Optimizing Publishing Infrastructure: A Case Study of ASM and ACS

Publishing infrastructure—which includes submission and peer review platforms, production and finance systems, author dashboards, and any other underlying systems that different users interact with throughout the publishing process—is essential to publishers running their business. Well-connected publishing infrastructure enables publishers to differentiate themselves and can enhance the experience for all users—authors, reviewers, editors, and administrators. In this session, we will discuss the concept of atomizing publishing infrastructure and connecting it under a single platform, thereby enabling publishers to introduce new, innovative capabilities such as custom pre-submission checks or chosen research integrity screenings, without having to deal with constraints from legacy systems. We will hear from speakers from the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) and the American Chemical Society (ACS), two organizations that have modernized their publishing workflows by de-coupling submissions from peer review, and connecting different systems on the ChronosHub platform, thereby unifying their user journey and maintaining operational flexibility. We will highlight successes and challenges, and discuss improvements that simplify submissions, enhance efficiency, and enable seamless integration with different peer review and other systems

Publication Date

May 2025

47th Annual Meeting (2025)

45

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.