06/24/2022

Striking the Right Chord with Millennial and GenZ Researchers

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Editor’s Note: This guest post is by Nikesh Gosalia, the senior vice president – global academic & publisher relations at Cactus Communications.

At the 44^th Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) annual meeting, I had the privilege of not only meeting my industry colleagues and peers after more than 2 years, but also hosting a panel discussion called, “Expanding Membership, Reach, and Impact: Striking the right chord with Millennials and Gen Z researchers.” The session was inspired by a whitepaper called “Striking the right chord with early-career researchers: A digital-first guide for academic societies and publishers” that was released a few months ago by Impact Science, a brand of Cactus Communications. I was joined by Charlie Rapple, co-founder at Kudos (and Scholarly Kitchen Chef), and Jennifer Regala, director of publications/executive editor at American Urological Association. In her last post here, Rapple set the context very nicely, defining the Millennial and GenZ researcher personas and what they look for in the content they consume. We conducted a few live audience polls during our session, which threw up some interesting responses that I will share here. Although only a small number of delegates participated, wider discussions and web research suggest they are not unrepresentative of the wider sector.

In the Harbingers project — a longitudinal study of “digital natives” — researchers who identified themselves as “early career researchers” (ECRs) were 21–40 years old, that is, Millennials and Generation Z. In the US, these two demographics make up 48 percent of all workforces. We asked SSP delegates at the session whether their organizations have a strategy in place to attract new ECRs (as authors, reviewers and so on).

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.