This year, I was one of 12 Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) Fellows, and I thought I would share reflections on my experience with the LPC community!
Overall, I found this experience invaluable as an early-career professional. The fellowship provided me with a suite of professional development opportunities, including a good amount of networking (and as someone who is not extroverted most of the time, this was extra impactful for me). The elements of the fellowship I’ll cover here are being assigned an industry expert mentor, creating a research poster with other fellows, and attending the Annual Meeting, though we also had regular group check-ins and other professional development opportunities.
To start, I was assigned a wonderful mentor: David Haber, Publishing Operations Director at the American Society for Microbiology. The thing I appreciate most about our conversations is how I’m able to be myself—I don’t feel the need to tiptoe around my stronger opinions (or language). We’ve only been meeting for a handful of months, but we’ve already been able to learn so much from each other, especially in areas where our opinions don’t quite align. Gaining the perspective of a society journal publisher has been important as I’ve taken on more journal responsibilities in my role, but it’s also been quite useful to know how and what changes happen in other parts of the scholarly publishing ecosystem, especially regarding the development and implementation of new technologies.
The most time-consuming part of the fellowship was creating a research poster to present at the Annual Meeting. The timeline was tight, with the journey from research idea to final poster being just three months. Our group created a poster that sought to visualize where open peer review takes place in open access publications, via data gathered from DOAB and DOAJ. Was it kind of awkward standing against a wall near our poster, waiting for people to talk to me? Yes—but the conversations I had were lovely, extending beyond the poster and into library publishing and accessibility, among other things.
Speaking of the poster presentation, attending this year’s Annual Meeting was incredible! I will say that, with how budgets have shaken out recently, attending the meeting was made possible by my fellowship benefits, which included a travel stipend and registration waiver. I attended sessions on disability and accessibility, journal publishing, AI, and new technologies. I was also invited to be part of a panel of early-career professionals, where we shared our experiences and advice. And of course, it was absolutely lovely meeting up with the other fellows in person for the first time (I also wrote about my experience for The Scholarly Kitchen, if you’d care to read more).
Though my fellowship is technically over, later this year I’ll be rolling onto SSP’s DEIA Committee—I’m excited to see what kind of work this group does while also being in my second year on LPC’s DEIA committee. All in all, I highly recommend that grad students and early-career professionals in the library publishing space apply for this fellowship. It has been such a unique way to learn about the scholarly publishing landscape and make strong connections within the industry—I wouldn’t trade it for the world!