New Directions in Publisher Collaborations and Access to Content

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.

Allison C Belan is the Associate Director for Digital Strategy and Publishing Systems at Duke University Press. Allison works to align all aspects of the Press’s digital publishing strategy and operations to build a digital presence that connects scholars and thinkers to Duke University Press’s publications and that speeds our scholarship to the world. She leads the Scholarly Publishing Collective, a collaboration between non-profit journal publishers that is managed by Duke University Press.

Andrea Lopez is the Director of Sales, Partnerships & Initiatives at Annual Reviews where she is responsible for the sales and distribution of Annual Reviews journals. She has over 25 years of experience in academic publishing sales. She joined Annual Reviews in 1999 to manage the then new site license program and has enjoyed partnering with librarians and sales agents worldwide to build the program. Most recently she has been involved in developing and implementing the Subscribe to Open model for Annual Reviews and establishing the Subscribe to Open Community of Practice.

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.

Ralph Youngen is Senior Director, Digital Strategy at the American Chemical Society where he oversees the content delivery, peer review, and identity management platforms for ACS Publications. Ralph holds key leadership roles in several industry initiatives aimed at supporting the needs of the scholarly research community. He was past Co-Chair of the joint STM and NISO RA21 initiative and now serves as a member of the governance committee for SeamlessAccess, its operational successor. Ralph is one of the founders of GetFTR, serves on STM’s Standards and Technology Executive Committee, and is chair of the STM Solutions Access Cluster.