in some form, including in hybrid journals whose subscription prices hover in the exosphere. More open access relieves the pressure on libraries to focus on acquiring conventional access to content.

Collectively, as an industry, we need to look at alternative approaches such as read and publish agreements, both to elevate the value of existing agreements and to shift the value proposition away from reading toward publishing. If certain publishers are not making this pivot or making it sustainable for libraries, that is an opportunity for libraries to consider shifting their investments away from legacy models and reinvesting in more equitable and sustainable publishing models like diamond open access (e.g., the Lyrasis Open Access Community Investment Fund or the Open Library of Humanities) and in community-led publishing programs. At the same time, libraries must continue to balance their local needs with their network-level strategies.

Library consortia have a key role to play in facilitating these shifts because consortia work at scale, and real change happens at the level of the collective. Organizations like the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Library Futures also have important roles to play. However, consortia are in a unique position to lead vendor negotiations and amplify member voices at scale, so that libraries with diverse circumstances and constituencies can work together to help shape the future of scholarly communication.

Alexa: We can’t sustain a model in which every institution pays to read, and many institutions also pay to publish. Read and publish agreements can be very effective as tools that facilitate institutions’ ability to share their research with the audiences who need it and who can make use of it. However, these agreements have to be constructed in partnership and with appreciation of the range of circumstances facing stakeholders, including institutions and their researchers, presses, and libraries, as well as scholarly societies. Funding read and publish agreements can only succeed in the long term if we establish a shared understanding that the ecosystem is dynamic, not static, and that “read” costs will necessarily come down as research-intensive institutions open more of their scholarship to the world.

Any conversation about funding has to be attentive to scale and has to recognize that there is not one perfect formula that can ease the costs of organizing and delivering scholarly literature across institutions that operate at varying scales and that necessarily rely in distinct ways on platforms, workflows, and staffing models.

I agree very much with Michael on the basis for libraries to increasingly evaluate and consider models that deliver sustainable paths to diamond open access. Again, our partnerships among library consortia and with university presses are essential to enacting these models that enable access at scale, rather than with a cost-per-transaction approach that necessarily hits every author, every reader, every paper. I believe that relieving our communities of this brand of transactionalism is the whole point of libraries.

Janaynne: I have professional experience in teaching and research in Brazil and in the United States. I am fascinated by library funding initiatives to support the development of open educational resources published under Creative Commons Licenses, in addition to research projects about open educational resources funded by federal funding agencies such as the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

One example of a library funding initiative is the Open Textbook Incentive Program 2026-2027 sponsored by the University Library of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The goal of the program is to support undergraduate students by encouraging teaching faculty “to develop alternative lower-cost educational materials rather than high-cost textbooks.” Selected proposals will receive up to $6,000. However, the amount of funding can reach up to $10,000 according to the complexity of the work that needs to be done.

In contrast, the OER + ScholComm is an education project led by researcher and professor Maria Bonn and funded by IMLS. Both outputs of this project, The Scholarly Communication Notebook and the openly-licensed book Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge, published in 2023 by ACRL, support the current and next generation of librarians. It is a content open for everybody; industry professionals in academic publishing or high school students can benefit from these projects.

These funding initiatives are fascinating and are working because they support course instructor creativity in the classroom through the reuse of learning materials in different formats, such as digital games. My librarian students and I had fun learning about copyright and Creative Commons licenses by playing a copyright card game available at OER Commons, a public digital library of open educational resources. The game fostered engagement, interaction, memorization, and happiness among my students. As students have different learning styles, I also enjoy encouraging them to browse the directories of open educational resources and select the materials that best promote their understanding of topics discussed in class. Seeing these funding initiatives and projects making my students happy and engaged in the classroom is a way to measure what is working beyond quantitative data.

As far as what is changing and what is not working…Teaching multicultural and multilingual classrooms in the United States increased my appreciation for open educational resources because it also opened my eyes to the lack of content about scholarly communication in languages beyond English. Although I value translations from English into Portuguese, I would like to see OER grant programs explicitly encouraging teaching faculty to create educational materials in non-English languages. AI tools for translations are indeed helpful in understanding materials written in a foreign language, and I value crowdsourced translation of education materials from English into other languages, but sometimes these materials are out of the context of the learners receiving the translation. In addition, students learning in English would enhance their language skills by reading the same material in English and their mother tongue.

Ok, let’s talk AI: What are your hopes and fears? What are the implications of AI in scholarly communications?

Michael: My hope is for AI to drive efficiency gains for research processes, helping researchers to process data, speed up computations, brainstorm ideas, and review the literature on a given topic. AI also has attractive use cases for translation and accessibility. But all this depends on AI becoming more reliable and transparent over time, which is an open question at this point.

One immediate concern is a recent push by publishers to tighten library licensing restrictions for electronic resources, triggered by genuine and understandable fears about misappropriation or misuse of scholarly content to train AI. But these fears are spilling over into attempts to restrict longstanding permitted uses such as scholarly sharing, text and data mining, and fair use, often in ways that institutions cannot reasonably accept. I’ve written elsewhere about publisher efforts to curtail perceived AI misuse by shifting toward more restrictive Creative Commons licenses, especially noncommercial and no-derivatives licenses in the place of CC BY. This makes open access content less open to creative and adaptive reuse. I worry we’re moving backwards.

We need to address the challenges posed by AI without reverting to more restrictive licenses. Creative Commons licenses do not supersede copyright, and the courts may find that reuse of content with AI is permitted under fair use exceptions and limitations. So what can we do? The Wikimedia Foundation is working to funnel computational reuse through processes that screen out problematic bot activity, ensuring that there is a human involved and that data mining takes place in a responsible way that does not crash servers or reduce uptime. Creative Commons is exploring a new mechanism called CC Signals to empower creators and rightsholders to signal to reusers what their preferred uses of CC-licensed content are. There are so many unknowns with AI that all industry players need to be careful not to overcorrect prematurely in ways that may permanently affect the openness of content or the value of content to researchers.

Alexa: As with any tool, I hope that we can leverage AI in ways that center people and practical problem-solving in our work. I always hope we can use our tools in service to people and avoid placing people in service to tools.

Libraries have the unique superpower of engaging with people in non-evaluative settings, and this is really significant for learning and exploration with AI. We can leverage this strength in our workshops, consultations, and other programming in ways that help us both demystify and, ideally, de-stigmatize some of the AI capabilities that can help with everyday tasks as well as more powerful computation and analysis.

Janaynne’s point, below, about the crisis of trust is astute and spot on. If we do not engage openly about AI in research and academic environments, we will miss an opportunity to grow and restore trust. I also really appreciate and share Michael’s perspective on the spillover potential that we need to guard against in the world of licensing. Our users are accustomed to longstanding practices with licensed content, including everything from citation management to qualitative coding. It’s not productive to put those and other essential activities at risk with unreasonable restrictions or to force our users into onerous and platform-specific pathways into analysis. Our world needs fewer barriers to creative and innovative analysis, not more.

Janaynne: Following on Michael’s point, I agree that AI can help researchers in many ways and support translation and accessibility. As a non-native English speaker, I hope AI can support researchers trying to publish in English or in other languages. This is not only about publishing a paper in “X” language. I hope AI helps to promote global knowledge exchange. I also hope that AI can be a reading partner to my students, helping them understand complex topics and fostering their curiosity and critical skills.

However, I have concerns regarding the transparency of the use of AI by researchers and by students. Yes, many journals have been working on creating AI policies to guide authors on how to disclose the use of generative AI tools during the research process and manuscript writing. Even so, I have noticed that researchers have different views on whether to use AI or not when collaborating in projects, in addition to what is “right” or “wrong” regarding disclosing their use of AI to journals.

Furthermore, it does look like the idea of accelerating research by using AI is not at the same pace as the development of training on research integrity and ethics and AI for researchers. In the middle of all this, I fear a crisis of trust among researchers and a greater impact on public trust in science, already impacted by a huge number of papers retracted, elitism in academia, and the politicization of scientific evidence.

What about researchers’ experiences? What challenges do you see, and how should we respond?

Michael: I want to build on the point that Alexa raised earlier about the administrative burden confronting researchers. Researchers face countless decision points and compliance activities required by employers, funders, publishers, or governments, all of which subtract precious time from the actual conduct of research. In order to be a successful scientist or humanist, do you need to be an expert in copyright law or CC licenses? Do you need to understand the nuances of all the open access business models? I find this stuff fascinating, but I believe that no one should have to become an expert in these domains to be a successful scientist or scholar.

From wherever we sit in the research ecosystem, we need to work on making the administrative elements of research more efficient so as to enable researchers to focus on the most impactful work that they do. We need to stop overwhelming researchers with choices and decision points while still giving them opportunities to learn about the scholarly communication ecosystem and make deeply informed decisions. Ultimately, we need to declutter the researcher experience.

Alexa: Researchers rely on support and collaboration from a diverse ecosystem that includes funders, institutions, publishers, societies and other disciplinary communities, etc. When the relationships between these entities are strained, researchers — and research — suffer. Being a researcher is likely to be one of many hats that someone wears, among others, such as instructor, mentor, clinician, person with a family and responsibilities outside of their professional life, etc. The policies and regulations that are intended to strengthen research, with respect to access, integrity, security, etc, are also policies and regulations that people have to navigate and pay for. If we want to sustain the benefits of a vibrant research enterprise, we need to achieve more balance between conducting research as effectively and competitively as possible and navigating an increasingly burdensome administrative environment.

Janaynne: I agree with Alexa and Michael. Researchers don’t need to be experts in all domains to be successful, and it would be inhumane to require researchers to know everything about scholarly communication when knowledge in their own expertise is infinite and scientific knowledge, like other forms of knowledge, has limitations. However, I think that it is important for researchers to ask for help when they need it, be aware of challenges in scholarly publishing, get the support that they need and recognize that support. By doing this, researchers would make our profession more humane and reinforce the importance of collaboration (going beyond coauthorship) to advance in our search for knowledge and outcomes to benefit science and society.

Any concluding thoughts?

Michael: To go full circle back to our original discussion on funding and what is or isn’t working — I often invoke the old adage not to let perfection preclude progress. Whether you’re a vendor or a library, be open to exploring, experimenting and investing in new products and new models, even if they’re not a sure thing, because that’s how we collectively make progress.

Alexa: Every theme we have discussed connects back, in some way, to people who are working toward their education or trying to solve a complex problem through research. I’m always a proponent of keeping people centered in our considerations of complex topics, from AI to funding to access in general.

Janaynne: Speaking again about the potential of AI translation tools, I am excited to learn in the next few years how this technology will enhance global knowledge exchange and sharing and support the networks of multicultural and multilingual researchers and professionals in scholarly publishing.