Real World Results on Peer Review: Pilot Study Indicates a Solution

Although every year in the scholarly publishing ecosystem is a balancing act of innovation, optimization, and value creation, 2025 is shaping up to be particularly challenging as the pace and scale of change is accelerating more than we’ve ever seen before. There is increasing pressure to provide value to and to meet the incredibly diverse needs of the global research community while maintaining financial health for our own organizations, living our values, and continuing to protect the scholarly record. With AI, open access, integrity, and mistrust frequently dominating the conversation, we are in the midst of an unprecedented shift in both our industry and society as a whole. As always, the SSP community continues to focus on bringing together academics, funders, librarians, publishers, service providers, technologists, researchers and countless others with a communal interest and stake in disseminating scholarly information. We look to the 47th Annual Meeting as an opportunity to continue this tradition and welcome all colleagues and community stakeholders.

Christopher I. Petkov, PhD is a Professor of Neurosurgery and Vice Chair for Research at the Iowa Carver College of Medicine, department of Neurosurgery. He has a PhD. in Systems Neuroscience from the University of California in Davis, CA. He is Editor in Chief of Current Research in Neurobiology and interested in peer review research.

In her role as Associate Director, Publishing, at Wolters Kluwer Health, Jennifer Regala works with award-winning news magazine publications, including Oncology Times and Emergency Medicine News. Jennifer has worked in scholarly publishing for 20+ years, most recently as the Director of Publications/Executive Editor at the American Urological Association. Jennifer's personal motto is: "It's free to be nice and to comb your hair.."

Ginny Pittman leads a medical journal portfolio at Elsevier, with 14 open access and subscription journals. She has over 25 years of experience in scholarly research publishing and educational product development, making an impact in the healthcare and life sciences fields at Wiley, Blackwell, Wolters Kluwer, and Mary Ann Liebert Publishers. She has presented to author communities at medical institutions globally and has created new approaches to portfolio development, metrics, and author/editor training and tools, earning multiple awards for innovation.