Financial sustainability is a goal shared by the entire research support community and it is an ongoing, often elusive one. The term funding often brings to mind grants and philanthropy, but the reality is that organizations and initiatives of all kinds may rely on multiple sources of funds to keep the lights on, including memberships, fees for service, sponsorships, and more. In the current environment, it can be hard to know which services may be at risk, what lessons can be learned from times of relative plenty, and what strategies the scholarly publishing community can employ, individually and collectively, to maximize chances of sustainability. This panel session will cover a variety of use case perspectives on the current funding landscape, where it might be headed next, and what part we all play in shaping it.

Just as new directions in leadership have changed the way organizations have thought about their activities, cultures, and policies, new directions in data have done the same. While many organizations have used data to track the success of usage, sales, and other activities, this panel will outline some actionable ways to blend quantitative and qualitative data to foster innovation. In this session, our panelists will discuss the ways organizations can use internal data to improve workflows and staff experience, how we can use data to better inform the impact of our outputs and activities, and how data can help us understand our stakeholders’ decision-making process and motivations.

Open Access usage reporting is becoming ever more complex. Growing content syndication means that usage is occurring at scale across multiple platforms. While it's clear how this usage can be reported via COUNTER to libraries, it's less clear what other stakeholders are looking for, such as funders, editors, and authors. How granular should reporting be? Is there a role for geo-locating usage to help in organizational affiliation? What's the importance of human vs machine interfaces? And is all usage created equal, and does that matter? This session brings together four different perspectives: an OA publisher, an institutional funder, an open repository, and a vendor. We'll walk through what's known and then start to unpack the questions for which we don't yet have answers. Our goal is to inform our community understanding of the challenges ahead of us and, hopefully, start to lay the groundwork for future standards in this area.