The very first Atypon Community Meeting was held on June 23, 2021, and it was an exciting new experience!
Taking a different approach from the classic User Conference, this meeting highlighted the voices of Atypon customers and partners, with a brief introduction from Atypon General Manager Gordon Tibbitts setting the stage not only for the Community Meeting itself, but for the full scope of our community-building efforts at Atypon. It was also our first online meeting, which presented a unique challenge.
About 85% of Literatum clients were represented among registrants. Thanks to our fabulous speakers, moderators, and panelists, we learned a lot from our first meeting—and thanks to your feedback, we have some great ideas for making the second Community Meeting in early December even better (including changing platforms to enable more voices to be heard!).
Community Voices: Community Interest Groups
We kicked off the day with updates from representatives from several of our Community Interest Groups, some of them already established and some in the process of launching. Thanks to the groups’ reps who shared updates on what their group has discussed (or plans to discuss) and the specific challenges that they’re swapping ideas on:
- Bernd Pulverer (Reproducibility)
- Judy Hum-Delaney (Open Access)
- Christina Rudyj (Onsite Discovery)
- Liz Allen (Cross-Publisher Collaborative Marketing, Damita Snow (Accessibility)
- Mike Cannon (Offsite Discovery)
- Paul Guinnessy (Publishing Workflows)
- Rob Posadas (Offsite Discovery)
- Patrick Hargitt (Reproducibility).
The Atypon team is excited about the Community Interest Groups, and were delighted to find that we’re not the only ones! Since the Community Meeting, nearly 50 community members have signed up, and several topic areas have generated so much interest that we’ll be spinning up additional groups.
→ If you missed the sign-up form, don’t worry—follow this link to sign up for an existing group or suggest a new one!
To round out this section of the program, we heard from Ralph Youngen at the American Chemical Society about the collaborative Abuse Management Program, a great example of community members collaborating for the greater good of Literatum publishers. You can watch Ralph’s talk on our Vimeo channel!
Community Expertise: Panels
Modernizing workflows
The first of the day’s three panels focused on publishing workflows and featured:
- Mike Cannon, Director of Serial Publications and Editorial Services, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
- Andrew Smeall, Chief Strategy Officer, Hindawi
- Paschal Ssemaganda, eLibrary Product Manager, World Bank Group
Moderated by Atypon’s Veronica Showers, the panel’s conversation covered a wide range of topics under the three broad headings of how our industry’s roots in print continue to affect our publishing workflows; panelists’ wish lists for workflow technologies; and the lessons they’ve learned from introducing workflow technologies at their own organizations.
→ Watch panel 1, “Modernizing the publishing workflow,” on our Vimeo channel!
Supporting the open access transition
The second panel approached a ubiquitous topic—open access—from an unusual angle, asking what publishers and societies need in order to transition successfully into the open access future, featuring panelists:
- Liz Ferguson, VP of Open Research, Wiley
- Sara Rouhi, Director of Strategic Partnerships, PLOS
- Stuart Taylor, Publishing Director, Royal Society
This panel’s conversation addressed transformative agreements, the technological, financial, and social drivers of and barriers to the OA transition, the Open Access Switchboard initiative, and much more!
Building collaborative solutions
In the last panel of the day, experts from the worlds of standards, publishing software, and security tackled a subject that was once almost unheard of and is now crucial to almost everything scholarly publishers do: cross-industry collaboration!
Moderated by Atypon’s Dorothy Hoskins, this panel featured:
- Nettie Lagace, Associate Executive Director, NISO
- Ken Ferris, Security Architect, Taylor & Francis
- Bruce Rosenblum, VP of Content and Workflow Solutions, Inera
- Richard Wynne, Principal, Rescognito
Their conversation covered the range from metadata and micro-services to research funding, persistent identifiers, SciHub, and the Article Sharing Framework.
Until we meet again …
The first Atypon Community Meeting is over, but the Atypon Community is here for you all year round!
Join or suggest a Community Interest Group, subscribe to our Community Newsletter, suggest a newsletter or blog post topic, or send us an email—this is your community, and we want to hear from you.
And stay tuned for news on the next Community Meeting in early December (on UK time)!