Since June 2017 Alison has been Chief Executive Officer of the Public Library of Science (PLOS), a nonprofit on a mission to drive open science forward with measurable, meaningful change in research publishing, policy, and practice. During her tenure, Alison has led PLOS through significant strategic and financial transformation, building the organizational foundations for long-term sustainability. Most recently, she has overseen an ambitious 18-month R&D program – supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation – exploring how publishing models must evolve to reflect the realities of modern research: recognizing the full range of contributions that make science work, enabling practical reuse at scale, and building the open infrastructure that AI-mediated research will increasingly depend on. The next phase translates these findings into practice, as PLOS works to demonstrate that mission-driven publishing can be both financially sustainable and genuinely transformative for the research ecosystem.
Prior to PLOS, Alison served as Director of the University of California Press, where she led a significant organizational and financial turnaround, launched new digital publishing initiatives, and strengthened the Press’s relationships across the UC system. Before that, she served as Executive Vice President at Sage, with earlier leadership roles at Taylor & Francis and Blackwell Publishers – a publishing career now spanning more than 35 years.
Alison is a regular speaker at industry meetings and a contributing writer for The Scholarly Kitchen blog. She has served on numerous boards and advisory bodies including the Society for Scholarly Publishing, the MIT Libraries Board, the Center for Open Science, and the American Heart Association.
Today’s post shares the results of an initiative designed to answer the question: what would it actually take to build a publishing model fit for the research ecosystem we have now, rather than the one we inherited?
As AI systems increasingly reason from the scientific literature, the integrity signals that make research trustworthy — open data, structured metadata, robust retraction processes — matter more than ever. PLOS CEO Alison Mudditt on why open access publishers have a different set of obligations in an AI world.
Today, Alison Mudditt reflects on a Charleston Conference session that asked: what would it take to make the scholarly communication system truly equitable, impactful, and future-ready?
Antitrust litigation has been filed against six major scholarly publishers. We reached out to the community for their thoughts.
Transitional agreements are proving to be neither transitional nor transformative. How should libraries and publishers reassess and chart a different course?
Robert Harington and Alison Mudditt, CEO of PLOS, in conversation in this series of perspectives from some of Publishing’s leaders across the non-profit and profit sectors of our industry.
eLife’s recent announcement that it will reinvent itself as a “service that reviews preprints” has generated much discussion over recent weeks. But what are the primary drivers and goals, and what might we all learn from this bold experiment?
Is there an entrenched stasis in scholarly communication in which the core elements of the system have not been much moved by the revolutions happening around us?
Everyone has an opinion about the OSTP Policy memo! Come over and hear what the Chefs have to say and share your opinions with us. Part 1 of a 2 part post.
We ask the 2022 Society for Scholarly Publishing Fellows to offer their thoughts on this year’s Annual Meeting.
Today we ask the Scholarly Kitchen Chefs how they’re feeling about in-person conferences in general, and the 2022 SSP Annual Meeting in particular.
The beginning of the holiday season means it’s time for our annual list of our favorite books read during the year (and more!). Today we offer Part 2 of our suggestions.
Open peer review has been growing steadily but its implementations take many different forms. Alison Mudditt and Véronique Kiermer take a deep dive into the question of whether reviewers should be openly identified.
Revisiting Alison Mudditt’s 2018 post on sexual harassment in our community. What has changed in the last three years, and what can we continue to do to eradicate this behavior for the next generation of women.
Lots of things are wrong with paying for peer review, according to Tim Vines and Alison Mudditt in the recent R2R conference debate