Business Processes for Sustainable Open Access: Recommended Practices for Institutions, Research Funders, and Publishers

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.

Chris Shillum joined ORCID as its second Executive Director in 2020. With more than 25 years of experience in product and platform development in scholarly communications and STM publishing, he brings to ORCID his deep expertise in product and technology strategy in a time of rapidly changing business models, technological advances, and increasing expectations from users and customers. He previously held a number of leadership positions at Elsevier, has served on the boards of Crossref, ORCID, the International DOI Foundation and the National Information Standards Organization, and has lead several industry-wide collaborative projects including SeamlessAccess and GetFTR.

Howard is the driving force behind CHORUS. Over the past two decades, he played a key role in developing innovative technology solutions that have transformed scholarly communications. He co-founded and chaired ORCID, and was active in the establishment of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and the founding and technical development of Crossref and CLOCKSS. He was President of SSP from 2014-2015 and served on its board from 2010-2012 and 2013-2016. He is an active member of the Metadata 2020 and SCHOLIX initiatives and the STM Future Labs. Before joining CHORUS, Howard was Chief Technology Officer for Nature Publishing Group where he was in charge of global web and mobile development and operations, content management, production and manufacturing, and information technology across all NPG products. Howard also held positions at Springer and John Wiley & Sons.

Mary Beth Barilla is NISO’s Director of Business Development and Communications, where she manages member communications and ensures our sustainability through growth in membership, sponsorship, events, and other funding sources. Prior to joining NISO, Mary Beth worked at the Society for Scholarly Publishing as Program Director, where she led volunteers to develop educational programming for the scholarly communications community. She has also worked at RedLink, Inc. as the Publisher Relations Director and in various sales and marketing roles at both commercial and university presses.  Mary Beth has a master’s degree in English from Indiana University, a master’s from Simmons College in teaching English to speakers of other languages, and a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Yvonne Campfens holds a MSc Econometrics degree from University of Amsterdam, and has worked in academic publishing and related service sectors for almost 30 years (Elsevier, Swets Subscription Services, Bohn Stafleu van Loghum/Springer Media, Springer Nature). She was involved in collaborative and workflow solutions like ASA model licenses (1999), ALPSP Learned Journal Collection (2004) and TRANSFER Code of Practice (2009). In 2018, she started her own consultancy business, and has been involved with OA Switchboard since 2019. In 2020 she was appointed Executive Director of Stichting ('foundation') OA Switchboard.