This session aims to showcase society publishers' community engagement projects that have achieved real results. It will feature case studies from ASCB, ASM, FASEB, and AGU, highlighting their innovative approaches. The ASCB initiative provides guaranteed peer review for members, increasing submissions. ASM focuses on community-building through a sustainable open-access publishing model. FASEB has established an Early Career Researcher editorial board to enhance diversity and inclusion, expanding their team to over 100 members. AGU's Thriving Earth Exchange program and the Community Science Exchange platform support local communities by connecting them with researchers to address community priorities and sharing project reports and peer-reviewed articles. Speakers will engage attendees in dialogue to help them develop their community engagement proposals.

Publishing infrastructure—which includes submission and peer review platforms, production and finance systems, author dashboards, and any other underlying systems that different users interact with throughout the publishing process—is essential to publishers running their business. Well-connected publishing infrastructure enables publishers to differentiate themselves and can enhance the experience for all users—authors, reviewers, editors, and administrators. In this session, we will discuss the concept of atomizing publishing infrastructure and connecting it under a single platform, thereby enabling publishers to introduce new, innovative capabilities such as custom pre-submission checks or chosen research integrity screenings, without having to deal with constraints from legacy systems. We will hear from speakers from the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) and the American Chemical Society (ACS), two organizations that have modernized their publishing workflows by de-coupling submissions from peer review, and connecting different systems on the ChronosHub platform, thereby unifying their user journey and maintaining operational flexibility. We will highlight successes and challenges, and discuss improvements that simplify submissions, enhance efficiency, and enable seamless integration with different peer review and other systems

The global infrastructure enabling Open Access and Open Science has come a long way over the past two decades to improve the user experience for authors, publishers, funders, and institutions. Yet isn't there more we, as publishers, can do for our users? Accelerating the adoption of OA through a variety of business models has led to growing complexity in stakeholder relationships and user expectations. We are learning that when the community shares an understanding of common challenges and embraces best practices, particularly consistent use of persistent identifiers, UX improves for authors and institutions, and customer satisfaction grows. In this interactive session, an author will interview three panelists to reflect on successful collaborations that streamline OA processes, remove unnecessary work for the researchers, and enable cross-stakeholder transparency. Attendees will leave the session with ideas to achieve a more unified user journey to satisfy the needs of authors, institutions, and funders.