In our monthly Spotlight on our committees campaign, Portland Press Non-Executive Director Dr Kamran Naim has shared his perspective on the importance of learned society publishers.

He also discusses the move towards more open and sustainable publishing models such as Subscribe to Open, and the role societies can play in making scientific knowledge more accessible and equitable.

For Open Access Week, Kamran reflects on making open science truly equitable.

How long have you been involved with PPL and what encouraged you to take on your board role?

I joined the Board in 2024, at a particularly interesting moment when the Society and Portland Press were beginning to explore Subscribe to Open (S2O) as a possible pathway towards a more open and sustainable publishing model. Having been involved in developing S2O, I was interested in bringing some of that experience into the organisation and contributing to how a learned society navigates the transition towards open publishing.

But what particularly attracted me was the wider mission of the Biochemical Society. A society publisher exists within, and ultimately in service of, a scientific community. Publishing is therefore not an end in itself: it is one of the ways in which the Society can advance the discipline, support researchers, strengthen its community and ensure that scientific knowledge is shared as widely and effectively as possible.

That also makes the governance role particularly interesting. Publishing is changing very rapidly, and boards have a responsibility not simply to oversee today's activities and business models, but to think about how they need to evolve in order to continue serving the Society's mission and its community in the future.

What qualities do you think make someone particularly effective in a publishing-related role (either on a committee or Editorial Board)?

Curiosity, openness and a willingness to challenge assumptions are important. Scholarly publishing has accumulated practices that we sometimes treat as inevitable simply because they have existed for a long time.

I think effective committee and board members need to be prepared to ask quite fundamental questions: What problem are we trying to solve? Who benefits from the way we currently do things? Who might be excluded? And, most importantly for a learned society, how does this advance the Society's mission and support the scientific community it represents?

At the same time, it is important to listen. Publishing brings together researchers, editors, societies, libraries, funders and institutions, often with quite different perspectives and constraints. Good governance means understanding those perspectives while keeping sight of the interests of the scholarly community as a whole.

Why do you think small society publishers are so important?

For a learned society, publishing should be part of a much broader scientific mission. It can generate resources, but those resources can in turn support researchers, convene communities, develop the next generation of scientists, advance a discipline and enable knowledge to circulate. That relationship between publishing and mission is enormously valuable.

At a time when scholarly communication is becoming increasingly concentrated and technologically complex, independent society publishers can also demonstrate that high-quality publishing can remain community-led, mission-driven and responsive to researchers. Models such as Subscribe to Open are interesting in this respect because they explore whether existing relationships between publishers, libraries and research communities can be organised around collectively supporting open knowledge rather than charging individual researchers to participate.

But being a society publisher does not automatically make a publishing model equitable or sustainable. That distinction has to be earned through the choices we make: by being transparent, experimenting with new approaches, reducing barriers to participation and ensuring that publishing ultimately creates value for the scientific community that sustains it.

What do you see as the importance of open science, and what role does the Society play in supporting this?

For me, open science starts from a fairly simple proposition: scientific knowledge has its greatest value when others are able to access it, scrutinise it, build upon it and reuse it.

But open science is about much more than making articles free to read. Research produces publications, data, software, methods and protocols, as well as processes of review and evaluation. We need a scholarly communication system that connects these different components and makes science more transparent, reproducible and useful.

There is also an important question of equity. We should be careful that in removing barriers to reading research we do not simply replace them with barriers to participating in its publication. An open system needs to work for researchers regardless of geography, institution or ability to pay.

This is where I think learned societies have a particularly important role. The Biochemical Society does not exist primarily to publish journals; it exists to advance the molecular biosciences and support the community that makes that science possible. Publishing and open science should therefore be understood in the context of that larger mission.

The Society's exploration of approaches such as S2O is one example of how we can rethink openness without simply transferring costs to individual authors. More broadly, we can support open research practices, experiment with new forms of scholarly communication and ensure that the knowledge produced by our community is available to the widest possible audience.

For me, that is ultimately the opportunity for learned societies: not simply to respond to changes in scholarly communication, but to help their scientific communities shape what comes next.

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