Each new change in scholarly communication promises to make research fairer, faster, more transparent. Yet, in many cases, researchers, especially from under resourced countries or from countries where English is not the first language, face added pressure to catch up, rather than to move forward.
Heather Staines Presidential Address from the SSP 2025 Annual Meeting.
It is time for OA proponents to engage in public debate with academic associations, universities and national funding agencies, because the widespread use of academic content in AI models poses significant risks for the research ecosystem.
DORA’s reaction to Clarivate’s decision to no longer fully index eLife (and, therefore, not to give it a Journal Impact Factor) seems inconsistent with both its and eLife’s public positions, and based on the mistaken belief that “disruption” is an absolute good in itself.
How much has changed in a dozen years? Lettie Conrad looks back at Ann Michael’s post from the 2009 SSP Annual Meeting, “Publishing for the Google Generation”.
Artificial intelligence is now a commodity appliance. What are the implications for Scholarly Publishing?
As we’ve absorbed and adopted the information economy assumptions peddled by Silicon Valley, social isolation has increased, the definition of “fact” has become slippery, and the scientific record has become more superficial, less reliable, and more transitory. In fact, confirmation bias seems to have become our main operating principle. Maybe a change in economic incentives and greater skepticism across the board could help — all driven by more humans at the controls.
What do people mean when they say scholarly publishing is “ripe for disruption”? Where might such disruption come from, and what will drive its success?
A number of recent articles have posited the idea that information distribution on the Internet is undergoing a massive change – driven by the failure of site advertising and subscriptions as a general purpose economic model, and the rise of mobile powered social media as the discovery tool of these times. To what extent is this way of thinking applicable to scholarly publishing?
The New York Times’ “Innovation” Report will hit a lot of nerves when it comes to strategy, long-term transformation, investment, digital operations, silos, print legacy, and organizational culture. And it will remind you how barely contained panic looks to others.
The way Netflix unbundled DVD-by-mail and streaming video services, flipped branding strategies, and made it all a public show created a focus on strategic inflection points and betting for the long-term.
Complexity, culture, and baked-in bias are limiting how publishers define value and approach the future.