Editors’ note: Today’s post is by Greg Fagan, Marianne Calilhanna, and Audrey Grey. Greg is Senior Director of Business Development at Aptara. Marianne is the Vice President of Marketing at Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL). Audrey is Senior Account Manager at Silverchair.

SSP’s Annual Meeting will be held June 2-4, 2027, in Providence, Rhode Island. Every year, the meeting brings together scholarly publishing professionals from around the world to discuss current issues, best practices, and ideas for the future. The call for participation is now open, and we invite you to submit an educational session proposal by Monday, November 9. Submissions for posters, 5-minute previews, and Industry Breakout sessions are also welcome with deadlines for all three occurring in February.

Theme for the 2027 Annual Meeting

Our 2027 meeting theme is “Defining Our Future: Reassessing What, How, and Why We Publish.” It is well established that we publish scholarly content to record discoveries, disseminate critical information, and promote learning. One way to distill the scholarly publishing process is through three first principles: discoveries/knowledge (what), journals and books (how), and human progress (why). In recent decades (and in many of our past annual meetings), we’ve challenged costs, speed, and access, but the basics of what, how, and why we publish have largely remained steadfast. That foundation no longer feels stable.

What Holds When Everything Shifts?

Many of the challenges we face today threaten the basic principles of our industry.

• Can we guarantee research integrity, and how do we go about doing so during an age of increasing falsification?
• How do we quell populist doubt in scientific and medical expertise, particularly when retracted science continues to be socially cited with misinformation spreading like wildfire?
• What do financially sound business models look like when public funding for human progress is no longer reliable?
• How should content be delivered and packaged as users discover and engage with scholarly content in new and still unforeseen ways?

While we are all feeling the fatigue of discussing AI, it is perhaps the biggest hurdle we’ve encountered in scholarly publishing, and it is likely to be a disruptive current running beneath all  other challenges we face. What does the future look like when AI systems read, summarize, and create literature faster than any human editor? Are the traditional publishing containers of journal articles and books still ideal in an AI discovery world? AI is challenging our concept of distribution, discovery, and purpose more than any other of our many conversations regarding the evolution of publishing models, peer review, and production have in the past.

You Are Cordially Invited!

At the 2027 Annual Meeting, we want to hear your ideas for how we should define our future and reassess what, how, and why we publish. As a scholarly publishing community, let us activate our collective knowledge to meet the next generation of researchers, readers, and the tools they use with intentionality.

• What ideas would you like to see our community adopt or use to adapt to our changing technological landscape?
• What existential questions should we be asking to advance the work we do and the knowledge it represents?

These are big challenges, but our strength is in facing them together, bringing ideas from various perspectives into the conversation to move our industry forward as a community.

We look forward to your submissions, and we hope to see you in Providence!