As the long tail of smaller publishers shortens, new entrants and partnerships are on the rise, plus new competitive dynamics are reshaping our industry. This panel brings together the perspectives of an information scientist, a marketing director, and an industry expert who will discuss the cycle and barriers of a partnership, a bold, new coalition built on purpose above profit, and the consolidation happening in publishing/technology and its impact on competition today. The panel will address problems in common that scholarly communication stakeholders face and would be better solved through partnerships, and the barriers to consolidating these partnerships due to challenges such as power imbalance, conflicts of interest, and competition.

Throughout the history of scholarly communication, “peer reviewers” have typically been two or three academics selected by editors and dissemination has happened largely through scholarly journals. This session will discuss the ways in which this traditional model is being disrupted through initiatives such as public review and preprint workflows, such as eLife’s recent shift in their publishing model. New modes of peer review and publication seek to increase the number of individuals reviewing new research, diversify the reviewer pool, improve research quality and clarity, bring new voices to the peer review process, and ensure that research dissemination methodologies are fit for purpose in an increasingly digital, global ecosystem. This one-hour panel will consist of three presentations followed by an open discussion period.