Brainstorming Solutions and Building Connections at NISO Plus 2026 in Baltimore
Last month, professionals from across the information community gathered in Baltimore to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing scholarly communications: leveraging AI's potential while using it sustainably and responsibly, maintaining and strengthening scholarly infrastructure, improving the peer review process, and building trust in research, to name just a few. The conference is designed to seed potential solutions to these challenges, with sessions incorporating time for discussion and brainstorming, and you can check out this month's Letter from the Executive Director to review some of the many ideas generated.
The energy on the last day of the conference, especially following Board Chair Jonathan Clark's lively, interactive closing session, felt very positive to NISO staff members. Not everyone is comfortable sharing negative feedback in person, however, and we're always interested in reviewing what respondents had to say in the post-event survey. Now that the results are in, with over 30% of attendees responding, we can take a closer look at what participants really thought of the meeting.
The conference truly brought together a wide range of stakeholders from the community, with most segments well represented. Technology and service providers accounted for 29% of respondents, librarians, 25%, and publishers, 20%. Consultancies, government agencies, and researchers were also represented in the survey. Many participants are repeat attendees, with around 70% of those who responded having attended a past NISO Plus conference.
When asked for their main reason for attending NISO Plus, over 30% responded that the meeting content sounded relevant to their organization, and indeed, the conference program was highly rated. All aspects, from the pre-conference program through the closing session, received a score of 4.0 or higher (on a scale from 1–5). Respondents particularly enjoyed the three pre-conferences ("Keeping the Robots in Line: Provisioning AI Access to Content," "Tracking Usage in the Age of AI," and JATS-Con 2026), scoring them 4.5 or more, and the Miles Conrad Lecture, delivered by 2026 awardee Alondra Nelson, received a score of 4.8. Attendees also praised the breakout sessions, with the following receiving the highest number of votes for most valuable:
- Discovering the Future Discovery Pathways: Understanding the Journeys, Stumbling Blocks, and Solutions for Humans (and Machines)
- Better Together: How Diverse Researcher Identifier Systems Can Work Together to Meet Community-Specific Needs while Achieving the Goal of Universal Interoperability
- Headless Scholarly Infrastructure: The Hard Questions about Access, Identity, and Standards Nobody's Answering Yet
- Measuring Usage and Making Value Out of AI Services
- Sustainable Approaches to AI Development
During the closing plenary, which used Mentimeter to gather audience feedback in real time, emcee Jonathan Clark asked participants to say in one word how they were leaving the conference. In the word cloud generated by the responses to this question, one of the largest words was "connected." We were delighted to see this, as one of our main goals for the conference is to bring the community together to share knowledge and collaborate on solutions to common problems. The post-event survey revealed similar reactions to the meeting. Here are a few examples of how respondents answered the question, What did you like best about the NISO Plus conference?
- "The aspect I appreciated most was the collaborative atmosphere."
- "The connections to others who may have different POVs and are working on similar problems"
- "The community!"
Of course, some respondents offered constructive criticism of the conference. Some recommended changes to the program such as sharing additional information about attendees. Others suggested incorporating more content on accessibility and integrity controls for AI. There were also requests to make the NISO working group updates a plenary session, to avoid competition with the breakouts. Our NISO Plus Planning Committee will be sure to review the post-event survey and incorporate this feedback into our 2027 plans where possible. In the meantime, we extend heartfelt thanks to all the speakers, attendees, volunteers, and sponsors who helped to make our meeting a success. We hope to see you in Baltimore next February—we'll announce our 2027 dates in the coming weeks.