Three of us will be attending and presenting at the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s 2026 annual meeting next week in Chula Vista, California. We’ll be focusing on Bots and Analytics, and here’s a run-down of where you can catch us:
Bot Wars: Will AI Scraping Change the Scholarly Landscape Forever?
Tim will moderate a discussion on how AI-driven bots are challenging, and benefitting, scholarly platforms. Joining him in conversation is Emilie Delquie, Chief Product & Customer Success Officer for Silverchair; Carolyn Caizzi, Associate University Librarian for Digital Initiatives and IT at the University of California Berkeley; and Chad Nelson, Technical Team Manager for Publishing, Archives, and Digitization at the California Digital Library.
We’ll share the impact we’re seeing of bots from the varied perspectives of publishers, libraries, and institutional repositories. We will also dig into some of the longer term implications, including the future viability of Open Access, what this implies for PDFs, and how bots are also impact Editorial workflows.
Tim is also presenting on LibLynx’s Bot Filter solution at the SSP Previews session on Friday morning.
Show Me the Data; Don’t Scrimp on the Empathy
Lettie will present on the importance of empathy when designing tools for usage analytics and ensuring accessibility compliance. Scholarly communication is a fact-driven enterprise, grounded in data used for research, publication, and impact measurement. But data isn’t everything; empathy is equally vital to its success. This session begins by examining evidence on the benefits of empathy and explores ways to embed it throughout the scholarly communication life cycle—from collaboration and peer review to dissemination and assessment.
One focus will be the role of empathy in today’s geopolitical climate, where distrust in scholarship continues to grow. While facts are essential, trust often depends on interpersonal understanding, making empathy-forward approaches more effective than facts-forward ones. Another focus will consider empathy within ethics investigations, where fairness and compassion support integrity. In her talk, Lettie will address human-centered design methods in the development of usage analytics tools and software, and ensuring compliance with accessibility standards. The session will conclude with a lively discussion on the critical question: in a metric-driven scholarly communication ecosystem, can—or should—empathy be measured? Not all value is quantifiable, and discussing this tension will invite active audience participation.
From Cost Center to Catalyst: Unlocking the Commercial Power of Metadata
Michelle will present on the critical role of metadata in driving discovery and usage analytics. In an era of AI-driven search and shrinking budgets, treating metadata as a back-office operational cost is no longer sustainable. For content to be both discoverable and attributable to a publisher in an AI-mediated world, metadata needs to be treated as a primary commercial asset. This session explores how leading scholarly publishers are enhancing content with more robust metadata, in order to drive the value of their content and recover usage lost to frontier model LLMs.
Following presentations by Tanya LaPlante (Oxford University Press) and Mark Collins (Virtusales Publishing Solutions) on the benefits of metadata enrichment, Michelle will show how improved metadata used in key places benefits end user discovery and drives more usage.
We look forward to seeing you online at SSP 2026!