Delivering Value at a Mission-Driven Organization: Some Case Studies

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.

Alice is a co-founder of the MoreBrains Cooperative, a consulting organization that specializes in — and supports the values of — open research. Her career has spanned both scholarly publishing (at Blackwell Publishing and then Wiley) and research infrastructures — first as Director of Community Engagement & Support of ORCID, and then in a similar role at NISO (National Information Standards Organization). Alice is actively involved in the scholarly communications community, including as President of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) in 2021-22 and as a regular contributor to their Scholarly Kitchen blog. She is passionate about the need for a robust and open global research infrastructure (with a particular interest in metadata and workflows) and about improving diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility - in scholarly communications and in society at large.

Ana is responsible for developing and promoting community adoption of ORCID across different regions in the world. She also focuses on growing and improving ORCID integration development and knowledge. She is always seeking for global collaboration, with emphasis on the Latin America and the Caribbean region. She has collaborated with several institutions from different sectors during their development, implementation and adoption of ORCID and has participated in several international conferences and training throughout her career. Ana is an enthusiastic and active promoter of Open Science and Persistent Identifiers (PIDs). She has an MBA from the Antonio de Nebrija University in Spain and is passionate about teaching and data analysis.

Niamh is Chief Publishing Officer at PLOS where she leads the Publishing & Partnerships teams. Her focus includes providing business leadership for PLOS’s portfolio of products, growing PLOS’s regional networks and partnerships, and ensuring that PLOS’s Publishing Operations are aligned to deliver PLOS’s vision for publishing in the digital age. A key aspect of her team’s work is developing new business models to enable equitable participation in open access and open science.

Nici Pfeiffer is the Chief Product Officer at the Center for Open Science (COS), a non-profit organization in Charlottesville, Virginia. She joined the COS team in 2015 and is responsible for guiding COS products through the product life cycle. Her focus is on enabling communities of researchers to share and show their work to advance the transparency and reproducibility of science through the advancement of the Open Science Framework (OSF). Nici's team builds the infrastructure to enable open science practices in research workflows as part of a broader Open Science culture shift movement calling for openness, transparency, and reproducibility of research. Nici served on the Crossref Board of Directors (2022-2024) and is a member of the Preprint Metadata Advisory Committee, a PI for the NIH's Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI), and a member of the RAiD Advisory Group. She received a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Robert M. Harington is Chief Publishing Officer at the American Mathematical Society. Robert has the responsibility for driving strategic growth and management of the AMS publishing program for books, journals and electronic products. Robert also serves on the MathJax Steering Committee. Robert came to the AMS from the American Institute of Physics, where he served as Publisher, successfully leading AIP’s move away from its traditional role as a provider of publishing services, moving on to focus on serving the publishing needs of its member societies and AIP’s own journals. He has forged an international career working in both non-profit and commercial settings, with rich experience across the United States, Europe, and Asia. Robert holds a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Oxford, and a first-class honours degree in chemistry from the University of London.