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02/22/2022

The Future of Scholarly Societies (Part 1)

Interviews with society leaders

This has been a tough couple of years. I for one can say that in my role, leading the publishing division of the American Mathematical Society, I found myself focusing on operations, enabling remote functionality, hunkering down in survival mode and celebrating the resilience of our staff through a major crisis. In large part, the exhaustive efforts of our team paid off — we are learning to live with the virus and its societal and structural ramifications.

Add to this the longer-term trends of stagnating society membership, a quickening pace towards open research, a fundamental shift away from print to digital content and a less than clear sense of equity in the publishing ecosystem, we are now looking ahead to a research and teaching landscape that has fundamentally changed. There are key components to consider. How do we operate as a workforce as we move to a new definition of work – a hybrid way of working? How do we hold meetings and conferences inclusively, equitably, and effectively? How may we diversify revenue as membership numbers flatten, or decline, conference revenues are put at risk and publishing revenues appear to be vulnerable as we move inexorably to open research? How do we best position scholarly society strategies to embrace increasingly interdisciplinary research and education?

In this post, I talk with several forward-thinking Society Executive Directors/CEOs representing a range of fields.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.

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