In our final tradition of reflections on the Annual Meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP), we invited librarian attendees and speakers to the Kitchen to share what they took away from this year’s event in Baltimore.

Amanda Echterling, Virginia Commonwealth University

As a first-time attendee, I came to SSP 2025 to listen. I am familiar with being attended to at library conferences. I intentionally chose SSP to learn about the challenges facing publishers. A major theme of the conference was the articulation of the values of scholarly publishing during this turbulent time, especially integrity in science communication. I enjoyed the broad view of the plenary panel, the future thinking of the “Charleston Trends,” as well as the practical aspects throughout. Many presentations demonstrated tools and services to support research identity management, which is a ballooning challenge to integrity.

Another theme was engaging more audiences in science communication; presenters and attendees sought opportunities to create derivative works, such as podcasts, audio readers, plain language summaries, and social media engagement. Which, of course, brings us to the great disruptor/audience in science communication, generative AI. Ithaka was able to share some early, promising data with their AI research tool. The “Breaking the Silos: Using AI to Fuse Copyright Law, Academic Knowledge, and Commercial Innovation” session addressed the need to license metadata for AI training and retrieval, extending integrity into AI training and retrieval, a discussion aimed at generating metadata related to the peer review process or the redaction process for AI model ingestion — metadata to help the models make more trustworthy predictions.

I was surprised not to see the library discovery knowledge base and KBART transactors at the conference talking about publisher metadata. Felt like a missed opportunity. In all, a wonderful three days of learning and dialogue. I would definitely attend again in the future.

Annie Johnson, University of Delaware

I attended SSP as a representative of the Library Publishing Coalition (LPC), where I currently serve on the Board. The LPC is an independent, community-led membership association of academic and research libraries and library consortia engaged in scholarly publishing. Libraries publish academic journals, monographs, open educational resources, and digital projects. According to the Global Library Publishing Map, there are almost 250 library publishers located around the world. SSP is a strategic affiliate of the LPC.

Having participated in the Library Publishing Forum in May, it was fascinating to compare and contrast the two conferences. Both conferences had sessions on open access, peer review, and AI. While many of the Forum’s sessions addressed working with students, SSP’s sessions were more focused on faculty and early career researchers. SSP also had a number of sessions related to research integrity. This topic is understandably top of mind for many publishers who are working to combat paper mills, data falsification, and AI-generated content. Within academic libraries, the issue of research integrity has largely been taken up by data management and research reproducibility librarians, and it is generally connected to larger efforts around advancing open access and open data. Interestingly, there were no sessions that addressed research integrity at the LP Forum, suggesting that it is not perceived as a major issue for library publishers.

I was also happy to be a speaker on the panel, “Where to Start? Talking with Authors About Open Access.” The panel, which was organized by Sarah McKee from ACLS, featured several faculty members who had experience with open access publishing. I was there to provide the librarian perspective. Our panel was one of only a small number of sessions at the conference that specifically focused on publishing humanities scholarship. We ended up getting some great questions from attendees about the differences between publishing open access in the humanities and publishing open access in STEM.

Overall, I really enjoyed my first time attending the SSP conference. In the future, it would be great if SSP and LPC could pursue some joint programming (perhaps a preconference one year?) in order to provide more opportunities for members to be in dialogue with one another.

Elliott Hibbler, Boston College Libraries

As a three-time attendee of the annual meeting, I have come to expect a lot packed into a short time, and SSP delivered again. The most striking aspect for me was the shift in tenor on Generative AI, where in the balance between threat and opportunity, the fulcrum has shifted noticeably towards opportunity. Previously, there was more emphasis on the threat of Generative AI when it came to falsifying research, paper mills, and a general threat to the scholarly record. While that threat is ongoing (with people working hard to combat it), copyright and the use of content without permission or compensation for Generative AI training and applications has moved to the forefront. But, there was much more optimism about AI, the ways it could be used to improve publishing processes, and what publishers can create with it using their own content. I’ll be curious to compare the GenAI vibe with library conferences over the next few months.

The other very pleasant surprise was the Volunteer Breakfast. I could not believe how many people came out to see each other on an early Friday morning on the last day of a conference! It really demonstrated how excited people were to be together and to be a part of the SSP community, which is the kind of spirit scholarly publishing is going to need with the challenges ahead.

Rick Anderson, Brigham Young University

I was particularly impressed by David Schiffman, the opening keynote speaker, who was neither a publisher nor a librarian, but who shared what I thought were some striking insights about how to communicate scholarly and scientific information to the public. We often struggle with how to communicate specialist information to non-specialists, and sometimes dismiss such efforts as “dumbing down” the information. But Schiffman, a marine scientist specializing in sharks, shared some great examples of ways he has been able to affect and even shape public discourse on his topic not by artificially simplifying the issues but rather by being conscious of specialist vocabulary, by being sensitive to what topics will likely be most interesting to the most people, and by presenting his expertise in an engaging way.

Now, we have to acknowledge that as a shark scientist, Schiffman is operating from something of an advantage: lots of people find sharks interesting, and even those who don’t find them intrinsically interesting do find them scary, and this gives him a “hook” to work with that those of us working in less – shall we say – intrinsically engaging areas might not have. (I say this as a librarian.) But all of us are working in areas that have the potential to affect the lives of many, and all of us can find ways to share our work that are more engaging. I was particularly struck by his encouragement to communicate our love for our topics – to let people see our enthusiasm and be drawn in by it.

I came away from Schiffman’s talk with some specific ideas about things I can do differently in my work, my writing, and my speaking. I was very grateful for that.