Diversification and Decentralization of Peer Review

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.

Emily Esten (they/them) is the Customer Success Manager at Knowledge Futures, providing technical client support for full-stack knowledge infrastructure. Previously, Esten worked as Project Lead on the DocMaps project, fostering trust through interoperable preprint review metadata. In Esten’s varied work experience - from project lead to curator, educator to site developer - their primary focus has been shaping collaborations, training, and programming of digital tools for scholarly communication.

Fiona Hutton is Head of Publishing at the open access publisher, eLife. In January 2023, eLife moved to a Publish-Review-Curate model of publication. Fiona leads the publishing division and is responsible for the six publishing departments. Prior to joining eLife, Fiona worked in scholarly publishing for over 20 years (Cambridge University Press, Wiley, Elsevier) driving the strategic and operational transformation to OA publishing and creating innovative open research products and publishing initiatives. Before moving into OA,  Fiona held a variety of key roles in Review publishing and started out as Editor of Trends in Biochemical Sciences after a postdoc at Columbia University. She sits on the Board of OASPA, is an ALPSP tutor, and is a member of the DORA Steering Group.

Dr John Inglis is a faculty member of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, co-founder of the Laboratory’s preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv, and founding Executive Director and Publisher of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. He has a Ph.D. in immunology from the University of Edinburgh Medical School and was formerly an Assistant Editor of The Lancet and founding Editor of Trends in Immunology. He is a Fellow of the American Society for Cell Biology and serves on the society’s finance committee. He is a member of the advisory board of MIT Press and Chair of the Scientific and Medical Advisory Board of the new non-profit openRxiv.

Tony ALVES is SVP of Product Management at HighWire Press, the platforms division of MPS Limited, overseeing a suite of platform products addressing the entire scholarly publishing infrastructure, from workflow to hosting to analytics. Tony served as Director of Product Management at Aries Systems, and Publisher at SilverPlatter Education. Tony promotes industry standardization, system-to-system communications and industry shared services, participating in initiatives on peer review, research integrity, PIDs and open science. Serving those interests, Tony volunteers with NISO, STM, Crossref, ORCID, OA Switchboard, CSE and ACSE, he organizes talks, and writes articles and blog posts on these topics.