INTERVIEW: “I want others to fall in love with the profession”

Heather Staines, who has led a long and illustrious career in and around the scholarly communications industry, considers herself to be – first and foremost – an academic.

She trained as a military and diplomatic historian before a tough job market led her to consider publishing – and she has never looked back. Heather recalls: “I was always happier editing other people’s work than I was researching my own projects, so it was a nice fit.

“I spent 11 years at Greenwood Publishing Group/Praeger Publishers, which was a very early adopter in creating XML workflows for books. Although it was a painful transition, as vendors were also finding their way, I could see the promise of having books online for researchers.

“To enable me to work in digital publishing full-time, I shifted over to the journals space. I was the first Global eProduct Manager for the SpringerLink platform; while there, I got heavily involved in industry associations and standards work, which I still enjoy today. I did a tour through the start-up world (both for profit and non-profit), working at the intersection of business development and technology.

“As It turns out, a wide-ranging career is excellent training to become a consultant. I’ve been at Delta Think since March of 2021, and I’ve never been happier.”

Insight and planning

Earlier this year Heather was elected president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) – a position she says she was honoured to accept. 

She says: “I had lost an election many years ago, so I know it is a tough process. Serving a year as President Elect, I was able to participate in Board Meetings, shadow (now Past) President Randy Townsend, serve on the Nominations Committee, and appoint the Committee Co-chairs for this coming year. I’m excited to get more insight into the many ongoing initiatives around membership and DEIA efforts. After my presidential year, I’ll have a year to serve as Past President.

The SSP is currently in the middle of a regular strategic planning cycle so Heather isn’t planning any new initiatives during her time in office, but she hopes to work within the existing committee structure to look for more ways to support early career professionals and those who have started new jobs during this Covid era. 

She declares: “I want to ensure that others have the opportunity to fall in love with the profession the way we all did. I’m excited to get to know more about all of the committees and task forces, particularly the work being done around mentorship and the Generations Fund (to create an endowment to support SSPs activities). 

“I’m serving SSP at an interesting time, as we’ll soon launch our recent Wage and Compensation survey as well as a new taxonomy around scholarly communications – and stay tuned for a brand new SSP Awards initiative (coming 2025) to recognize the outputs of scholarly publishing.”

A passion for people

Heather’s “day job” is as a Senior Consultant at Delta Think, which works with publishers of all varieties, vendors, foundations, and such on projects across a wide range of fields in scholarly communications. 

She reports that her favourite projects involve interviews: “When you get the chance to talk to someone about their passion (whether they are librarians, researchers, publishers, or service providers), their excitement is contagious. I love parsing these interviews for insights that our clients can use in formulating their own strategic plans. 

“I also oversee our Data & Analytics tool – which tracks research output by OA status, discipline, region, perceived impact, and more. I’m responsible for the monthly News & Views publications and the regular webinars we do for the industry. In this rapidly evolving landscape, we work with publishers to assess their content portfolios and find the best business models to move forward.”

One client that Heather brought to Delta Think is the International STM Association, where she does outreach work for both SeamlessAccess and GetFTR, which fall under the STM Solutions umbrella. 

She says: “The former is a way to standardise the access flow for federated authentication, and the latter is an effort to close the gap between discovery and access for researchers. I’m excited about SeamlessAccess because I was involved in a NISO Working Group around single sign-on about 15 years ago (ESPReSSO). And GetFTR has continued to evolve beyond its original vision to signal to researchers “upstream” in the discovery services they use that they have access to content (subscription, free, and OA), to support content syndication and, most recently, researcher integrity through display of retraction and errata information at the point of discovery. I’ve always been a big supporter of collaboration to create infrastructure, so I’m thrilled to work on these initiatives.”

Heather’s love for the industry is such that she is a self-confessed “over-volunteerer”. She also serves on committees for the Council of Science Editors, Researcher to Reader, STM’s Futurelab and Standards and Technology Executive Committee, COUNTER, ALPSP, the Charleston Conference, and the NASIG Board of Directors.

Musicals and metadata

So, with such a wide-ranging outlook on scholarly communications, what are Heather’s hopes for the industry? Where does she hope we’ll be in 10 years’ time?



“We’re chatting at a time when it seems that a new AI-related announcement comes out every day, and many folks are roiling at both the promise and the peril that the technology may bring. I try to stay optimistic, and I give the example of how the OA space works today. Many of the models we operate in and terms we use had not been created 10 years ago, so I imagine it is very challenging to predict what we’ll see around AI in a decade. 

“I hope that smart folks will harness both people and machine power to tackle the research integrity issues that concern so many. I hope we’ll improve our digital preservation efforts to include more format types. I hope that smaller societies will still be able to operate, so that we will continue to see true publication diversity. And I hope those early careers just starting out now are still there to run things.”

Despite her many and varied roles in the industry, Heather still finds the time and energy for her hobbies, which include travel – “I’m lucky that is a part of my job!” – and singing: “I’ve recently expanded from karaoke to open mic nights – which is a bit terrifying but very gratifying. And you may have heard that I’m developing a bit of a side-line in writing musicals about metadata… 

“I also enjoy playing with and walking my two rescue pups. I have two sons in their 20s, and I try to spend quality time with them – and also to get up to Ontario, Canada, to see my first grandson, Magnus!”

Interview by Tim Gillett