TrendMD at SSP’s 43rd Annual Meeting

Write-up on 43rd SSP Annual Meeting, 2021

The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) hosted its 43rd Annual Meeting at the end of May. It was their first all-virtual meeting and was an organizational triumph.

TrendMD was proud to sponsor the keynote speech by Dr. Joseph M. Williams, “Fighting Racial Inequity in the Publishing Industry: Closing the Intention-Behavior Gap.” Dr. Williams made an impassioned case that scholarly publishing professionals should focus on the results of diversity efforts, rather than the good intentions behind them. He called on everyone present to understand the actual effects of discrimination and unconscious bias and to become allies in the struggle to make scholarly publishing a truly inclusive community. A roadmap for achieving this is outlined in the Equity Toolkit developed by the Coalition for Diversity & Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC).

In spite of the challenges posed by the all-virtual format, the meeting was well-attended, packed with valuable and timely content, and full of opportunities for engagement and learning. The SSP’s first-ever poster session included 25 presentations with live Q&A.

At the virtual conference, members of the TrendMD team pushed a consistent message: no form of post-publication intervention has proven as effective as TrendMD for increasing citations. Publishers in every scholarly discipline share the goal of finding and engaging with the readers who are most likely to read and cite their articles. TrendMD is their most effective weapon to do so.

TrendMD’s poster summarized the results of our 12‐Month Randomized Controlled Trial, which tracked 3,200 articles over the first 12 months of publication, demonstrating how TrendMD-promoted articles received 50% more citations than the control group. During TrendMD’s Industry Breakout session, we shared actual publisher case studies that helped demonstrate how this works in different scholarly disciplines.

We all look forward to next year’s SSP meeting in Chicago when we’ll be together in person once again. Until then, it’s good to know that the exchange of information -- so essential to our industry -- can overcome even the most challenging obstacles!