Jennifer Kemp began her career as a scholarly librarian in the earlier days of open access and digital preservation. Frustrated scientists came to her when they couldn’t find papers online, or couldn’t access them. Some of those early conversations, along with highly contentious conference sessions between librarians and publishers, sparked an interest in open scholarship  and open dialog that has never abated.

Jennifer switched to the creation side of scholarly communications, working in policy, partnerships and product development at HighWire Press, Springer Nature, and Crossref, before joining the team at Statos in 2023. In her work as Director of Consulting Services, she focuses on policy, collaborations, program evaluation and stakeholder engagement and has a special affinity for work related to books, metadata and PIDs, and libraries.  

We caught up with her about her inspiration, approach, and what the future scholarship might look like.

What keeps you motivated and excited about the open access space?

There are so many incredibly smart, passionate people in our community working on some very complex issues. It’s fascinating to be involved in these discussions, both for the topics themselves, which range from big picture issues to highly niche concerns that may be broadly consequential, and the more meta experience of the dynamics that play out in any community with a diversity of perspectives and often strongly-held opinions. Science and scholarship matter to everyone — even if they don’t always realize it.

What are some of your top strategies for driving change in scholarly communications?

Identifying common ground and some understanding of the complexity of other stakeholders’ perspectives is a useful start. So much of our work on these topics comes down to relationships and change of any consequence doesn’t happen without people coming together.

Early on, it’s a lot of planting seeds, sometimes with one individual or a small group of champions within an organization who are advocating for change. Ours is a community that very much values expertise — so it is relatively easy to draw people into conversations about topics of interest! 

As ideas begin to take hold, concrete next steps provide a bridge from plans to action, and stories help stakeholders to understand, communicate and socialize the benefits of the work.

Coopetition can be a valuable motivator as well, and is certainly unavoidable. No one likes to be seen as being out of touch or lagging behind, so they are always scoping and responding to what others in their space are doing. 

What are some of the greatest challenges facing scholarly communications today?

There’s an urgent need for us as a community to grapple with how our human infrastructure should be supported, especially in the context of AI. When we talk about the cost of publishing, for example, how should we factor in the people that do the work? One positive outcome of the push to AI is this chance to consider that at a system level. We need to take this opportunity – possibly a “use it or lose it” one- to discuss and debate what work means for people and how it should be supported. Of course there is reason for trepidation as well. How can these technologies – these tools– augment and support human work in productive ways?

What are your hopes for the future of open scholarship?

“Scholarly communications” is plural for a reason. It indicates the plurality of the very vast scope of research and scholarship. We need to recognize that there is a wide range of outputs, and stop focusing so much on the late-stage, very particular format of the journal article. We need to start accepting this range and how outputs are interconnected and all contribute to evidence, integrity and the value of expertise. And we need to enshrine that belief in our infrastructure and systems, so that the reward system of science and scholarship recognizes the full range of contributions.