A Fighting Chance: Funding and Support Strategies for the Current Moment

Duration: 1 hr 9 mins
Publication Date: October 2025

About the session

Financial sustainability is a goal shared by the entire research support community and it is an ongoing, often elusive one. The term funding often brings to mind grants and philanthropy, but the reality is that organizations and initiatives of all kinds may rely on multiple sources of funds to keep the lights on, including memberships, fees for service, sponsorships, and more. In the current environment, it can be hard to know which services may be at risk, what lessons can be learned from times of relative plenty, and what strategies the scholarly publishing community can employ, individually and collectively, to maximize chances of sustainability. This panel session will cover a variety of use case perspectives on the current funding landscape, where it might be headed next, and what part we all play in shaping it.

Collection

New Directions 2025

Speakers

Executive Director, OA eBook Data Usage Trust
Research Lead, Invest in Open Infrastructure

Katherine Skinner is an open knowledge researcher-activist with deep commitments to community building, organizational resilience, and systems thinking. Her passion for facilitating, empowering, and cultivating communities led her to help found the Educopia Institute, where she provided scaffolding, training, and systems to support such collaborative groups as Library Publishing Coalition, MetaArchive Cooperative, BitCurator Consortium, C4DISC, Software Preservation Network, and Maintainers. She also co-authored Community Cultivation: A Field Guide (2018) to provide an open, practical guide to this type of work. She has co-edited three books and has authored and co-authored numerous reports and articles. She has served as Principal Investigator for 24 research projects funded by foundations and federal grants and awards on topics like education (Nexus LAB, Bitcurator.edu), digital curation (Chronicles in Newspaper Preservation, OSSArcFlow), and scholarly communication (Library Publishing Workflows, Mapping the Scholarly Communication Infrastructure). She lives in Greensboro, NC, in the US.
Senior Director of Publishing, Transformation and Engagement, APS
Director, Consulting Services, Strategies for Open Science (Stratos)

Jennifer Kemp is Director of Consulting Services at Strategies for Open Science (Stratos). She was most recently Head of Partnerships at Crossref, where she worked with funders, publishers, service providers and API users to improve community participation, metadata and discoverability. Prior to Crossref, she was Senior Manager of Policy and External Relations, North America for Springer Nature. Jennifer started her career as a librarian before joining HighWire Press where she worked with a wide variety of scholarly publishers. She is active in the research support community and serves as Board Secretary for the OA Book Usage (OAeBU) Data Trust.