Jayne Marks, Maverick’s Head of EMEA Business Development and a member of R2R’s 2025 advisory board, provides her thoughts on the recently completed R2R conference.
The 2025 Researcher to Reader Conference was a lively event as usual offering an opportunity to hear from a variety of speakers across the scholarly publishing community. The event kicked off with a talk from John Willinsky the founder of Publick Knowledge Project which offers open-source solutions to support journal publishing. He challenged the audience to respond to the challenges we face from research sustainability and integrity with new ways to disseminate the outputs of research.
One of the unique features of R2R is a series of workshops that span three hours over the two days. Delegates choose a topic and take part in discussing challenges and possible solutions with the group. It is good to be able to take a deep dive into issues from peer review, the global south to open science.
There was also an opportunity to hear updates from a variety of companies in a series of Lightening Talks. These were five minutes each and for me it was an opportunity to see some of the new tools being developed.
One of the recurring themes of this meeting was the realisation that open science is not always easy to achieve and the early promise of a complete flip to open is not happening. The presentations and discussion focused on the difficulties of complying with mandates across different disciplines, particularly with respect to data deposit, and the challenge of where to find the budget to pay for some of the new models that try to get away from APCs such as subscribe to open. Whilst it is attractive for some, the lack of certainty about funding is proving challenging for some publishers.
One of the great things about this conference is the chance to talk with people who don’t always go to the same meetings. This leads to really interesting exchanges of views that are thought provoking and insightful. In this respect Researcher to Reader 2025 did not disappoint.