New Directions in Open Access

SSP’s 2022 New Directions Seminar gathered experts in the field to review the latest developments and innovations in our industry and discuss how we can collectively take the best of what we’ve learned over the past few years into the future. Featured presentations highlighted the advancement of new ideas, technologies, and collaborations that are currently shaping the future of academic publishing, including new directions in open access; new agreements and collaborations that could change the course of research and research funding; ethics in peer review; new technologies in scholarly publishing and the importance of adapting to a data-driven future; and much more. Topics were presented by a diverse and passionate group of speakers from academia, scholarly publishers, librarians, and industry service providers.

Bill Moran is currently the Publisher of the Science Family of Journals. In his role, Bill and the publishing team are responsible for content, rights and permissions, licensing, scientific meetings, publishing collaborations, advertising, outreach, Science Careers and all publishing operations. During his 17 years with AAAS, Bill has been instrumental in broadening the association’s international publishing activities and collaborations. He spearheaded the launch of the Beijing office; in addition, he developed an international collaboration program for Science Publishing that encompasses Science Careers outreach. Bill has also worked with the Science editorial team to raise awareness of Science/AAAS within academic institutions in developed and developing countries. Notably, in 2014, Bill collaborated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences to arrange a meeting between former Editor-in-Chief of Science Dr. Marcia McNutt and the Premier of China Li Keqiang. He further established Science Custom Publishing activity a decade ago.

Heather Staines is Senior Consultant at Delta Think and Director of Community Engagement for the OA Data Analytics Tool. She currently holds the record for human with the highest number of annotations. She is a frequent speaker and participant at industry events including the COUNTER Board of Directors, the Charleston Library Conference, the STM Futurelab, Society for Scholarly Publishing, Council of Science Editors. She has a Ph.D. in Military and Diplomatic History from Yale University.

Maridath Wilson is Head of Scholarly Resources at Boston University Libraries where she leads the licensing and negotiation activities for digital resources. She brings a diversity of professional experience to collection strategy work, including content aggregators, liberal arts and R1 settings, as well as library consortia. Her first monograph, Doing Academic Research: A Practical Guide to Research Methods and Analysis was published by Routledge in 2019, and she is a proud member of the 2019 cohort of the Harvard Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians. Maridath serves on the Executive Committee of the NERL Consortium and was part of the team that negotiated the first-ever retroactive open access agreement with Elsevier in 2021. You can find Maridath on Twitter (@maridathann) where she would love to connect with you about all things related to vendor negotiation, licensing, and consortial work.

Moriana M. Garcia is the Scholarly Communication Librarian at River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester, in Rochester, New York. She has a PhD in Pharmacology from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and a Master of Library and Information Science from Kent State University, Ohio. At Rochester, she supports the university community on topics from across the scholarly communication landscape with a special focus on open scholarship. She recently joined SPARC's team on a one-year appointment as VPO for Open Models. She will help SPARC increase library understanding and acceptance of funding models that provide equitable open access without relying on article processing charges.

Sara Rouhi is the Director of Strategic Partnerships at PLOS focusing on developing new business models for sustainable, inclusive open access publishing. Since she’s joined PLOS, the organization has launched three non-APC based business models, one of which — Community Action Publishing — was awarded the ALPSP award for Innovation in Publishing. As a member of PLOS’ leadership team, she works to ensure PLOS’ commercial work aligns closely with its mission to foster open science globally. Sara is active in the scholarly communications community as a volunteer and thought leader speaking frequently on open access, equity in publishing, and diversity in scholarly communications. She is currently Board Member for the a Society of Scholarly Publishing (SSP) and was the recipient of SSP’s Emerging Leader award in 2015.

Sarah Forzetting leads licensing strategy at Stanford Libraries. She brings a unique perspective to library operations and e-resource license negotiations, having worked in publishing and for a library services vendor prior to coming to Stanford in 2014. Sarah is currently Chair of the NERL Program Council Executive Committee where she supports member-driven, values-based license negotiation for the consortium.