The Scholarly Kitchen: Innovations in Open Research

The SSP webinar program delivers a series of highly informative, thought-provoking webinars designed to challenge and stimulate discussion. Covering timely topics and offered regularly throughout the year, our one-hour webinars are available for viewing 180 days after the live broadcast.

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.

Since June 2017 Alison has been CEO of PLOS, an organization dedicated to building an Open Science future that is equitable, collaborative, and global. Prior to PLOS, Alison served as Director of the University of California Press and as Executive Vice President at SAGE Publications. Alison is Chair of the Board of Directors for the Center for Open Science and also serves on the boards of the Authors’ Alliance and the American Chemical Society’s Governing Board for Publishing. A regular speaker at industry meetings, Alison also writes for the Scholarly Kitchen blog. Her more than 30 years in the publishing industry also include leadership positions at Taylor & Francis and Blackwell Publishers.

Charles Watkinson is Director of the University of Michigan Press and Associate University Librarian, Publishing, at the University of Michigan Library. He was President of the Association of University Presses in 2022-2023. Charles has previously been Director of Purdue University Press and Director of Publications at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.