For Frontiers, the Charleston Library Conference has become one of the defining moments of our annual events calendar, and a real anchor point for our community. The week-long conference offers an incomparable opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue with librarians and other institutional representatives and to build awareness of our mission to make science open. This year’s conference did not disappoint.

Frontiers was in the thick of November 2023’s event – we hosted a meet and greet mixer on the first night of the conference and enjoyed numerous productive conversations at our booth in the exhibit hall. We also occupied a prominent spot on the conference schedule, as a diamond sponsor of the event, and through our participation in speaker sessions on topics including the Nelson Memo one year on and publishers’ responses to open access mandates.

Thomas Romano, institutional partnerships global sales manager at Frontiers, elaborated on our ongoing commitment to Charleston: “This continues to be the ideal conference to support our efforts to increase awareness, build valuable relationships, and to highlight the importance of our institutional partnerships program, as we work towards making science open for all.”

Frontiers’ speaker sessions

Frontiers was represented at Charleston by team members with expertise spanning many areas of publishing.

In an information session entitled ‘Shaping the Future of Open Access Through Co-creation’, Thomas Romano spoke about Frontiers’ core mission and our ongoing commitment to partnerships with institutions, funders and consortia. This also included the two new agreements recently signed under Frontiers’ new flat-fee pilot model with the University of California and the University of Kansas.

In turn Frank Hellwig, institutional partnerships global development manager, presented Frontiers’ co-creation approach to developing institutional partnership models, highlighting our aspiration to make institutions’ input an integral part of the process. He shared some insights on the newly launched flat-fee model and sketched out possible future directions.

From a policy perspective, Tom Ciavarella, Frontiers' public affairs and advocacy lead, presented a follow-up to the 2022 Charleston session (The OSTP Public Access Guidance: Headlines, Details, and Impact), reviewing the scope of the Nelson Memo and the challenges stakeholders should consider in 2024.

Conversations and feedback

Beyond these more structured formats, the team engaged in many productive one-to-one conversations about new collaborations, industry trends, and developing new solutions. Audrey Grey of Frontiers' institutional partnerships customer engagement unit said: “The Charleston conference was incredibly beneficial in engaging librarians from around the country. I came away with a much better understanding of the various barriers facing librarians who want to adopt more impactful open access policies. Our annual contribution at this conference will ensure that we continue to build trust with librarians and institutions as we work with them to solve the challenges around moving to fully open access scholarship."

Dr Helena Meskanen, institutional partnerships regional development manager, continued this dynamic with a focus group bringing together librarians for an hour of deep-dive questions and discussion. The highly engaged participants enjoyed an open exchange and provided valuable feedback.

Julia Kostova, Frontiers’ North America publishing director, participated in a panel discussion on the changing nature of the library-publisher relationships. She said of her experience this year: “As libraries and other stakeholders grapple with new open science mandates and questions about how to fund and scale sustainably the transition to open science, my colleagues and I appreciated the opportunity to tell the community about how we are supporting this transition through the new flat fee model for libraries and our policy work. Our discussions in Charleston were a good reminder that open science is going to be pivotal if we are to find solutions to the pressing global problems facing our planet.”

Frontiers continues to move towards the goal of having all publications covered by institutional agreements, increasing efficiency and transparency while reducing administrative costs. Our new flat-fee agreements with California Digital Library and the University of Kansas are a significant step towards this and to realizing our aspiration to make science available to all, for the benefit of all.

For more information about partnering with Frontiers or to discuss our new partnership models email institutions@frontiersin.org