Addressing Research Integrity with Identity Verification

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.

Hylke Koers is the Chief Information Officer for STM Solutions, STM’s operational arm which develops and manages shared infrastructures and collaborative services to support the scholarly communications community. Before joining STM, Hylke worked in several senior technology and product management roles, in both private and public sector organizations, supporting the research community. Hylke also held leading roles in FAIRsFAIR, the Research Data Alliance and served on the EOSC Architecture Working Group. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Amsterdam.

Ralph Youngen is Senior Director, Digital Strategy at the American Chemical Society where he oversees the content delivery, peer review, and identity management platforms for ACS Publications. Ralph holds key leadership roles in several industry initiatives aimed at supporting the needs of the scholarly research community. He was past Co-Chair of the joint STM and NISO RA21 initiative and now serves as a member of the governance committee for SeamlessAccess, its operational successor. Ralph is one of the founders of GetFTR, serves on STM’s Standards and Technology Executive Committee, and is chair of the STM Solutions Access Cluster.

Theresa Fucito is the Director of Content Operations for AIP Publishing. She has more than 26 years of experience in journal publishing and leading a team of publishing professionals. In her role, she oversees day-to-day publishing operations and works closely with our internal stakeholders, Editorial Development, Books Publisher, and Peer Review Management to support long-term strategic growth and development.

Tim Lloyd is founder and CEO of LibLynx, a business helping publishers, service providers and libraries to manage identity and access to online resources, and better understand the usage and impact of those resources. Tim is a member of the Governance committee and co-Chair of the Outreach committee for SeamlessAccess.org, and a member of COUNTER’s Open Access/Unpaywalled sub-group. His career spans several decades in a variety of product development and operational roles in online publishing, with a particular focus on developing innovative products and services to support online learning and research.