Cadmore media player playing video Get Involved! 2025 Committee Information Session
Video Player
Accessibility
Using forms mode, you can utilize keyboard shortcuts to make usability more efficient.
Space bar will play and pause the video. Pressing escape will close all displays and pressing it again will jump to the end of the player.
You can press A to open the Keyboard Shortcut Dialog which also provides an audio description of the player and all of its features.
Language
1x
Play Speed
Adjust Volume
Transcript
Search
Result Count
of
Click to jump to result
Search
Re-center
Segments
Result Count
of
Click to jump to result
Search
Name:
Get Involved! 2025 Committee Information Session
Description:
Get Involved! 2025 Committee Information Session
Thumbnail URL:
https://cadmoremediastorage.blob.core.windows.net/b4381241-1155-4921-9091-0570c500601e/thumbnails/b4381241-1155-4921-9091-0570c500601e.png
Duration:
T00H49M40S
Embed URL:
https://stream.cadmore.media/player/b4381241-1155-4921-9091-0570c500601e
Content URL:
https://cadmoreoriginalmedia.blob.core.windows.net/b4381241-1155-4921-9091-0570c500601e/GMT20250508-154944_Recording_gallery_2048x1152.mp4?sv=2019-02-02&sr=c&sig=ZGYURolhLTaX1GYI7y679RRkhXisSSXBsLzxX0C1ZuU%3D&st=2025-06-07T18%3A44%3A49Z&se=2025-06-07T20%3A49%3A49Z&sp=r
Upload Date:
2025-06-07T18:49:49.9757659Z
Transcript:
Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
Hi, everybody.
Welcome we're just going to give a couple of minutes for everyone to stream in and then I'll get started.
All right. I'm going to go ahead and start sharing my screen. Susan it says my screen sharing is paused. Can you guys see it. Oh there it goes. Everybody can see. Yep looks good. Excellent welcome.
So thank you for coming today. What we're going to do is just have a quick introduction to SSP. Then we're going to talk about how SSP works with our volunteers. And then I'm going to hand things over to our committee chairs who will tell you a little bit about their committee and what they're looking for. And then you'll have some time at the end to get to interact with the committee chairs, ask them any questions, and then we will come back together.
And I'll talk a little bit about how you can apply for our committees. So now I'd like to hand it off to Melanie, who is our executive director. And she'll tell you a little bit more about SSP. Great thanks, Jackie. For those of you who are new to SSP, or maybe you just need a refresher, I'm going to share a little bit about who we are.
SSP was founded in 1978 as a nonprofit organization that brings together professionals from literally every corner of scholarly publishing. Our mission is to foster communication, collaboration, and innovation within our industry. And our members include publishers, librarians, editors, service providers, and technologists from organizations of all sizes and sectors. We connect through our annual meeting, our webinars, our regional events, and always with an eye on advancing scholarly communications.
Together, our work is grounded in five strategic goals. Embed data and everything that we do. Support professionals at every career stage. Engage globally with the scholarly communications industry. Develop new content and services and ensure long term financial sustainability for the organization. And we live these goals through our core values, which are community, inclusivity, adaptability and integrity.
And all of this is made possible through the work of the board of directors, the committees, the task forces. And of course, our dedicated staff. And now I'd like to introduce President-elect Rebecca McLeod, who will share more about the benefits of getting involved. Thanks, Melanie. At the heart of SSPs work is a vibrant, dedicated volunteer community.
Over 300 active members contribute their time and talents to keep our programs running strong. Our volunteers serve on committees and task forces, kitchen, lead mentorship and fellowship programs, and develop educational content events like this one. Each SSP committee supports a specific strategic goals, and the board collaborates closely with them to make sure we're moving the organization forward in meaningful ways.
Whether you're interested in event planning, mentorship, education, data, or professional development, there's likely a place where your skills and passion can make a real impact. So here's some benefits of getting involved. Volunteering with SSP is not just about giving back, it's also about growing. When you get involved, you can expand your professional network, build leadership skills, increase your visibility in the industry.
And here's a couple of things that some members have said about volunteering. SSP helped me build bridges between early career and senior professionals. I saw a need in the organization that matched my skills and I've made friends while doing it. I benefited from mentorship and events and webinars, so I love reinvesting my time through volunteering now. Personally, I found SSP to be a source of inspiration, connection, and growth.
I've had the chance to work alongside amazing professionals and even when my ideas don't always land, I felt respected and heard. That's the kind of space SSP fosters. So how can you jump in. Here are a few ways. We have a communities of interest that are subject based groups open to all members.
We have regional groups that are location specific meetups and events that help foster local community. Now, if your area doesn't have one, you might be able to launch one, or you probably should launch one. Communities and task force are the engines of SSPs work, and a few examples include the annual meeting program committee, the career development and early career subcommittee, the Education Committee, the diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility committee, marketing and communications committee, and many more.
Each group plays a role in shaping SSPs future, and we need voices like yours to help lead that effort. Now, I'll hand it back to Jackie, who's going to begin our committee introductions. Thank you so much, Rebecca and Melanie. I really appreciate it. First, we're going to kick off with the annual meeting program committee.
And then each committee will have about three to four minutes to talk about it. And if you want, you can throw some questions in the chat. They may not get to them, but also feel free to hang around and ask those questions in the breakout rooms. So if we can get started, let's start with the annual meeting program committee. Thanks, Jackie.
Hi, everybody. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Erin Foley, and I'm one of the three co-chairs of the 2025 SSP annual meeting program committee, along with my colleagues Greg Fagin and Jesse Slater, who are also on the call today. So feel free to ask all of us questions throughout. And in the breakout rooms just a little bit about the annual meeting program committee.
We are the largest standing SSP committee, and we think that we're one of the most fun because we give members a chance to have a voice and a direct hand in planning and executing the annual meeting. And it's also an excellent opportunity for networking, upskilling, cross scaling and adding to your individual personal brand. A little bit about the size of our committee. Our committee has a full roster annually of around 30 to 40 volunteers.
It kind of depends on the year. And we typically also, in addition to being part of the broader committee, we typically have several subcommittees or working groups that we spin up depending on the needs identified during the initial planning phases of the annual meeting in August and September. So in past years, examples of working groups that we run have been subcommittees dedicated to determining the keynote theme and the speaker poster sessions, virtual experience preview sessions, et cetera.
So any of the especially the plenary sessions, if you've been to the annual meeting or watched a recording of the annual meeting, many of those sessions require spun up subgroups. And that's what we'll do in terms of our general tasks and projects. As you could probably imagine. From our name, we select the overall meeting theme. We determine topics, source speakers, and source moderators for the keynote, plenary, and concurrent educational sessions.
We run the previews and the poster sessions. We guide best practices and expectations around the annual meeting itself, and we work with the SSP board staff and other SSP committees to plan the schedule and promote the annual meeting. So in thinking about expectations around membership of the AmpC, which is what I'll call it. The rest of the time, because it's a long name. Generally speaking, we meet one to three times a month, and that really depends on whether you're only able to come to the general committee meetings, or whether you want to participate in one or more of the subcommittees that we will spin up.
And the workload is generally low to moderate depending on the time of the year. So the beginning of our year is really basically as soon as the annual meeting is over. So in June, the co-chairs have a lot of work to do. And then we usually spin up our first committee meeting in August or September and then August through maybe November or early December is the busiest part of the year because all the planning starts happening.
Then the educational sessions are submitted, they come in, we review them, et cetera. So that's a heavier time. But as we go into the spring, we will have, sort of peaks and valleys throughout our workload. So it just depends on the time of year. All of our AmpC members are engaged and super passionate members of the scholarly communications industry, dedicated to making the annual meeting an informative and successful event for all the attendees.
And they could be anywhere from senior high, higher end of the career to early career. We invite everybody, but we expect that they'll be present and engaged on all the committee calls every month. Participate in brainstorming and creativity related to the theme of the sessions, and speakers work independently on assigned tasks like session shepherding and take on extra tasks as their general workload and their interest allows.
So really, our fundamental purpose is planning and delivering a compelling program for the annual meeting and helping SSP engaging the global communications industry, making SSP a home for scholarly communications professionals at every career stage and embedding diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in everything that we do. And our work is very closely aligned to aligned to the SSP core values in the street and the strategic goals that you guys saw earlier.
So with that, I think I'm going to pause because I might be running down the clock, Jackie. But we're all three of us are here and we're happy to answer your questions, both on this meeting and at the meeting, the annual meeting and online if you need. Yeah, you nailed it. It was like three minutes and 58 seconds. Perfect so let's move on and let's speak to the audit committee.
Hi, everybody. I'm Michelle Fitzpatrick along with Jason Lindley. I'm one of the two co-chairs of the audit committee, which is decidedly smaller and more quiet than the MPC, but hopefully also just as important and surprisingly, a lot of fun. So as its name suggests, the audit committee is really responsible for the audit process and liaising with the board of directors about the audit and any findings.
So, as some of in 2020, SSP launched the generations fund, and that led to a change in the overall audit process to comply with fundraising guidelines. We replaced a three year audit cycle with an annual cycle. And so the audit committee oversees that. We have an annual audit that the committee reviews and passes along to the board and deals with any questions or concerns that might have been raised. We've also in the past done kind of special projects, such as developing an investigation procedure, and so there might be things like that in the future as well.
But overall, it's one of the quieter kind of behind the scenes committees like pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, but it is a lot of fun and really great people on it. So if anybody has any questions, I am happy to answer them. And with that, I will see a whole bunch of time. Back to other folks. Thank you. OK, let's hear from the Career Development committee.
Thanks, Jackie. So for those of you who don't know me, my name is Julie Nash and I'm VP of business growth and development at Wiley. And I'm here to talk today about the career development committee. I'm also one of three chairs and I'm representing our group here today. So Tricia Miller and Sean Pidgeon are the other two co folks on co-chairs on the committee with me.
So we also think we're quite a fun group of folks. And we have a lot of diverse and interesting projects that we work on. So overall, the career development committee plans and manages professional development activities, including the mentorship program, professional profiles, and student and early career fellowship program. Our current roster has about 25 to 30 volunteers, so we're a pretty big group and most of our work gets done on the working group level.
So we do have a monthly meeting. That meeting tends to be mostly updates from the various working groups. So that's about an hour commitment a month for that meeting. Often we run shorter than that, but the working groups themselves are where a lot of the work gets done. And this year, probably each year, we target to recruit an additional 5 to 10 members.
And really a lot of those projects tend to fall on of the fellowship work, the mentorship work that we do along with professional profiles. We also are enhancing and working on the professional skills survey and map. And then we also introduce services around career coaching, around job descriptions as well as resume review. And we've also been working on internship opportunities in collaboration with the DEI committee.
So those are different projects that we have. As some of the ones that you may know well are the fellowship programs we have. That's what Aaron described. It's a little bit of an ebb and flow. It's quiet for the beginning part. And then when it becomes application time, there's a lot of efforts that sort of small team, that small working group does.
So that's a very busy, busy group. And then they also then are managing Tricia's working closely with that and manages that program as it moves along. Sean is really key on our mentorship program and the mentorship matching. So that also is one that tends to have a lot of activity and then quiets down a little bit. Sanjay on our team is doing a lot of the professional profiles, those you'll see on the website and we're recruiting different people for those.
Kate and Kate on our team are working on the professional skills map work, as well as the job descriptions project. And that's something that we just met about recently this week, just to talk about the next steps on that. We'll certainly be looking for volunteers to help with that going forward. And so just as far as expectations, as I mentioned, there's a monthly meeting.
But then the expectation is that everybody on our committee is assigned to a working group. So everyone is doing some sort of side project on that. I think time commitment, it really can be a very, very light time commitment. And then sometimes in these busier times with some of these projects, there's a little bit more to do. So as the other said, I'm going to be on for the duration of the call.
Happy to answer any questions. Also will be at the annual meeting this year and happy to answer questions there. You also can find me online and you can reach out to me or Sean or Tricia and happy to. Happy to talk about the committee. So thank you. Excellent. Thank you Julie.
Now we'll hear from the early career subcommittee. Yeah thanks, Jackie. Hi, everyone. My name is Anna Volpe. I'm a co-chair of the early career subcommittee and associate publisher at Wiley. And my fellow co-chair, Kate is here as well. Hello yeah. So let's talk a bit about the early career subcommittee.
So the purpose of the iscs is to engage with and serve early career professionals in the scholarly communication industry. We provide educational resources to help them develop their careers, including the early career Chiu newsletter, which is posted on LinkedIn. We do early career professional profiles. The early career development podcast and webinars with topics that are relevant to early career professionals, and more so if you join our committee, you'll have a chance to contribute to these valuable resources and Polish up on a lot of your skills, such as writing, project management, things like that.
We have an hour long monthly meeting where we discuss the progress for each of our project teams and provide support to our volunteers. The SCS also aims to help early career professionals expand their networks and build a foundation for Career Success through increased presence and participation in SSP and other industry groups and events. We facilitate opportunities for networking such as with the early career professionals community of interest network, which is one of the subject focus groups that Rebecca mentioned earlier.
That's open to all members as well as non SSP members. This group offers a dedicated space for individuals who are new to the publishing field to network, learn and grow. At our monthly meetings, I'll pass along to Kate to speak a bit more. Great, thanks. So yeah, so a few other things that our committee does is we collaborate with other SSP volunteer groups, such as our parent committee, the career development committee, who you just heard from, also the annual meeting committee.
So sometimes we have a session at the annual meeting, which is really exciting. So if you're on that project team, you'll be able to work on that. Also, the community engagement committee, like Anna mentioned, we run one of the coin groups for early career professionals, also the DEIA committee and the scholarly kitchen group. So our internal SSP liaisons, and we also have external liaisons that work with other organizations outside of SSP.
So both of those types of liaisons are really valuable to our work. So it allows us to stay connected both internally and with the larger field. So we are a very friendly group. We're looking for volunteers who are passionate about engaging with and supporting early career professionals in the scholarly publication industry. Ideally and you have one to two hours a month to focus on the committee.
It's set up really similarly to the career development committee, where we have one large meeting every month, usually 45 minutes to an hour, where we bring everybody together and talk about updates that have been going on with the different project teams. And then separately, the different project teams will meet or work on their projects throughout the month as well. So we are looking for professionals in any stage of your career.
So not just early career professionals and not just those who are more senior. We have a really good mix right now and definitely we're open to the more the merrier because we have a lot of really cool projects going on. So yeah, that's a little bit about us and we'll both be sticking around after as well. If you have any questions and want to chat. Thank you guys.
That was wonderful. All right. Next, let's hear from the community engagement committee. Sorry that's a subcommittee. It should just be committee. Thanks, Jackie. Hi, everybody. My name is Ryan Rae. I'm the senior digital publishing strategist at the American Academy of Pediatrics.
That's my day job. But for SSP, I'm one of three co-chairs on the Keq or the community engagement committee. So we're a group of passionate volunteers with a global roster from across the scholarly communications world. And as was mentioned up at the top of this presentation, we are divided into various regional and topic based subgroups. We have a bunch of regional groups across the US, including but not limited to Washington DC, New York City, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia.
We also have a group based in the UK. We're looking to expand our shores. So if you are a publishing professional and are interested in exploring a more of a community in your area, I'm sure there is one. Please feel free to chime in and we will be happy to speak with you. And then the flip side of that is also our topic based groups or our communities of interest networks, our coins.
We have a few to mention here. We have one that's focused on the humanities and social sciences. We also have one from our early career folks. We have an AI based coin coin group. Interested in talking about AI and issues surrounding that. And we also have a mental health coin group that discusses mental health issues and looking at developing resources and that kind of thing.
So if you're interested in participating in any of those topic based subgroups, we would be happy to have volunteers from that group. Or if you have another topic based subgroup that you would like to bring up and lead, we welcome that as well. Community is all part of what SSP is all about. We're happy to bring on more volunteers. We're also happy to increase the Dia aspects of SSP.
Again, all of SSP activities are kind of community led and community driven. And that starts with you. And we welcome diverse perspectives from any angle that you can think of. Yeah, I think that about wraps it up. We have about we have a monthly meeting where we talk about the various things that are going on, various things that we want to develop, how we increase community engagement across the board.
And then the various subgroups meet at their own discretion. We have a lot of active subgroups. So yeah. Thank you. Thanks, Ryan. All right. Let's hear now from the diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility committee. All right.
Thank you Jackie. I'm Allison Liang. I'm one of the outgoing co-chairs for the AIA. And I'm joined today by Stefan Camille, who are two of our continuing co-chairs for the committee. And just to say a little bit about what we do can see the mission up here, but our mission is to raise awareness and promote advancements in DEI issues.
We help to provide direction to SSP volunteers and members that they can apply to their own work. And we also help to champion inclusive practices within SSP and also the broader publishing community. Many of the projects that we work on come from ideas that our committee members have, based on the needs that they see within their own workplaces, or that they might be observing within SSP or the broader industry.
And we achieve our goals in a lot of different ways. We do things like writing scholarly kitchen blog posts, we organize quarterly C4 webinars, we participate in the journals Academy and develop different kinds of resources such as C4 toolkits, and most recently have been working on a toolkit to support the reduction of bias in peer review. And then we will always have a lot going on. But a couple of the highlights that we have coming up.
We've been as early as the career development committee mentioned, we're developing resources to help prepare students and early career professionals for internships. We just recently completed an audit of the SSP web pages to look at accessibility improvements, and that will be ongoing for the next couple of months. We are also liaising with the mental Health Task force to develop some upcoming webinars.
And like a lot of the other committees, the bulk of our work is done by subcommittees or working groups within our committee. And each of those are co led by volunteers within our committee. We also have a liaison that is on every SSP committee. And you might have heard that other committees are mentioning work they've done with our group. A part of that is done through our Liaison Program. Those liaisons help to provide feedback and consultation on different initiatives, and help to make all of SSP efforts more inclusive and accessible.
And one of the reasons why it could be really good, if you're looking to volunteer, is that if you're interested in getting exposed to multiple committees, being a liaison on the committee can help you be able to participate in other committees, which I think is really great. And beyond that, there's tons of opportunities to contribute. Whether you want to lead a project or just contribute to something or serve as a liaison.
I want to emphasize that you don't need to be an expert in Dia, or even in a formal Dia role within your organization. We are looking for people that are passionate and who want to move the needle in Dia and are willing to engage to advance the work. And really, one of the best parts of the committee is that we're learning from each other. It's very community oriented, and we love when people bring their ideas to our conversations, and it helps us to learn more.
We take it back to our organizations in terms of time commitment. We meet as a whole committee once a month for an hour, and then the subcommittees usually meet once a month, but sometimes they meet every other month, just kind of depending on what work they have going on. And there may be additional offline work if you're contributing to a project that kind of varies based on how much you are doing or how big that project is.
And we will also be in the breakouts, so we look forward to welcoming new members to the committee. And if you have any questions, find me, Camille and Steph in the breakout. Thank you. Awesome thank you. Let's hear from the Education Committee. Hi, everyone. I'm David Myers, a senior lead publisher at Wolters Kluwer.
I'm co-chair of the Education Committee, along with Sophie rice from Mary Ann Lebert. We are divided into two subcommittees. Each subcommittee will have its own subcommittee chair, and then people on the overall Education Committee can choose which one they want to be on. One is the webinars. We're the ones who put on the three or four webinars that SSP holds per year, excluding the scholarly kitchen webinars.
And then the other half is the new directions team that plans out the program for the annual fall new directions seminar. We meet as a team once a month for about a half hour usually. And then each subcommittee would meet for once a month, probably for about an hour with the way they would break it, both of them out is that individual members of the subcommittees can choose which session or webinar they want to work on, and then they will be responsible for developing that.
The entire team, webinar team and new directions team come up with a list of ideas, and then the individual sessions are doled out. So the people working on them, it's usually two. So we usually have a pair. They will be responsible for soliciting the speakers, making sure that all the logistics are handled, getting the information to SSP for promotion. So not, again, a huge time commitment.
Basically a lot of brainstorming. And then you would be working on your one program during the year. And once that's over, that's the end of that particular commitment. And then just continue to contribute to the overall efforts of each subcommittee during the year. So looking for really anybody, any level of experience. Just looking for people to bring their ideas and people who are fine, going out and trying to do a little bit of cold calling to get some speakers to present.
Excellent. Thank you David. OK let's hear from the Finance Committee. Hi, I'm Emily delce. I'm the treasurer for the SSP and also the co-chair for the Finance Committee with Henry Spielberg, who will join us as well. So the Finance Committee is a little bit different from the other committees in that it's very much an Oversight Committee.
We're responsible for looking after the budget and the financial operations of SSP. Every month, the SSP staff puts together a financial reports, and our responsibility is to look through these reports and make sure that everything looks and feels right. And we also advise Melanie and the team on longer term issues around how to invest our reserve, or how to look at our financial advisor.
And the bulk of the activities for this group is really around the budget. So Melanie and her team will prepare the budget annually. And in the fourth quarter of the year, we'll go over the details of that budget and make a recommendation for that budget to for the board to approve. And I'll pass it over to Henry to highlight how the committee works in function.
Great thanks very much, Emily, and really nice to see everybody here. So yeah, as highlighted really, this is an Oversight Committee. And the key thing for anyone who's interested or potentially interested in joining is to reassure you that you don't need a financial background. You don't have to be an expert with numbers, with finances. But what is helpful is if you have a curiosity and certainly a desire to be supportive to SSP, because of course, being financially sound and stable is really important and underpins all of the activities of the society.
So in fact, having that sort of positive approach towards wanting to contribute in that way is really helpful. It's useful to have a little bit of an eye for detail. As Emily said, we do scrutinize the monthly accounts. So of course, if there's anything in there that needs to be questioned or just curiosity about that, then it's very helpful to raise that. But you don't have to have a finance background. And in fact, we have a very diverse membership of the committee from a wide range of different organizations and also people at different career stages.
So one of the things I've enjoyed as being a member is the chance to interact with a wide selection of people from across SSP over the years that I've been involved in terms of commitment. Yeah, it's an hourly meeting typically every month. As Emily said, it tends to be busier in the final months of the year when we're scrutinizing the budgets and so on and getting the numbers ready for approval.
And we do have occasional subgroups that there aren't any permanent subcommittees or working groups within finance, but occasionally there may be a specific topic area that a smaller group will work on. So as an example, a couple of years ago, we were having a look at the investment strategy for SSP and working with our fund managers and really just checking that our strategy was in line with other non-profits.
So there was a smaller group that worked on that. So that was a little bit of extra time, but not a huge time commitment. So generally it's a really fun committee to be a part of. It's very encouraging. You really do feel that you're seeing into the inner workings of SSP and what makes it tick. There is also some occasional working with some of the other committees.
So for example, membership committee on things like setting membership dues and so on. So there are those opportunities to work across as well. But yeah, we'll Emily and I will both be in the breakout after this and would welcome any interest or any questions that you might have about our committee. Fantastic Thank you both. OK, now let's hear from the marketing and communications committee.
All right. Hello my name is Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen. I'm one of the co-chairs of the Marcom committee, along with Michael caspe, who's also on the call today as well as John Linton. So the marketing and communications committee, Marcom, we coordinate and conduct a whole variety of marketing outreach for SSP activities, including the annual meeting, other virtual and in person events, and a whole range of other things.
We have about 30 members. We'd love to welcome about 5 to 10 new members this year with the committee. Within the committee are a variety of working groups, so much like a lot of the other committees. We meet once a month with the larger group, and then a lot of the work actually happens within the working groups that meet in between those meetings.
Those working groups include the remember newsletter, content marketing, the website analytics, and our various committee liaisons. So like the Dea committee, we have a Marcom liaison on most of the other committees. So it's a nice way to experience two committees at once, if that's something if you're torn between two, it's a good way to get a bit of the best of both. So yeah, work is pretty spread out over the course of the year.
People raise their hand for volunteer projects based on their availability. So it can be a bit of a choose your own adventure. You don't need to be a marketing professional. Like with finance, it's just anyone who's interested in communicating scholarly Publishing Resources and initiatives and promoting SSP is more than welcome on the committee. So some of the activities we do are we provide marketing support for the other committees and supporting the various initiatives that they're doing, website improvements, including a big project that's been ongoing around accessibility and updating other kind of content on the website, and then a variety of communications and content marketing including social graphics, webinar previews, recaps, news pieces, ask the community posts.
It really covers a wide range. More and more, we've been doing media sheets for big things like the annual meeting, et cetera that just put together a whole variety of templates so that others can be equipped to go do the promotion on our behalf as well. And so, yeah, volunteers contribute in a whole variety of ways. So this could look like, participating in a working group, writing a blog, working in Canva to do some graphic design for social things, contributing industry headlines for the remember newsletter, or working with the website committee on looking at accessibility improvements.
And we might have to have a fun off with some of these other committees, because I also think Marcom is a pretty fun committee. I'm not sure what that would look like, but I'm willing to brainstorm that. And I work in marketing, so I'm going to work in an endorsement. So recently as part of the Get involved push and all the volunteer stuff, one of our current committee members, Laura Simms, said on LinkedIn, when I joined the Marcom committee, no one told me the gig was going to be so fun.
It's been so fun to lend some creative energy to promoting SSP events and community building initiatives, and I've enjoyed learning from talented folks across the scholarly publishing industry, so we welcome anyone we'd love to chat more in the breakout room, so let us know if you have questions. What a fantastic testimonial. That's awesome.
All right, let's hear from the membership committee. Yeah and that's a tough act to follow Stephanie. So I'll try my best. But I'm Beth Cronin and I recently transitioned over to the American Physical Society, serving as the director of editorial operations. In my day job is the membership committee co-chair along with Sharon Booker, who's also on this call. We have served in this role for the last three years, and this committee really is to focus on monitoring SSPs membership health, promoting and developing new memberships within the organization, and advising the board of directors on matters concerning to benefits for all classes of membership.
And that includes both individual members from early career to retired members as well as our organizational members. In the past year, we helped to launch a revised organizational membership model with additional middle tier. And that's really to meet the needs of organizations wanting to increase their participation in SSP. Ultimately, this revised model was introduced just the beginning of during this year and introduced additional benefits within each of the three organizational tiers.
So if you have any interest in learning more about organizational membership. Definitely please feel free to reach out to us or members of our committee as well too. So making a plug there. Ultimately, all of this recent work really underscores the commitment to optimizing membership engagement and participation, as well as maintaining the financial health of SSP.
And at the end of the day, membership is the lifeblood of the organization. In terms of how we're structured and the work that we do, essentially our committee does meet on a monthly basis. And with that, we do also very similar to the career development committee, also have a subcommittee structure that we work within. We introduced this a couple years ago, and it's a great way to engage members and really empower the members of our committee to be to do the work, essentially.
So we focus on recruiting, new member engagement, general outreach and strategy. So membership strategy and from a project perspective, what that looks like is we do everything from executing the membership survey on a biannual basis. The committee will be undertaking this next year. Again, general prospecting in terms of the various membership aspect of things, new member recruitment as well.
And then also you'll see us very active at the upcoming annual meeting as we coordinate a number of member events at the annual conference, we're hosting a newly meet up item on Tuesday afternoon for those that get into Baltimore early before the conference kicks off. Off and then also you'll see us at the SSP booth. We do man that throughout the conference. And hopefully some of our other committee chairs will be able to join us through that process.
And then also you'll see us in attendance in managing the new member breakfast and engaging with folks throughout. So a number of events and activities that are happening and again, looking forward to engaging with folks there. Ultimately, again, membership for those of us that work in societies or those that don't, membership is also just a way to engage.
It's really important from our perspective and making sure that we engage all facets of our membership. So ultimately, we're not just looking for, people who have experience in this space and everyone we want represented and have a voice in terms of the membership committee. So I ultimately, our goal is really to make a home for scholarly communications professionals at every career stage, every aspect of our industry.
Ensuring, obviously, SSPs continued financial success. That's a really important aspect. But then also in making sure that we take a step back and think about engaging from a global scholarly communication community perspective. We also engage with again other committees, as Stephanie mentioned. Liaison we work closely with Markham, who's also really helped us through that revised model launch.
The committee also has a liaison who serves on our committee and also looking to for the future, also engage across other committees as well too. So with that, again, we typically bring on about 5 to 10 new volunteers on a yearly basis. We have a number of folks that have been on the Committee for a number of years. So again, we love the long tenured, we love New blood. And hopefully, if you have any questions.
Sharon and I are here to answer them. Wonderful Thank you. Now we'll hear from the scholarly kitchen cabinet. Thanks, Jackie. Hi, everyone. I'm Diandra Roberts, a Dea associate editor for the scholarly kitchen. TSK I'm standing in for the kitchen cabinet co-chairs Alice Meadows and Randall Walker.
So the kitchen cabinet is the governing body for the kitchen. Its responsibilities include settling governance issues, appointing the editor, reporting on ESG metrics and development to the board's board of directors, and making recommendations to the SSP committee regarding new opportunities for TSK. So the scholarly kitchen itself strives to be a voice within the scholarly communications industry, responding to current events and developments within the industry, as well as broadening the perspectives and experiences within the scholarly publishing community.
So joining the kitchen cabinet will help us grow our understanding of the value of the scholarly kitchen, and set its goals for future improvement. The membership is made up of the kitchen cabinet co-chairs, the SSP president, President-elect, board liaison, editor. It seems really long, but it's great. We're a great group.
The deputy editor, da, associate editor, staff liaison, and 10 to 12 committee members. So not all committee members are chefs. And there's no requirement that you have to be a chef. There's also no requirement in terms of career stage, so we are open to all who are interested. We're also looking for about three to four members for the next 2025 2026 rotation. Time expectations are monthly meetings.
We meet the second Friday of the month for an hour, and meeting times rotate between 9:00 AM and 11:00 AM ET to account for the varying time zones. Again, we all discuss the best times for the meeting, so this could be subject to change. Whoever comes on board and we've changed them before. And during the meetings we discuss current and upcoming projects, ideas, updates from the kitchen cabinet members, and recommendations, to name a few things.
This year we developed guidance for anonymous posts, which includes information on how to submit a request and how anonymity is maintained throughout the process, as well as the recruitment of the deputy editor, which has now been announced this year from a task and finish group, which included members of the cabinet, and the shortlist was taken to the wider cabinet and then decisions made and additional projects include the ongoing outreach group so the scholarly kitchen outreach group, and work on infrastructure and discussions on policies and guidelines regarding AI.
So that's new discussions that we're having. So whoever would like to join us, that's something we'll be talking about as well if you have an interest in that. Yeah it's generally it's a great opportunity to see the processes behind the scholarly kitchen and gain an understanding of the governance within an area of SSP, and it's also a path into further governance and board experience.
If that's something you're interested in, kind of just want to dip a toe for now. And taking part in the cabinet will help increase the discoverability, readership and awareness of the scholarly kitchen and continue to bridge the gap of the needs and the voices of the scholarly publishing community. I'll be around for the breakout groups and happy to answer any questions.
Thanks awesome. Thank you. All right. And last but not least, let's hear from the training committee. Hi, everyone. This is Jeff Mahoney from the American Academy of Pediatrics. I'm one of the co-chairs of the training committee, along with my other co-chair, Janine McKenna.
We are one of the newest committees. We might still be the newest committee officially within SSP, and we're very much growing. I think one of the reasons why I can credit to growing is we always ask for this prime slot at the end of the list of committees. So everyone primed you up and now you can hear about the training committee. I'd also like to thank all the other speakers.
You did a great job keeping within that 3 to four minutes. I mean, I think I have more time than usual here and I won't abuse it. We focus on real practical training skills based content and turn it into things of value that people will pay for. So they're typically paid experiences. And there's three primary aspects or projects that we work on. One is the journals Academy, which is held in the second half of the year.
And we focus our committee efforts in the second half of the year for a three week session that builds knowledge bases on scholarly journals, on a variety of topics, giving a great overview for early to mid-career professionals. It's a workshop like overview. We end up with a certificate at the end. We're going to have our third journals Academy at the end of this year in November and December, and it's been a real popular and growing part of the SSP offerings.
Newly transitioned to our training committee is also the Leadership Academy, and that's going on right now. It will happen again next year. If you haven't already heard about the programming this year, and that's focused more on leadership skills and personal growth. Really exciting additions to the programming as well. So that's also great for early career and mid-career professionals.
And we also have year round we have training seminars on specific topics, things like open access or copyright. Again, we do want to focus on the training aspect to differentiate ourselves from other SSP programming, trying to give real, practical skills that are of value to the attendees and to the organizations that they work for, because the expectation is that these are paid webinars and that there will be value that comes out of it.
We do meet once a month. Very engaging group. Again it's been growing. So I think last year at this time, we had about 8 to 10 members. We're up to 18 and 20 with bringing in the Leadership Academy as well. We would love additional people who have the energy, kind of people who like to build products, build new ideas, and expand some relatively new offerings within SSP.
When you're on the group, you often are assigned as a shepherd, which is some SSP lingo where you and a co shepherd will help some of the content within the journals Academy or within the Leadership Academy or one of the training seminars. And that's a great way to bond with some members within the committee, outside of the monthly meetings. But it's a relatively light. We're starting to become pros at this.
We've got some good standard operating procedures for how to run these programs. So really, we just need your talents to communicate with the speakers to help be there on the days of the events. And it's really exciting. You get to learn alongside it too. I've learned a lot as part of the program, so we're looking for two to four new members to join our growing team and looking forward to talking with you more.
Wonderful Thanks, Jeff. So what we're going to do now is go into some breakout rooms. Give us a few minutes to get everyone settled. Our excuse me. All of the committee chairs will go into a breakout room labeled with their committee. Feel free to mingle. As attendees, you all should have the ability to go in and out of rooms as you please.
And I'd say we're doing great on time, so I'd say we'll do at least 15 minutes, and then I'll check in with everybody and see where they're at, and then we'll regroup. So I've opened the rooms and you should be able to join them.
Oh I see.
Segment:0 .
Hi, everybody.
Welcome we're just going to give a couple of minutes for everyone to stream in and then I'll get started.
All right. I'm going to go ahead and start sharing my screen. Susan it says my screen sharing is paused. Can you guys see it. Oh there it goes. Everybody can see. Yep looks good. Excellent welcome.
So thank you for coming today. What we're going to do is just have a quick introduction to SSP. Then we're going to talk about how SSP works with our volunteers. And then I'm going to hand things over to our committee chairs who will tell you a little bit about their committee and what they're looking for. And then you'll have some time at the end to get to interact with the committee chairs, ask them any questions, and then we will come back together.
And I'll talk a little bit about how you can apply for our committees. So now I'd like to hand it off to Melanie, who is our executive director. And she'll tell you a little bit more about SSP. Great thanks, Jackie. For those of you who are new to SSP, or maybe you just need a refresher, I'm going to share a little bit about who we are.
SSP was founded in 1978 as a nonprofit organization that brings together professionals from literally every corner of scholarly publishing. Our mission is to foster communication, collaboration, and innovation within our industry. And our members include publishers, librarians, editors, service providers, and technologists from organizations of all sizes and sectors. We connect through our annual meeting, our webinars, our regional events, and always with an eye on advancing scholarly communications.
Together, our work is grounded in five strategic goals. Embed data and everything that we do. Support professionals at every career stage. Engage globally with the scholarly communications industry. Develop new content and services and ensure long term financial sustainability for the organization. And we live these goals through our core values, which are community, inclusivity, adaptability and integrity.
And all of this is made possible through the work of the board of directors, the committees, the task forces. And of course, our dedicated staff. And now I'd like to introduce President-elect Rebecca McLeod, who will share more about the benefits of getting involved. Thanks, Melanie. At the heart of SSPs work is a vibrant, dedicated volunteer community.
Over 300 active members contribute their time and talents to keep our programs running strong. Our volunteers serve on committees and task forces, kitchen, lead mentorship and fellowship programs, and develop educational content events like this one. Each SSP committee supports a specific strategic goals, and the board collaborates closely with them to make sure we're moving the organization forward in meaningful ways.
Whether you're interested in event planning, mentorship, education, data, or professional development, there's likely a place where your skills and passion can make a real impact. So here's some benefits of getting involved. Volunteering with SSP is not just about giving back, it's also about growing. When you get involved, you can expand your professional network, build leadership skills, increase your visibility in the industry.
And here's a couple of things that some members have said about volunteering. SSP helped me build bridges between early career and senior professionals. I saw a need in the organization that matched my skills and I've made friends while doing it. I benefited from mentorship and events and webinars, so I love reinvesting my time through volunteering now. Personally, I found SSP to be a source of inspiration, connection, and growth.
I've had the chance to work alongside amazing professionals and even when my ideas don't always land, I felt respected and heard. That's the kind of space SSP fosters. So how can you jump in. Here are a few ways. We have a communities of interest that are subject based groups open to all members.
We have regional groups that are location specific meetups and events that help foster local community. Now, if your area doesn't have one, you might be able to launch one, or you probably should launch one. Communities and task force are the engines of SSPs work, and a few examples include the annual meeting program committee, the career development and early career subcommittee, the Education Committee, the diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility committee, marketing and communications committee, and many more.
Each group plays a role in shaping SSPs future, and we need voices like yours to help lead that effort. Now, I'll hand it back to Jackie, who's going to begin our committee introductions. Thank you so much, Rebecca and Melanie. I really appreciate it. First, we're going to kick off with the annual meeting program committee.
And then each committee will have about three to four minutes to talk about it. And if you want, you can throw some questions in the chat. They may not get to them, but also feel free to hang around and ask those questions in the breakout rooms. So if we can get started, let's start with the annual meeting program committee. Thanks, Jackie.
Hi, everybody. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Erin Foley, and I'm one of the three co-chairs of the 2025 SSP annual meeting program committee, along with my colleagues Greg Fagin and Jesse Slater, who are also on the call today. So feel free to ask all of us questions throughout. And in the breakout rooms just a little bit about the annual meeting program committee.
We are the largest standing SSP committee, and we think that we're one of the most fun because we give members a chance to have a voice and a direct hand in planning and executing the annual meeting. And it's also an excellent opportunity for networking, upskilling, cross scaling and adding to your individual personal brand. A little bit about the size of our committee. Our committee has a full roster annually of around 30 to 40 volunteers.
It kind of depends on the year. And we typically also, in addition to being part of the broader committee, we typically have several subcommittees or working groups that we spin up depending on the needs identified during the initial planning phases of the annual meeting in August and September. So in past years, examples of working groups that we run have been subcommittees dedicated to determining the keynote theme and the speaker poster sessions, virtual experience preview sessions, et cetera.
So any of the especially the plenary sessions, if you've been to the annual meeting or watched a recording of the annual meeting, many of those sessions require spun up subgroups. And that's what we'll do in terms of our general tasks and projects. As you could probably imagine. From our name, we select the overall meeting theme. We determine topics, source speakers, and source moderators for the keynote, plenary, and concurrent educational sessions.
We run the previews and the poster sessions. We guide best practices and expectations around the annual meeting itself, and we work with the SSP board staff and other SSP committees to plan the schedule and promote the annual meeting. So in thinking about expectations around membership of the AmpC, which is what I'll call it. The rest of the time, because it's a long name. Generally speaking, we meet one to three times a month, and that really depends on whether you're only able to come to the general committee meetings, or whether you want to participate in one or more of the subcommittees that we will spin up.
And the workload is generally low to moderate depending on the time of the year. So the beginning of our year is really basically as soon as the annual meeting is over. So in June, the co-chairs have a lot of work to do. And then we usually spin up our first committee meeting in August or September and then August through maybe November or early December is the busiest part of the year because all the planning starts happening.
Then the educational sessions are submitted, they come in, we review them, et cetera. So that's a heavier time. But as we go into the spring, we will have, sort of peaks and valleys throughout our workload. So it just depends on the time of year. All of our AmpC members are engaged and super passionate members of the scholarly communications industry, dedicated to making the annual meeting an informative and successful event for all the attendees.
And they could be anywhere from senior high, higher end of the career to early career. We invite everybody, but we expect that they'll be present and engaged on all the committee calls every month. Participate in brainstorming and creativity related to the theme of the sessions, and speakers work independently on assigned tasks like session shepherding and take on extra tasks as their general workload and their interest allows.
So really, our fundamental purpose is planning and delivering a compelling program for the annual meeting and helping SSP engaging the global communications industry, making SSP a home for scholarly communications professionals at every career stage and embedding diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in everything that we do. And our work is very closely aligned to aligned to the SSP core values in the street and the strategic goals that you guys saw earlier.
So with that, I think I'm going to pause because I might be running down the clock, Jackie. But we're all three of us are here and we're happy to answer your questions, both on this meeting and at the meeting, the annual meeting and online if you need. Yeah, you nailed it. It was like three minutes and 58 seconds. Perfect so let's move on and let's speak to the audit committee.
Hi, everybody. I'm Michelle Fitzpatrick along with Jason Lindley. I'm one of the two co-chairs of the audit committee, which is decidedly smaller and more quiet than the MPC, but hopefully also just as important and surprisingly, a lot of fun. So as its name suggests, the audit committee is really responsible for the audit process and liaising with the board of directors about the audit and any findings.
So, as some of in 2020, SSP launched the generations fund, and that led to a change in the overall audit process to comply with fundraising guidelines. We replaced a three year audit cycle with an annual cycle. And so the audit committee oversees that. We have an annual audit that the committee reviews and passes along to the board and deals with any questions or concerns that might have been raised. We've also in the past done kind of special projects, such as developing an investigation procedure, and so there might be things like that in the future as well.
But overall, it's one of the quieter kind of behind the scenes committees like pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, but it is a lot of fun and really great people on it. So if anybody has any questions, I am happy to answer them. And with that, I will see a whole bunch of time. Back to other folks. Thank you. OK, let's hear from the Career Development committee.
Thanks, Jackie. So for those of you who don't know me, my name is Julie Nash and I'm VP of business growth and development at Wiley. And I'm here to talk today about the career development committee. I'm also one of three chairs and I'm representing our group here today. So Tricia Miller and Sean Pidgeon are the other two co folks on co-chairs on the committee with me.
So we also think we're quite a fun group of folks. And we have a lot of diverse and interesting projects that we work on. So overall, the career development committee plans and manages professional development activities, including the mentorship program, professional profiles, and student and early career fellowship program. Our current roster has about 25 to 30 volunteers, so we're a pretty big group and most of our work gets done on the working group level.
So we do have a monthly meeting. That meeting tends to be mostly updates from the various working groups. So that's about an hour commitment a month for that meeting. Often we run shorter than that, but the working groups themselves are where a lot of the work gets done. And this year, probably each year, we target to recruit an additional 5 to 10 members.
And really a lot of those projects tend to fall on of the fellowship work, the mentorship work that we do along with professional profiles. We also are enhancing and working on the professional skills survey and map. And then we also introduce services around career coaching, around job descriptions as well as resume review. And we've also been working on internship opportunities in collaboration with the DEI committee.
So those are different projects that we have. As some of the ones that you may know well are the fellowship programs we have. That's what Aaron described. It's a little bit of an ebb and flow. It's quiet for the beginning part. And then when it becomes application time, there's a lot of efforts that sort of small team, that small working group does.
So that's a very busy, busy group. And then they also then are managing Tricia's working closely with that and manages that program as it moves along. Sean is really key on our mentorship program and the mentorship matching. So that also is one that tends to have a lot of activity and then quiets down a little bit. Sanjay on our team is doing a lot of the professional profiles, those you'll see on the website and we're recruiting different people for those.
Kate and Kate on our team are working on the professional skills map work, as well as the job descriptions project. And that's something that we just met about recently this week, just to talk about the next steps on that. We'll certainly be looking for volunteers to help with that going forward. And so just as far as expectations, as I mentioned, there's a monthly meeting.
But then the expectation is that everybody on our committee is assigned to a working group. So everyone is doing some sort of side project on that. I think time commitment, it really can be a very, very light time commitment. And then sometimes in these busier times with some of these projects, there's a little bit more to do. So as the other said, I'm going to be on for the duration of the call.
Happy to answer any questions. Also will be at the annual meeting this year and happy to answer questions there. You also can find me online and you can reach out to me or Sean or Tricia and happy to. Happy to talk about the committee. So thank you. Excellent. Thank you Julie.
Now we'll hear from the early career subcommittee. Yeah thanks, Jackie. Hi, everyone. My name is Anna Volpe. I'm a co-chair of the early career subcommittee and associate publisher at Wiley. And my fellow co-chair, Kate is here as well. Hello yeah. So let's talk a bit about the early career subcommittee.
So the purpose of the iscs is to engage with and serve early career professionals in the scholarly communication industry. We provide educational resources to help them develop their careers, including the early career Chiu newsletter, which is posted on LinkedIn. We do early career professional profiles. The early career development podcast and webinars with topics that are relevant to early career professionals, and more so if you join our committee, you'll have a chance to contribute to these valuable resources and Polish up on a lot of your skills, such as writing, project management, things like that.
We have an hour long monthly meeting where we discuss the progress for each of our project teams and provide support to our volunteers. The SCS also aims to help early career professionals expand their networks and build a foundation for Career Success through increased presence and participation in SSP and other industry groups and events. We facilitate opportunities for networking such as with the early career professionals community of interest network, which is one of the subject focus groups that Rebecca mentioned earlier.
That's open to all members as well as non SSP members. This group offers a dedicated space for individuals who are new to the publishing field to network, learn and grow. At our monthly meetings, I'll pass along to Kate to speak a bit more. Great, thanks. So yeah, so a few other things that our committee does is we collaborate with other SSP volunteer groups, such as our parent committee, the career development committee, who you just heard from, also the annual meeting committee.
So sometimes we have a session at the annual meeting, which is really exciting. So if you're on that project team, you'll be able to work on that. Also, the community engagement committee, like Anna mentioned, we run one of the coin groups for early career professionals, also the DEIA committee and the scholarly kitchen group. So our internal SSP liaisons, and we also have external liaisons that work with other organizations outside of SSP.
So both of those types of liaisons are really valuable to our work. So it allows us to stay connected both internally and with the larger field. So we are a very friendly group. We're looking for volunteers who are passionate about engaging with and supporting early career professionals in the scholarly publication industry. Ideally and you have one to two hours a month to focus on the committee.
It's set up really similarly to the career development committee, where we have one large meeting every month, usually 45 minutes to an hour, where we bring everybody together and talk about updates that have been going on with the different project teams. And then separately, the different project teams will meet or work on their projects throughout the month as well. So we are looking for professionals in any stage of your career.
So not just early career professionals and not just those who are more senior. We have a really good mix right now and definitely we're open to the more the merrier because we have a lot of really cool projects going on. So yeah, that's a little bit about us and we'll both be sticking around after as well. If you have any questions and want to chat. Thank you guys.
That was wonderful. All right. Next, let's hear from the community engagement committee. Sorry that's a subcommittee. It should just be committee. Thanks, Jackie. Hi, everybody. My name is Ryan Rae. I'm the senior digital publishing strategist at the American Academy of Pediatrics.
That's my day job. But for SSP, I'm one of three co-chairs on the Keq or the community engagement committee. So we're a group of passionate volunteers with a global roster from across the scholarly communications world. And as was mentioned up at the top of this presentation, we are divided into various regional and topic based subgroups. We have a bunch of regional groups across the US, including but not limited to Washington DC, New York City, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia.
We also have a group based in the UK. We're looking to expand our shores. So if you are a publishing professional and are interested in exploring a more of a community in your area, I'm sure there is one. Please feel free to chime in and we will be happy to speak with you. And then the flip side of that is also our topic based groups or our communities of interest networks, our coins.
We have a few to mention here. We have one that's focused on the humanities and social sciences. We also have one from our early career folks. We have an AI based coin coin group. Interested in talking about AI and issues surrounding that. And we also have a mental health coin group that discusses mental health issues and looking at developing resources and that kind of thing.
So if you're interested in participating in any of those topic based subgroups, we would be happy to have volunteers from that group. Or if you have another topic based subgroup that you would like to bring up and lead, we welcome that as well. Community is all part of what SSP is all about. We're happy to bring on more volunteers. We're also happy to increase the Dia aspects of SSP.
Again, all of SSP activities are kind of community led and community driven. And that starts with you. And we welcome diverse perspectives from any angle that you can think of. Yeah, I think that about wraps it up. We have about we have a monthly meeting where we talk about the various things that are going on, various things that we want to develop, how we increase community engagement across the board.
And then the various subgroups meet at their own discretion. We have a lot of active subgroups. So yeah. Thank you. Thanks, Ryan. All right. Let's hear now from the diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility committee. All right.
Thank you Jackie. I'm Allison Liang. I'm one of the outgoing co-chairs for the AIA. And I'm joined today by Stefan Camille, who are two of our continuing co-chairs for the committee. And just to say a little bit about what we do can see the mission up here, but our mission is to raise awareness and promote advancements in DEI issues.
We help to provide direction to SSP volunteers and members that they can apply to their own work. And we also help to champion inclusive practices within SSP and also the broader publishing community. Many of the projects that we work on come from ideas that our committee members have, based on the needs that they see within their own workplaces, or that they might be observing within SSP or the broader industry.
And we achieve our goals in a lot of different ways. We do things like writing scholarly kitchen blog posts, we organize quarterly C4 webinars, we participate in the journals Academy and develop different kinds of resources such as C4 toolkits, and most recently have been working on a toolkit to support the reduction of bias in peer review. And then we will always have a lot going on. But a couple of the highlights that we have coming up.
We've been as early as the career development committee mentioned, we're developing resources to help prepare students and early career professionals for internships. We just recently completed an audit of the SSP web pages to look at accessibility improvements, and that will be ongoing for the next couple of months. We are also liaising with the mental Health Task force to develop some upcoming webinars.
And like a lot of the other committees, the bulk of our work is done by subcommittees or working groups within our committee. And each of those are co led by volunteers within our committee. We also have a liaison that is on every SSP committee. And you might have heard that other committees are mentioning work they've done with our group. A part of that is done through our Liaison Program. Those liaisons help to provide feedback and consultation on different initiatives, and help to make all of SSP efforts more inclusive and accessible.
And one of the reasons why it could be really good, if you're looking to volunteer, is that if you're interested in getting exposed to multiple committees, being a liaison on the committee can help you be able to participate in other committees, which I think is really great. And beyond that, there's tons of opportunities to contribute. Whether you want to lead a project or just contribute to something or serve as a liaison.
I want to emphasize that you don't need to be an expert in Dia, or even in a formal Dia role within your organization. We are looking for people that are passionate and who want to move the needle in Dia and are willing to engage to advance the work. And really, one of the best parts of the committee is that we're learning from each other. It's very community oriented, and we love when people bring their ideas to our conversations, and it helps us to learn more.
We take it back to our organizations in terms of time commitment. We meet as a whole committee once a month for an hour, and then the subcommittees usually meet once a month, but sometimes they meet every other month, just kind of depending on what work they have going on. And there may be additional offline work if you're contributing to a project that kind of varies based on how much you are doing or how big that project is.
And we will also be in the breakouts, so we look forward to welcoming new members to the committee. And if you have any questions, find me, Camille and Steph in the breakout. Thank you. Awesome thank you. Let's hear from the Education Committee. Hi, everyone. I'm David Myers, a senior lead publisher at Wolters Kluwer.
I'm co-chair of the Education Committee, along with Sophie rice from Mary Ann Lebert. We are divided into two subcommittees. Each subcommittee will have its own subcommittee chair, and then people on the overall Education Committee can choose which one they want to be on. One is the webinars. We're the ones who put on the three or four webinars that SSP holds per year, excluding the scholarly kitchen webinars.
And then the other half is the new directions team that plans out the program for the annual fall new directions seminar. We meet as a team once a month for about a half hour usually. And then each subcommittee would meet for once a month, probably for about an hour with the way they would break it, both of them out is that individual members of the subcommittees can choose which session or webinar they want to work on, and then they will be responsible for developing that.
The entire team, webinar team and new directions team come up with a list of ideas, and then the individual sessions are doled out. So the people working on them, it's usually two. So we usually have a pair. They will be responsible for soliciting the speakers, making sure that all the logistics are handled, getting the information to SSP for promotion. So not, again, a huge time commitment.
Basically a lot of brainstorming. And then you would be working on your one program during the year. And once that's over, that's the end of that particular commitment. And then just continue to contribute to the overall efforts of each subcommittee during the year. So looking for really anybody, any level of experience. Just looking for people to bring their ideas and people who are fine, going out and trying to do a little bit of cold calling to get some speakers to present.
Excellent. Thank you David. OK let's hear from the Finance Committee. Hi, I'm Emily delce. I'm the treasurer for the SSP and also the co-chair for the Finance Committee with Henry Spielberg, who will join us as well. So the Finance Committee is a little bit different from the other committees in that it's very much an Oversight Committee.
We're responsible for looking after the budget and the financial operations of SSP. Every month, the SSP staff puts together a financial reports, and our responsibility is to look through these reports and make sure that everything looks and feels right. And we also advise Melanie and the team on longer term issues around how to invest our reserve, or how to look at our financial advisor.
And the bulk of the activities for this group is really around the budget. So Melanie and her team will prepare the budget annually. And in the fourth quarter of the year, we'll go over the details of that budget and make a recommendation for that budget to for the board to approve. And I'll pass it over to Henry to highlight how the committee works in function.
Great thanks very much, Emily, and really nice to see everybody here. So yeah, as highlighted really, this is an Oversight Committee. And the key thing for anyone who's interested or potentially interested in joining is to reassure you that you don't need a financial background. You don't have to be an expert with numbers, with finances. But what is helpful is if you have a curiosity and certainly a desire to be supportive to SSP, because of course, being financially sound and stable is really important and underpins all of the activities of the society.
So in fact, having that sort of positive approach towards wanting to contribute in that way is really helpful. It's useful to have a little bit of an eye for detail. As Emily said, we do scrutinize the monthly accounts. So of course, if there's anything in there that needs to be questioned or just curiosity about that, then it's very helpful to raise that. But you don't have to have a finance background. And in fact, we have a very diverse membership of the committee from a wide range of different organizations and also people at different career stages.
So one of the things I've enjoyed as being a member is the chance to interact with a wide selection of people from across SSP over the years that I've been involved in terms of commitment. Yeah, it's an hourly meeting typically every month. As Emily said, it tends to be busier in the final months of the year when we're scrutinizing the budgets and so on and getting the numbers ready for approval.
And we do have occasional subgroups that there aren't any permanent subcommittees or working groups within finance, but occasionally there may be a specific topic area that a smaller group will work on. So as an example, a couple of years ago, we were having a look at the investment strategy for SSP and working with our fund managers and really just checking that our strategy was in line with other non-profits.
So there was a smaller group that worked on that. So that was a little bit of extra time, but not a huge time commitment. So generally it's a really fun committee to be a part of. It's very encouraging. You really do feel that you're seeing into the inner workings of SSP and what makes it tick. There is also some occasional working with some of the other committees.
So for example, membership committee on things like setting membership dues and so on. So there are those opportunities to work across as well. But yeah, we'll Emily and I will both be in the breakout after this and would welcome any interest or any questions that you might have about our committee. Fantastic Thank you both. OK, now let's hear from the marketing and communications committee.
All right. Hello my name is Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen. I'm one of the co-chairs of the Marcom committee, along with Michael caspe, who's also on the call today as well as John Linton. So the marketing and communications committee, Marcom, we coordinate and conduct a whole variety of marketing outreach for SSP activities, including the annual meeting, other virtual and in person events, and a whole range of other things.
We have about 30 members. We'd love to welcome about 5 to 10 new members this year with the committee. Within the committee are a variety of working groups, so much like a lot of the other committees. We meet once a month with the larger group, and then a lot of the work actually happens within the working groups that meet in between those meetings.
Those working groups include the remember newsletter, content marketing, the website analytics, and our various committee liaisons. So like the Dea committee, we have a Marcom liaison on most of the other committees. So it's a nice way to experience two committees at once, if that's something if you're torn between two, it's a good way to get a bit of the best of both. So yeah, work is pretty spread out over the course of the year.
People raise their hand for volunteer projects based on their availability. So it can be a bit of a choose your own adventure. You don't need to be a marketing professional. Like with finance, it's just anyone who's interested in communicating scholarly Publishing Resources and initiatives and promoting SSP is more than welcome on the committee. So some of the activities we do are we provide marketing support for the other committees and supporting the various initiatives that they're doing, website improvements, including a big project that's been ongoing around accessibility and updating other kind of content on the website, and then a variety of communications and content marketing including social graphics, webinar previews, recaps, news pieces, ask the community posts.
It really covers a wide range. More and more, we've been doing media sheets for big things like the annual meeting, et cetera that just put together a whole variety of templates so that others can be equipped to go do the promotion on our behalf as well. And so, yeah, volunteers contribute in a whole variety of ways. So this could look like, participating in a working group, writing a blog, working in Canva to do some graphic design for social things, contributing industry headlines for the remember newsletter, or working with the website committee on looking at accessibility improvements.
And we might have to have a fun off with some of these other committees, because I also think Marcom is a pretty fun committee. I'm not sure what that would look like, but I'm willing to brainstorm that. And I work in marketing, so I'm going to work in an endorsement. So recently as part of the Get involved push and all the volunteer stuff, one of our current committee members, Laura Simms, said on LinkedIn, when I joined the Marcom committee, no one told me the gig was going to be so fun.
It's been so fun to lend some creative energy to promoting SSP events and community building initiatives, and I've enjoyed learning from talented folks across the scholarly publishing industry, so we welcome anyone we'd love to chat more in the breakout room, so let us know if you have questions. What a fantastic testimonial. That's awesome.
All right, let's hear from the membership committee. Yeah and that's a tough act to follow Stephanie. So I'll try my best. But I'm Beth Cronin and I recently transitioned over to the American Physical Society, serving as the director of editorial operations. In my day job is the membership committee co-chair along with Sharon Booker, who's also on this call. We have served in this role for the last three years, and this committee really is to focus on monitoring SSPs membership health, promoting and developing new memberships within the organization, and advising the board of directors on matters concerning to benefits for all classes of membership.
And that includes both individual members from early career to retired members as well as our organizational members. In the past year, we helped to launch a revised organizational membership model with additional middle tier. And that's really to meet the needs of organizations wanting to increase their participation in SSP. Ultimately, this revised model was introduced just the beginning of during this year and introduced additional benefits within each of the three organizational tiers.
So if you have any interest in learning more about organizational membership. Definitely please feel free to reach out to us or members of our committee as well too. So making a plug there. Ultimately, all of this recent work really underscores the commitment to optimizing membership engagement and participation, as well as maintaining the financial health of SSP.
And at the end of the day, membership is the lifeblood of the organization. In terms of how we're structured and the work that we do, essentially our committee does meet on a monthly basis. And with that, we do also very similar to the career development committee, also have a subcommittee structure that we work within. We introduced this a couple years ago, and it's a great way to engage members and really empower the members of our committee to be to do the work, essentially.
So we focus on recruiting, new member engagement, general outreach and strategy. So membership strategy and from a project perspective, what that looks like is we do everything from executing the membership survey on a biannual basis. The committee will be undertaking this next year. Again, general prospecting in terms of the various membership aspect of things, new member recruitment as well.
And then also you'll see us very active at the upcoming annual meeting as we coordinate a number of member events at the annual conference, we're hosting a newly meet up item on Tuesday afternoon for those that get into Baltimore early before the conference kicks off. Off and then also you'll see us at the SSP booth. We do man that throughout the conference. And hopefully some of our other committee chairs will be able to join us through that process.
And then also you'll see us in attendance in managing the new member breakfast and engaging with folks throughout. So a number of events and activities that are happening and again, looking forward to engaging with folks there. Ultimately, again, membership for those of us that work in societies or those that don't, membership is also just a way to engage.
It's really important from our perspective and making sure that we engage all facets of our membership. So ultimately, we're not just looking for, people who have experience in this space and everyone we want represented and have a voice in terms of the membership committee. So I ultimately, our goal is really to make a home for scholarly communications professionals at every career stage, every aspect of our industry.
Ensuring, obviously, SSPs continued financial success. That's a really important aspect. But then also in making sure that we take a step back and think about engaging from a global scholarly communication community perspective. We also engage with again other committees, as Stephanie mentioned. Liaison we work closely with Markham, who's also really helped us through that revised model launch.
The committee also has a liaison who serves on our committee and also looking to for the future, also engage across other committees as well too. So with that, again, we typically bring on about 5 to 10 new volunteers on a yearly basis. We have a number of folks that have been on the Committee for a number of years. So again, we love the long tenured, we love New blood. And hopefully, if you have any questions.
Sharon and I are here to answer them. Wonderful Thank you. Now we'll hear from the scholarly kitchen cabinet. Thanks, Jackie. Hi, everyone. I'm Diandra Roberts, a Dea associate editor for the scholarly kitchen. TSK I'm standing in for the kitchen cabinet co-chairs Alice Meadows and Randall Walker.
So the kitchen cabinet is the governing body for the kitchen. Its responsibilities include settling governance issues, appointing the editor, reporting on ESG metrics and development to the board's board of directors, and making recommendations to the SSP committee regarding new opportunities for TSK. So the scholarly kitchen itself strives to be a voice within the scholarly communications industry, responding to current events and developments within the industry, as well as broadening the perspectives and experiences within the scholarly publishing community.
So joining the kitchen cabinet will help us grow our understanding of the value of the scholarly kitchen, and set its goals for future improvement. The membership is made up of the kitchen cabinet co-chairs, the SSP president, President-elect, board liaison, editor. It seems really long, but it's great. We're a great group.
The deputy editor, da, associate editor, staff liaison, and 10 to 12 committee members. So not all committee members are chefs. And there's no requirement that you have to be a chef. There's also no requirement in terms of career stage, so we are open to all who are interested. We're also looking for about three to four members for the next 2025 2026 rotation. Time expectations are monthly meetings.
We meet the second Friday of the month for an hour, and meeting times rotate between 9:00 AM and 11:00 AM ET to account for the varying time zones. Again, we all discuss the best times for the meeting, so this could be subject to change. Whoever comes on board and we've changed them before. And during the meetings we discuss current and upcoming projects, ideas, updates from the kitchen cabinet members, and recommendations, to name a few things.
This year we developed guidance for anonymous posts, which includes information on how to submit a request and how anonymity is maintained throughout the process, as well as the recruitment of the deputy editor, which has now been announced this year from a task and finish group, which included members of the cabinet, and the shortlist was taken to the wider cabinet and then decisions made and additional projects include the ongoing outreach group so the scholarly kitchen outreach group, and work on infrastructure and discussions on policies and guidelines regarding AI.
So that's new discussions that we're having. So whoever would like to join us, that's something we'll be talking about as well if you have an interest in that. Yeah it's generally it's a great opportunity to see the processes behind the scholarly kitchen and gain an understanding of the governance within an area of SSP, and it's also a path into further governance and board experience.
If that's something you're interested in, kind of just want to dip a toe for now. And taking part in the cabinet will help increase the discoverability, readership and awareness of the scholarly kitchen and continue to bridge the gap of the needs and the voices of the scholarly publishing community. I'll be around for the breakout groups and happy to answer any questions.
Thanks awesome. Thank you. All right. And last but not least, let's hear from the training committee. Hi, everyone. This is Jeff Mahoney from the American Academy of Pediatrics. I'm one of the co-chairs of the training committee, along with my other co-chair, Janine McKenna.
We are one of the newest committees. We might still be the newest committee officially within SSP, and we're very much growing. I think one of the reasons why I can credit to growing is we always ask for this prime slot at the end of the list of committees. So everyone primed you up and now you can hear about the training committee. I'd also like to thank all the other speakers.
You did a great job keeping within that 3 to four minutes. I mean, I think I have more time than usual here and I won't abuse it. We focus on real practical training skills based content and turn it into things of value that people will pay for. So they're typically paid experiences. And there's three primary aspects or projects that we work on. One is the journals Academy, which is held in the second half of the year.
And we focus our committee efforts in the second half of the year for a three week session that builds knowledge bases on scholarly journals, on a variety of topics, giving a great overview for early to mid-career professionals. It's a workshop like overview. We end up with a certificate at the end. We're going to have our third journals Academy at the end of this year in November and December, and it's been a real popular and growing part of the SSP offerings.
Newly transitioned to our training committee is also the Leadership Academy, and that's going on right now. It will happen again next year. If you haven't already heard about the programming this year, and that's focused more on leadership skills and personal growth. Really exciting additions to the programming as well. So that's also great for early career and mid-career professionals.
And we also have year round we have training seminars on specific topics, things like open access or copyright. Again, we do want to focus on the training aspect to differentiate ourselves from other SSP programming, trying to give real, practical skills that are of value to the attendees and to the organizations that they work for, because the expectation is that these are paid webinars and that there will be value that comes out of it.
We do meet once a month. Very engaging group. Again it's been growing. So I think last year at this time, we had about 8 to 10 members. We're up to 18 and 20 with bringing in the Leadership Academy as well. We would love additional people who have the energy, kind of people who like to build products, build new ideas, and expand some relatively new offerings within SSP.
When you're on the group, you often are assigned as a shepherd, which is some SSP lingo where you and a co shepherd will help some of the content within the journals Academy or within the Leadership Academy or one of the training seminars. And that's a great way to bond with some members within the committee, outside of the monthly meetings. But it's a relatively light. We're starting to become pros at this.
We've got some good standard operating procedures for how to run these programs. So really, we just need your talents to communicate with the speakers to help be there on the days of the events. And it's really exciting. You get to learn alongside it too. I've learned a lot as part of the program, so we're looking for two to four new members to join our growing team and looking forward to talking with you more.
Wonderful Thanks, Jeff. So what we're going to do now is go into some breakout rooms. Give us a few minutes to get everyone settled. Our excuse me. All of the committee chairs will go into a breakout room labeled with their committee. Feel free to mingle. As attendees, you all should have the ability to go in and out of rooms as you please.
And I'd say we're doing great on time, so I'd say we'll do at least 15 minutes, and then I'll check in with everybody and see where they're at, and then we'll regroup. So I've opened the rooms and you should be able to join them.
Oh I see.
Form Title Download
Transcript
Form Title Bookmark
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Form Title Share
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Form Title Accessibility and Keyboard Shortcuts
The cadmore media player is a professional video and audio player experience designed to deliver media as well as relevant transcript, segmentation, and metadata. On the screen is a traditional html video player with buttons such as play, pause, forward, captioning, language and play speed selection and more. Adjacent to the video player are generally tabs, one of which shows a scrolling transcript of the video and the other shows any segmentation of the media, sometimes referred to as chapters. At the top of the video is a menu bar containing an Explore button and Tools button. The Explore button allows you to dig deeper into the video by opening up an explore dialog which contains tabs for a visual navigation of the video using thumbnails, an about tab which contains rich metadata about the media, a segments tab which contains further information about the video, and a related tab which contains links to other media related to this media. The tools button opens a menu with options for sharing the media on social media, creating bookmarking links, creating embed codes for your website, generating citations, and more.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts only work while you are in forms mode. By entering forms mode, you will be able to quickly access portions of the media player with single key commands.
Spacebar: Play/Pause Toggle
I: Info Menu,
O: Tools Menu
T: Transcript Tab,
S: Segments Tab
F: Forward 15,
R: Rewind 15
L: Languages,
P: Playspeed
M: Mute Toggle,
V: Volume Bar
N: Video Only Toggle,
B: Full Screen Toggle
C: Captions Toggle
Escape: Closes dialogs and menus / Exits Player
Z: Next Transcript Chapter
X: Previous Transcript Chapter
Q: Next Transcript Paragraph
W: Previous Transcript Paragraph
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Embed Size
-
You Size - Responsive
-
We Size - Responsive
-
Picture Overlay Popup
-
400 x 225
-
512 x 288
-
400 x 700
-
768 x 1024
-
1024 x 512
-
1280 x 608
Form Title Cite
No citation provided.
Info
Segments
Related
Thumbnails
Exit Clip Mode
You have requested to see a portion of the video outside of the clip.
Click OK to switch to the full video or click if you would like to stay inside the clip. You can always go back to the clip with Tools and Clip Mode