Participants Share Thoughts on 2025 NISO Plus Baltimore Experience
The work doesn’t end after the closing keynote.
Last month over 200 publishers, librarians, service and infrastructure providers, and other information community professionals gathered to address challenges in scholarly communications at our much-anticipated NISO Plus conference (February 10–12) in Baltimore. The thought-provoking presentations, lively conversations, and camaraderie that followed were a fitting reward for the many weeks of work that the NISO Plus Planning Committee, speakers, and staff put into the meeting. But as anyone who has hosted a conference knows, the work doesn’t end after the closing keynote. Followup activities are an important part of managing any conference, and at NISO we are busy reviewing session outputs and identifying ideas we can carry forward for future projects. Another example of an essential post-conference activity is our review of attendee feedback—the true measure of our success and what we use to improve future NISO Plus meetings. Almost 25% of conference participants responded to our post-event survey, and now that the results are in, we’d like to share some of their thoughts.
One pre-conference attendee lauded the “great interaction and ability to share new ideas to solve problems”
When asked to name their primary reason for attending the conference, over 35% of attendees cited the relevance of the meeting program to their work and organization (other popular reasons included having found a previous NISO Plus meeting valuable and being invited to speak at the conference). And when asked to rank specific aspects of the program content on a scale from 1–5 (with 1=poor and 5=excellent), they gave the pre-conferences, which covered AI tools in scholarly communication, OA book usage, and the JATS-Con users meeting, particularly high marks (all three received weighted average scores above 5.5). One pre-conference attendee lauded the “great interaction and ability to share new ideas to solve problems,” and another expressed hope that NISO would continue to host JATS-Con, held for the first time as a NISO Plus pre-conference this year.
Participants also enjoyed the timely and thought-provoking conference keynotes, Cindy Hohl’s opener on “The Human Standard: Ensuring Equal Library Access for All,” and the closing Miles Conrad Award lecture, “#TeamHuman: Community-Rooted AI Research,” by Executive Director and founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), Dr. Timnit Gebru. Both presentations received average scores of over 4.5, and the recordings are now available in our video library!
As for the over 20 parallel sessions hosted at the meeting, the average score was 4.59, with participants praising the range of topics, quality of content, and relevance. When asked which sessions they enjoyed the most, the responses, not surprisingly, reflected some of the most pressing issues in scholarly communications. The top three (in descending order of popularity) were “Navigating the Tightrope: Balancing Access and Cybersecurity in Academic Publishing,” “Improving the Kludge: Complexities of Open Access Usage Metrics,” and “Imagining Interoperable and Usable Accessibility Metadata.” Several sessions addressing ways to better support research integrity in the information community were also highly ranked.
...one of the most important goals of NISO Plus is to generate ideas and identify potential solutions for problems facing the information community.
Again, one of the most important goals of NISO Plus is to generate ideas and identify potential solutions for problems facing the information community. That is why every parallel session included time dedicated to group discussion as well as speaker presentations. Attendees scored this session format an average 4.96 out of 5, with many citing it as the best aspect of the meeting. Several responses suggested additional time for following up on these discussions, either in workshops or special sessions for further developing ideas emerging from the meeting. This is great feedback as we plan for not only future NISO Plus meetings, but also for some followup virtual workshops later this year—stay tuned for more information!
There were also requests for more content on specific topics, especially PIDs and metadata, AI, and accessibility.
When it came to things we should change about NISO Plus, there were some helpful suggestions for making presentations more accessible, which we will share in our speaker brief for future conferences. There were also requests for more content on specific topics, especially PIDs and metadata, AI, and accessibility—valuable suggestions we can share with the Planning Committee as we begin to think about our next NISO Plus conference, to be held virtually in September.
Many thanks to all of our attendees and speakers for making the meeting a success and for sharing the feedback that will help us to make future NISO Plus events even better. We’re also especially grateful for our NISO Plus 2025 sponsors, whose support helps to make our meeting possible. If you weren’t able to join us last month, you can get a taste of the conference experience by checking out the recordings of keynote speakers Cindy Hohl and Dr. Timnit Gebru. And if you’ve never attended a NISO Plus conference, consider joining us at NISO Plus Global Online! Warning: you may not be able to attend just one! Over half of survey respondents had attended at least one other NISO Plus meeting, and over 40% three or more.
If you’d like to learn more about future NISO Plus events, sign up for our announcements.
