A Fighting Chance: Funding and Support Strategies for the Current Moment

Thirty years ago, Charlie Munger delivered his now-famous “Psychology of Human Misjudgment” speech at Harvard, where he argued that the behaviors we observe—whether in individuals, organizations, or markets—are the natural result of underlying incentive structures. This theme will delve into how different stakeholders such as researchers, institutions, publishers, funders, and governments create and respond to incentives. From the evolution of open access models to the business strategies behind publishing workflows, we will examine the systemic forces steering the future of scholarly publishing and ask how these incentives align with our values and what we can do to impact the forces that shape the knowledge ecosystem.

Jennifer Kemp is Director of Consulting Services at Strategies for Open Science (Stratos). She was most recently Head of Partnerships at Crossref, where she worked with funders, publishers, service providers and API users to improve community participation, metadata and discoverability. Prior to Crossref, she was Senior Manager of Policy and External Relations, North America for Springer Nature. Jennifer started her career as a librarian before joining HighWire Press where she worked with a wide variety of scholarly publishers. She is active in the research support community and serves as Board Secretary for the OA Book Usage (OAeBU) Data Trust.

Katherine Skinner is an open knowledge researcher-activist with deep commitments to community building, organizational resilience, and systems thinking. Her passion for facilitating, empowering, and cultivating communities led her to help found the Educopia Institute, where she provided scaffolding, training, and systems to support such collaborative groups as Library Publishing Coalition, MetaArchive Cooperative, BitCurator Consortium, C4DISC, Software Preservation Network, and Maintainers. She also co-authored Community Cultivation: A Field Guide (2018) to provide an open, practical guide to this type of work. She has co-edited three books and has authored and co-authored numerous reports and articles. She has served as Principal Investigator for 24 research projects funded by foundations and federal grants and awards on topics like education (Nexus LAB, Bitcurator.edu), digital curation (Chronicles in Newspaper Preservation, OSSArcFlow), and scholarly communication (Library Publishing Workflows, Mapping the Scholarly Communication Infrastructure). She lives in Greensboro, NC, in the US.