President's Column

By Ray Fastiggi, SSP President

Once again in 2008-2009 we find SSP flourishing. Thanks to everyone who made our recent Annual Meeting in Baltimore such a success. Over 600 attendees attended sessions covering every aspect of scholarly publishing. A number of bloggers followed and commented on the speakers’ remarks, and more than 1000 tweets were posted during the course of the meeting. For the first time, audience members were active participants in some sessions by texting “votes” to panelists who were able to post them in real time so the audience could see an aggregate of their responses instantly.

Over the course of the next year, we will move toward the completion of the strategic planning effort that Sue Kesner started in September 2007 and was continued by Past President October Ivins. Another objective for the coming year is to increase the use of evolving social networking tools. Over the last year, SSP’s presence in social networking venues has grown. We now have a presence on LinkedIn (an open group), with 576 members, and Facebook (a closed group), with only 30 members. I would encourage all members to join these two groups.

One of the reasons that SSP has become such a thriving organization has been our dedicated group of more than 110 volunteers who populate our committees. It was truly gratifying to see so many new members join our committees over the year.

One of the most popular features on the SSP website is The Scholarly Kitchen. Launched in mid-2008, we now have more than 850 subscribers to our RSS feeds and more than 350 members on our e-mail list. There has been major media coverage of the Kitchen, and it has driven much traffic to our website. Although some of the posts are specifically designed to be provocative by their nature, I want to remind all members that the posts are solely the opinions of the “chefs,” not SSP. As part of its mission to serve as a neutral forum for all perspectives, SSP does not take a pro-or-con position as an organization, which makes posts to the Kitchen (and their comments) even more provocative.

We are very excited by our new fall event, the IN Conference, to be held on September 22-23 at the Hotel Providence. This newly-titled meeting stands for the first letters of INteract, INnovate, and INspire. Participants will be organized into groups and, tapping into interactive technology, attendees will use a wiki to capture their discussion outcomes in order to create a “best practices” list during our final session.

Thank you for the opportunity to serve as your President for the coming year. I encourage you all to let me know your thoughts as to how SSP can be improved or strengthened. SSP will continue to be an energetic and exciting organization with your help and innovative ideas.