OA Authors Panel at SSP 2025

Authors are one of the most important stakeholders in the scholarly publishing landscape. But they don’t always have full information about how the industry is evolving. As open access opportunities become available, it’s helpful to bring authors into the conversation, both so that publishers understand their concerns and so that authors know how this publication option might affect their scholarship and their individual careers. In May, at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing, a panel of three humanities authors with experience in open publishing across different models shared their experiences. They were joined by a librarian with extensive experience in working with faculty to develop open access publications.

Philip P. Arnold, professor of religion at Syracuse University, spoke about the importance of open access to his field of Indigenous studies, as well as to the communities who participate in the research. His book The Urgency of Indigenous Values (Syracuse University Press, 2023) will flip to open in 2026 as part of the Path to Open program hosted at JSTOR. Danielle Fosler-Lussier, a professor of music at The Ohio State University and a member of the Path to Open Community Advisory Committee, shared her experiences of publishing Music on the Move (University of Michigan Press, 2020) through the TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) initiative. For her, the open access edition significantly expanded her audience, reaching 171 countries as well as incarcerated students. Michigan’s Fulcrum platform also allowed for the inclusion of moving maps and multimedia files that offer a fuller expression of the book’s key arguments.

Eron Smith, Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Oberlin College and Conservatory, spoke next about the digital affordances supported by the fully open access journal Music Theory Online, published and funded by the Society for Music Theory. Her article “Prosodic Dissonance” (April 2023) includes audio files that provide essential examples for readers alongside the text, and it was later cited by a musician in a YouTube video essay that attracted 1 million views. Annie Johnson, Associate University Librarian for Publishing at the University of Delaware, brought her considerable expertise in working with faculty on open access publications to the conversation. She shared with the audience–composed primarily of publishers–the concerns regularly raised by authors about open access and also noted several questions that authors should be asking, particularly about choosing the right publishers and platforms for their work.

The panel was co-organized by ACLS and JSTOR and moderated by Sarah McKee, Project Manager for Amplifying Humanistic Scholarship at ACLS.

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