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New Business Models for Sustainable Open Science
February 19, 2026 at 11am - 12:00pm ET
As budgets tighten and expectations for openness rise, publishers, researchers, funders and librarians are re-examining how the work of publishing gets paid for. This session looks at the business models gaining real traction today: Subscribe to Open (S2O) and other collective models, institutional agreements (“read-and-publish”), membership and consortium funding, and review-led, non-Article Processing Charge (APC) approaches.
Moderator Sara Rouhi (AIPP) will guide a practical conversation with leaders such as Lauren Kane (BioOne), Scott Delman (ACM), and Shane Alsop (eLife) on how these models align with mission, scale beyond pilots, and protect quality and integrity.
Moderator
Sara Rouhi
Sara Rouhi is the Director of Open Science and Publishing Innovation at AIP Publishing. A political science by training, she joined the scholarly publishing community as a publisher starting in 2008 and has been working at the nexus of community engagement, product development, and equitable business models.
Driving AIP Publishing’s open science strategy, she focuses on developing new publishing models and sustainable business strategies to accelerate AIPP’s mission to advance pragmatic, researcher-focused open science. Rouhi joins AIP Publishing from Public Library of Science (PLOS) where she held business development and publishing development leadership roles. She’s a vocal advocate for pragmatic, sustainable, community-driven open science strategies. She has a track record of leading agile, award winning teams at PLOS and Digital Science and received numerous awards and recognition for her work in scholarly publishing.
After hours, outside of AIP Publishing, she is a free-speech activist and co-author of the Declaration to Defend Research from US Government Censorship alongside the team at DefendResearch.org. She is also long-form improviser in the DC comedy scene and rants on all things #scholcomm, politics, free speech, and comedy on Bluesky @RouhiRoo.bsky.social.
Speakers
Shayn Awl-sop
Shane is the Publishing Development Manager at eLife, where he helps drive promotion and adoption of open access publishing agreements with institutions, funders, and society partners. He also supports outreach and community initiatives, and has helped socialise the eLife model across a global network of researchers and institutions.
Scott Delman
Scott Delman is the Director of Publications at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s leading society in the field of Computing. In this role, he has overall responsibility for ACM’s Publications program, editorial and publishing strategy, sales and marketing activities, publishing policy development, research integrity initiatives, and open access strategy and implementation.
Christine Orr
Christine Orr serves as BioOne’s Senior Director of Business and Community Development, driving strategic initiatives designed to advance the mission of sustainably maximizing access to scientific research. Her portfolio includes leading efforts to achieve revenue targets, driving corporate communications and raising the profile of BioOne among strategic communities, and supporting organizational transformation via the creation of Open Access pathways and product diversification. With more than three decades of experience working across mission-driven and for-profit organizations, Christine has deep connections in the scholarly publishing and library communities. Christine holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and an MLS from Long Island University. She has also earned an Executive Scholar Certificate in Nonprofit Management from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
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