Where to Start? Talking with Authors About Open Access

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.

Annie Johnson is the Associate University Librarian for Publishing, Preservation, Research, and Digital Access at the University of Delaware Library, Museums, and Press. Her portfolio includes the digital initiatives and preservation department, library information technology, and the University of Delaware Press. Annie works to further open access, open education, and open data at the University of Delaware and beyond.

Danielle Fosler-Lussier is Professor of Music at the Ohio State University. Her interests include global mobility, the politics of music, and women’s roles in musical life. Her open access book, Music on the Move, was published by the University of Michigan Press, supported by a grant from TOME and the Ohio State University Libraries. Music on the Move makes full use of the Fulcrum digital platform by including multimedia and digital maps. She is now working on a book that describes the interaction between government and civic groups in building an infrastructure for musical life in the United States across the twentieth century. She is also Director of the Imagined Futures Graduate Career Development Initiative at Ohio State, which aims to align the university’s graduate curriculum and mentorship with preparation for diverse careers.

Eron Smith (EE-run), originally from Decatur, GA, is an assistant professor of music theory at Oberlin College & Conservatory. She got her Ph.D. in 2022 from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY. She researches post-2000 pop music, concerto form, and music-language intersections. Her first print article "Prosodic Dissonance" was published in the open-access journal Music Theory Online in 2024. As an author, Eron prefers to be cited by first name rather than last (e.g., “Eron 2023”). This preference is partially because her first name is significantly more distinct than her last and partially to question the assumption that patrilineal names are more professional. Outside of academia, Eron is also a pianist, oboist, songwriter, and parent to an amazing 8-month-old. She enjoys traveling, birding, reading sci-fi, and playing the occasional video game, and is passionate about emotional literacy and mental-health coping strategies.

Philip P. Arnold is a Professor in the Religion Department; core faculty in Native American and Indigenous Studies, Syracuse University; and Founding Director of the Skä·noñh—Great Law of Peace Center. His books are Eating Landscape: Aztec and European Occupation of Tlalocan (1999); Sacred Landscapes and Cultural Politics: Planting a Tree (edited with Ann Gold, 2001); The Gift of Sports: Indigenous Ceremonial Dimensions of the Games We Love (2012); Urgency of Indigenous Values  (2023), in the Syracuse University Press series “Haudenosaunee and Indigenous Worlds,” for which he is co-editor. He established and hosts the Doctrine of Discovery Conferences and Study Group and Indigenous Values Initiative. With his wife Sandra Bigtree he co-hosts the Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery podcast and is the PI for “200 Years of Johnson v. McIntosh: Indigenous Responses to the Religious Foundations of Racism,” a 4-year (2022-25) grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.

Sarah McKee is the Project Manager for Publishing Initiatives at the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), where she works to support a healthy ecosystem for the creation and dissemination of humanistic scholarship across disciplines and institutions. Prior to her arrival at ACLS she administered Digital Publishing in the Humanities, sponsored by the Mellon Foundation and based at Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, and served as managing editor of the born-digital New Georgia Encyclopedia at the University of Georgia Press. She is an advisory board member for the Next Generation Library Project and coauthor of Multimodal Digital Monographs: Content, Collaboration, Community.