SSP 40th Annual Meeting Scholarly Publishing at the Crossroads: What’s working, what’s holding us back, where do we go from here?

As the Society for Scholarly Publishing celebrates its 40^th anniversary, the theme for the conference highlights the many crossroads within scholarly publishing, including past and future practices, changing revenue models, funding challenges, regulation changes, technological innovations, and reaching new markets while maintaining established ones.  These crossroads introduce new challenges as well as new opportunities for scholarly publishing and for the communities it serves and push us to keep up with the changing needs of researchers and academics who both generate and use the content.  As we look back, could we have predicted forty years ago where scholarly publishing would be today? How can we anticipate the needs for the future? What questions do we need to be asking—and answering—to move forward?

The annual meeting will be held in Chicago, a crossroad city itself, and we will explore which strengths to draw on from our past, what might be holding us back, and where to go to meet the needs of researchers and other important stakeholders. As publishers, librarians, vendors, and academics, we will discuss the challenges and opportunities that face us as an industry and how we can best continue to serve our mission of publishing and distributing quality scholarly content.

We encourage proposals from and for all types of stakeholders in scholarly communications. We invite content that fits into the following tracks, but also welcome creative, non-thematic submissions. We are especially interested in sessions that benefit attendees by providing case studies, tips on best practices, and thought-provoking ideas that cross subject areas and content formats.  

Proposed tracks:

• Funding and Revenue Sources (perspectives from funding sources/agencies, alternative revenue streams, monetization, funding challenges, open access models, sustainability)
• Practical Skills/Publishing 101 (skills-based instruction, management and leadership; topics can include advice on career development or content geared toward early-career professionals)
• Marketing and Sales (ways to increase visibility and usage, internationalization, product differentiation/enhancement, market expansion, analytics)
• Tools and Technology (breakthroughs and innovations, add-ons to content platforms for researchers and/or publishers, content management / workflow tools, data, development methodologies)
• Research and Scholarship (changing needs/practices for researchers, roundtables or panels of academics, collaboration, government mandates)
• Innovations and Challenges (new content models/delivery, end user customization, security, metrics, design, product development)