Inside SSP’s 2025 Annual Meeting: Chefs Reveal Their Game-Changing Insights You Never Saw Coming
SSP is important and is one voice among many. I feel lucky to be a part of this organization.
Alice Meadows
The SSP annual meeting was the first scholarly publishing conference I ever attended, and it remains my favorite. But this year there was some stiff competition, as I unexpectedly attended – and enjoyed – more conferences than usual (write-up on the EASE Conference from fellow Chefs Haseeb Irfanullah, Phill Jones, and me to follow).
Having said that, SSP certainly lived up to my (always high!) expectations. The highlight is, of course, connecting and reconnecting with friends and colleagues and I had some really valuable conversations – many of which, inevitably, circled back to the current political climate and what it means for our community and industry. I especially appreciated talking to several of this year’s Fellows, a smart, thoughtful, and well-informed group of early career professionals. Their thoughts on how SSP can – indeed must! – continue to live our values was particularly helpful. We’ve done a lot of work to embed DEIA in our organization but there’s still more to be done, and we need to make sure we demonstrate to the next generation of scholarly publishers that DEIA is genuinely part of our DNA. So another highlight was seeing my long-time mentee (and former SSP Fellow), Kasia Repeta, receive one of this year’s Emerging Leader Awards, in part for her work establishing and leading the SSP Accessibility Subcommittee.