Designing Resilient Communities for Change: Successes, Challenges, and Practical Ways Forward

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.

Anne Stone is a marketing and strategy consultant to publishers, professional associations, and businesses focused on the intersection of organizational strategy and implementation. She is an active volunteer on SSP committees and the Workplace Equity survey, sponsored by C4DISC. You will find her most of the time in Central Massachusetts, walking her Airedale on the weekends.

Camille Lemieux leads data projects as a Manager of Global Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) at Springer Nature. Leveraging her specializations in program evaluation and data-driven decision-making, she helps teams track progress on their DEI goals. In this role, she also leads the company's annual DEI employee survey, which helps senior leaders use feedback from thousands of employees to cultivate a more inclusive and equitable workplace culture. She holds a master's degree in learning sciences from the University of Iowa.

Karen Stoll Farrell is Director of Scholarly Communication and Open Publishing at Indiana University Libraries, Bloomington, where they were previously the Librarian for South and Southeast Asian Studies. They hold an MA in South Asian Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, an MLIS from Wayne State University, and a BA in Anthropology from Kalamazoo College. Currently, their research is focused on feminist management practices and on disability equity, including equity in scholarly communications and for neurodiverse librarians, specifically. They are active in work incorporating equitable values into open access practices. Their most recent publication, coauthored with nicholae cline, is “Envisioning Leadership: Principles of Feminist Management in Practice” a chapter in Critical Library Leadership (2024).

Dr. Paul-André Genest is an Editorial Director and Publisher at the American Chemical Society where he is responsible for the management and development of roughly half of the ACS journal portfolio and Global Editorial Strategy team. He also acts as the Chair of the ACS Pride Affinity Group. Since 2016, he is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University where he co-teaches a yearly course on scholarly communication (BIOS 292: Preparation and Practice: Scientific Communication and Media). Previously, he worked as a Publisher and Senior Editor at Wiley and as an Associate Publisher and Scientific Editor at Elsevier. Dr. Genest has a BSc (Biology) degree and a MSc (Microbiology-Immunology) degree from the Université Laval in Québec City, Canada, and a PhD (Molecular Parasitology) from the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He held two postdoc research positions at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, The Netherlands before transitioning to the scholarly publishing industry.

Simon Holt is Senior Product Manager for Content Accessibility at Elsevier, where he leads work making books, journals, video and audio accessible to people with disabilities. As a sight impaired person himself, accessibility is important to him personally as well as professionally. He has worked in scholarly publishing for over 15 years, working with authors and editors, and is involved in several industry initiatives including serving as a Director for the Society of Scholarly Publishing, a member of an Advisory Board for the Royal National Institute for Blind People and as a Trustee for the sight-loss charity MyVision Oxfordshire. He lives in Oxford, UK.