Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting 2019: Conference report from LetPub

This past May the 41^st annual Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) meeting took place in sunny San Diego, CA, with the theme of this year’s meeting being “Shaping the New Status Quo: Global Perspectives in Scholarly Publishing.” The scholarly publishing industry has indeed been expanding and evolving across North American as well as parts of Asia, India, and the Global South as publishers and academic societies look for ways to expand their membership abroad and increase the number of high quality manuscript submissions from countries around the world.

A significant change to this year’s meeting was the effort to invite new voices into the ongoing scholarly publishing debate and conversations. SSP has striven over the past several years to include professionals from all backgrounds to help our industry become more inclusive and global. Many panels at this year’s meeting were diverse (including both male and female speakers as well as speakers from various countries around the world). A big focus was also on exploring how key stakeholders are preparing for changes brought on by Plan S and the open science movement.

A sampling of this year’s discussion panels were organized around the following key topics:

• Inviting New Voices: In keeping with the theme of global perspectives, sessions that centered on stakeholders who are not historically heard from during publishing conferences were presented.
• External Pressures on Publishing: Large changes are on the horizon for the business of scholarly publishing; sessions were designed to collaboratively evaluate possible solutions.
• Going to Market: The “market” for publishing continues to grow. How can we develop new products, reach new geographies, and find new ways to make research relevant to the world?
• Tools and Technology: An ecosystem that involves the entire world will always be powered by technology. Sessions focused on the latest developments in the tools and infrastructure underlying the sharing of scholarship.
• Publishing on a Smaller Scale: Large commercial publishers often dominate the news due to scale, but there are a myriad of other publishers helping bring critical new results and scholarship to the world. Sessions focused on operations and strategies at smaller publishers, non-profits, university presses, and societies.

LetPub’s 2019 session titled, “Exploring new journal communication formats: insight and experiences from the launch of new offerings” (presented as part of the Going to Market track) drew one of the largest crowds, with many questions posed about how journals, societies, and publishers can best make use of podcasts, video abstracts, and custom animations to grow their audience and author engagement and better share key scientific discoveries with diverse audiences. We look forward to helping key stakeholders across the scholarly publishing community better producing engaging multimodal content and welcome follow up questions from you!

Please contact us at [email protected] for more information.

About LetPub | www.letpub.com
LetPub, the flagship editorial brand of Accdon LLC, is the only author services company headquartered in the Boston area. LetPub helps authors from around the world publish and share their research. LetPub’s language and scientific editors are leaders in their fields, teach at top American universities, and hold industry-leading credentials such as the Board of Editors in the Life Sciences certification. LetPub editors specialize in biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, environmental sciences, geology, humanities, material science, mathematics, medicine, physics, social sciences, and more. LetPub provides expert English editing and research communication services as well as editorial support packages for journals, academic societies, and publishers. To find out more about our expert services and to get a quote visit www.letpub.com.