Experiments in Community Engagement at the Society Associations

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.

Darla is the central business, operational, and thought leader for open science, research integrity, and publications. Recently, she led a science-first, scientist-centered response to public access plans across all FASEB member societies. Darla served in leadership positions at John Wiley & Sons and at the American Chemical Society as the first Head of Open Access. She is a frequent speaker at industry meetings and serves on multiple boards and committees. She holds a PhD in biological chemistry from Duke University and scholarly information works under her remit have earned 11 industry awards.

David Haber is the Director of Publishing Operations at the American Society for Microbiology, which publishes 15 peer-reviewed journals from food microbiology to genomics and the microbiome. He collaborates with a team responsible for all content and metadata operations from submission into the peer review system, through article flow during production, and to eventual publication and distribution online. For the past twenty years, he has held a wide range of positions in the STM ecosystem, from copyediting manuscripts to typesetting articles, from digital conversion modeling to solution architecture for publishing support systems, from old-school, print workflow management to speedy OA publication models.

Matt Giampoala serves as the Vice President for Publications for the American Geophysical Union (AGU). He’s responsible for overseeing AGU’s publications, including 21 journals and its books program. Matt has extensive experience as a publisher of journals and books across the spectrum of STM publishing and has led efforts in expanding access and engagement through open science and reproducibility initiatives. He is an advocate for promoting diversity and mentorship in scholarly publishing. Before arriving at AGU, he served in roles at Springer, Wiley, and Elsevier. Matt has a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the Perlman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Yurong Fei-Bloom is the Director of Publications for the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB). In this position, she oversees all aspects of ASCB's self-publishing program and is focused on driving strategic growth in editorial development, subscription sales, and open-access initiatives. Yurong has extensive experience in STEM publishing, having worked with both nonprofit organizations and major publishing companies. Before her role at ASCB, she held various positions at Springer Nature and Taylor & Francis Group. Yurong earned her Ph.D. in Biomedical Science from the University of Connecticut Health Center.