Drowning in Submissions? Smart Guide to AI-powered Peer Review (The Only Answer to the Deluge)

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.

Ann Michael leads the Transformation Office at AIP Publishing, charged with increasing organizational velocity, flexibility, and strategic alignment in data and analytics, new product development, and ongoing product operations. She also serves as Board Chair of Delta Think, a consultancy focused on strategy and innovation in scholarly communications. Since its start, the focus of Ann’s career has been organizational evolution and working with groups that are data-driven and future focused.

Dustin Smith is the Co-founder and President of Hum, which provides AI and data intelligence solutions for publishers. For over 15 years, he’s worked at the cross-section of scholarly publishing and tech innovation. He leads Hum’s product vision, strategy and development, and oversees solutions that leverage AI to unify and activate first-party data, including Alchemist, Hum’s deep AI suite. He’s particularly passionate about helping publishers harness data to drive reader engagement, content intelligence, author/reviewer recruitment, and more.