Fiona Carr, US Account Manager, Ingenta Connect
In June 2017, Ingenta attended and exhibited at the Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Conference (SSP) in Boston, USA. SSP is a key event on the publishing calendar and proved to be extremely busy for us. There were some excellent keynote and plenary speakers throughout the event. For example, Paula Stephans of Georgia State University opened the conference with a very strong keynote talking about the changing characteristics of ‘academe’ and how it’s now regarded as an alternative career to being in industry. She talked at length about the increasing tendency towards ‘risk aversion’ in research and reliance upon short-term bibliometrics for tenure. How sustainable is this? Where is the new, exciting research going to come from in this current environment? Hot on the heels of this keynote, came Jeffrey Mervis from Science, talking about the impact of the Trump administration upon science in the United States. With little interest or investment from Trump and the US Government in science and scholarly research, what can be done? Is a ‘March on Science’ really needed? Opinions are split on this, with Democrats thinking it’s a good idea to do this, while Republications are showing very little support or interest in science. New ideas are needed to build support for science. These keynotes, along with many of the other talks and product demonstrations throughout the conference certainly provided plenty of food for thought….
In addition to some great speakers, SSP gave Ingenta the opportunity to talk to existing Ingenta Connect clients – always fantastic to be able to meet in person. We also met with several organizations to discuss some exciting new developments for Ingenta Connect throughout the rest of 2017 and into 2018. Webinars on some of these, such as Altmetric and PaperHive, are already scheduled over the coming weeks and we look forward to hosting these for you.
Next year, SSP will be hosted in Chicago at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers, May 30 – June 1st. We hope to see some of you there.