The Future of Scientific Editing and Publishing: Science Editor Symposium

MODERATOR: Jonathan Schultz American Heart Association Editor-in-Chief, Science Editor SPEAKERS: Michele Avissar-Whiting Howard Hughes Medical Institute Chhavi Chauhan American Society for Investigative Pathology Dan Kulp Executive Editor & Director of Publications American Urological Association David Mellor Center for Open Science REPORTER: Peter J Olson JAMA Network “The future doesn’t just happen to us—we have to shape it.” Jonathan Schultz opened the final session of the 2025 CSE Annual Meeting with this eloquent edict, and although he was directly addressing the meeting’s 250 attendees, the intent behind his injunction clearly extended to the scholarly publishing industry at large. Schultz set the tone for the session—entitled “The Future of Scientific Editing and Publishing: Science Editor Symposium”—by reflecting on the industry landscape at the start of the 21st century: Open Access (OA) had not yet been defined; peer review was still being managed via ground mail or fax; and online journals, article databases, and manuscript trafficking systems were all in their infancy. Fast-forwarding to 2025, he turned to a panel of scholarly publishing experts to elicit their thoughts on where the industry is right now, what changes they envision in the next quarter-century, and what might be done to influence those changes for the greater good of the scientific enterprise. Michele Avissar-Whiting, Director of Open Science Strategy at Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), began the conversation by offering the perspective of a scientific research funding organization. Avissar-Whiting, who oversees OA policy and preprint-related programs at HHMI, noted that while most major industry […]