Inside SSP’s 2025 Annual Meeting: Chefs Reveal Their Game-Changing Insights You Never Saw Coming
Beyond the sessions, the true spirit of the community was on display at the EPIC awards ceremony. It was such a delight to gather and celebrate not just individual achievements, but the passion and purpose driving our collective work. As Chair of the ORCID Board, I was especially proud to see the ORCID team honored with a Silver Award for ORCID’s Community Trust Network marketing collateral. And, of course, I’m looking forward to seeing my “pink carpet” photos!
Charlie Rapple
I loved having science communication front and center on the agenda and throughout the program. There were some valuable practical insights, and some thought-provoking (and fun) exploration of what good sci comm looks like, what it can achieve, why we do it, and how to do it in the prevailing climate (hat tip to David Shiffman). But it’s telling that an early question from a publisher in the audience was “how do we get institutions to do more of this?” People who work for publishers and institutions tend to be supportive and enthusiastic about sci comm on a personal level. But on an organizational level, it’s hard to get the resources (time + budget) to expand sci comms because it’s not really required or incentivized. It only happens when researchers are confident enough to do it themselves, AND when they have the circumstances/privilege/drive to do it all on their own time/dollar. But as was acknowledged again in this meeting, if we don’t do a better job of communicating science to broader stakeholders, we are creating a vacuum for misinformation – and we are now seeing the direct line from misinformation to defunding to the closure of institutions, societies, and publishers. If we want our sector to survive, we have to see the correlation here and make science communication a properly valued and resourced part of what we do.
