Harnessing AI for Discovery: Analyzing Impact Across Library Users and Insights from Publishers

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.

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.

Charles manages the Publishing division of the U-M Library (publishing.umich.edu) which is composed of three parts - University of Michigan Press (UMP), Michigan Publishing Services (MPS), and Deep Blue repository and research data services (DBRRDS). Professionally, he has worked at University of Michigan since 2014. Previously he was in a similar position at Purdue University Libraries and Director of Publications at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. He has have a BA/MA from University of Cambridge in Archaeology and Anthropology and an MBA from Oxford Brookes University.

John is the Vice President of Published Content on JSTOR and was responsible for global participation on JSTOR prior to moving into this position in 2019. Before working at JSTOR, John worked at ProQuest in various roles for 10 years after being acquired by Softline Information in 2001. Prior to Softline Information, John was an instructor in the field of psychology, developer for online learning programs and a data analyst. Having seen first hand the importance and impact having access to digital content can bring to students, he has worked to provide access to as much scholarly content as possible to researchers over the last 20 years.

Sherer has been the director of UNC Press since 2012. In that time, he has published numerous award-winning books, including two NY Times bestsellers. He has also been PI on several major grants to support OA publishing for monographs. Working with JSTOR and ACLS, he designed the Path to Open program.