Delivering Value at a Mission-Driven Organization: Some Case Studies

Duration: 1 hr
Publication Date: May 2025

About the session

Delivering value is—or should be—just as important to mission-driven organizations in scholarly publishing and communications as it is to their commercial counterparts. However, the values associated with being mission-driven can sometimes seem to be at odds with the need to deliver value to a customer or end-user. For example, if being open is part of your mission, how do you balance that with the need for organizational sustainability? How do you decide what it’s appropriate to charge for, and how much people should pay? How can you demonstrate the value of your organization to your stakeholders, especially if you also rely on them to support your mission as volunteers?

In this session, speakers from several mission-driven organizations will discuss how being mission-driven can make a real difference to how they think about, and deliver value to their communities.

Collection

Annual Meeting (2025)

Speakers

Chief Publishing Officer, Public Library of Science

Niamh is Chief Publishing Officer at PLOS where she leads the Publishing & Partnerships teams. Her focus includes providing business leadership for PLOS’s portfolio of products, growing PLOS’s regional networks and partnerships, and ensuring that PLOS’s Publishing Operations are aligned to deliver PLOS’s vision for publishing in the digital age. A key aspect of her team’s work is developing new business models to enable equitable participation in open access and open science.
Co-Founder, MoreBrains Cooperative

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.
Chief Product Officer, Center for Open Science

Nici Pfeiffer is the Chief Product Officer at the Center for Open Science (COS), a non-profit organization in Charlottesville, Virginia. She joined the COS team in 2015 and is responsible for guiding COS products through the product life cycle. Her focus is on enabling communities of researchers to share and show their work to advance the transparency and reproducibility of science through the advancement of the Open Science Framework (OSF). Nici's team builds the infrastructure to enable open science practices in research workflows as part of a broader Open Science culture shift movement calling for openness, transparency, and reproducibility of research. Nici served on the Crossref Board of Directors (2022-2024) and is a member of the Preprint Metadata Advisory Committee, a PI for the NIH's Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI), and a member of the RAiD Advisory Group. She received a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Chief Publishing Officer, Publishing, American Mathematical Society

Robert M. Harington is Chief Publishing Officer at the American Mathematical Society. Robert has the responsibility for driving strategic growth and management of the AMS publishing program for books, journals and electronic products. Robert also serves on the MathJax Steering Committee. Robert came to the AMS from the American Institute of Physics, where he served as Publisher, successfully leading AIP’s move away from its traditional role as a provider of publishing services, moving on to focus on serving the publishing needs of its member societies and AIP’s own journals. He has forged an international career working in both non-profit and commercial settings, with rich experience across the United States, Europe, and Asia. Robert holds a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Oxford, and a first-class honours degree in chemistry from the University of London.
Senior Engagement Lead ,ORCID

Ana is responsible for developing and promoting community adoption of ORCID across different regions in the world. She also focuses on growing and improving ORCID integration development and knowledge. She is always seeking for global collaboration, with emphasis on the Latin America and the Caribbean region. She has collaborated with several institutions from different sectors during their development, implementation and adoption of ORCID and has participated in several international conferences and training throughout her career. Ana is an enthusiastic and active promoter of Open Science and Persistent Identifiers (PIDs). She has an MBA from the Antonio de Nebrija University in Spain and is passionate about teaching and data analysis.