What's Next for STM? A Publishing Insider's Perspective Featuring David Haber

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About the Publisherspeak Podcast

Real stories. Honest reflections. Conversations about leadership, change, and the work that shapes our world.

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Hosted by Sowmya Mahadevan, Chief Orchestrator at Kriyadocs, The Publisherspeak Podcast features interviews with people making meaningful moves—inside and outside the world of scholarly publishing. From academic leaders and publishing professionals to coaches and change-makers, each episode goes beyond job titles to explore personal journeys and the mindsets behind impactful work.

In this episode

‍Host Sowmya Mahadevan sits down with David Haber, Director of Publishing Operations at the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), to explore his 20+ year journey in STM publishing.

David brings a unique dual perspective, having worked on both the vendor and publisher sides of the industry. At ASM, he leads key areas including metadata, peer review, production, and publication strategy.

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Dive into the full conversation below or watch the episode here.

Full conversation

Sowmya: Hi, David. Welcome to The Publisherspeak Podcast. It's so good to have you on board here. Now, you've had a fantastic journey in STM Publishing. I mean, you've worked both on the vendor side and you've worked on the publisher side, and currently you're leading the publishing operations at the American Society for Microbiology. So, we'd like to hear a little bit about your journey in this industry. How did you get to where you are now?

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‍David: Okay, that's a really good question. It's a long, windy path, and I feel like I should talk a little bit about before I got to the vendor side of STM Publishing because it shapes everything I do. I was originally a apprentice cabinet maker and machinist in a CNC lathe shop making jet engine parts. And that exposed me to this idea of efficiency in production and solving problems in creative and unique ways.

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And when I entered CAM Publishing, I was an editorial assistant at a publisher servicer servicing house. So basically a printer. And I had always loved words. And I came from like a machinist factory directly into this new field in which I didn't understand a word that was being spoken. I didn't, couldn't comprehend the, the science that I was reading and supposed to be editing.

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But they saw something in me and took a chance and they didn't know what to do with me. I entered this industry with a job title, but really no job description. So, they sort of pointed me in directions. Hey, we need to track things. Can you help us? And we built an access database, old school, to track manuscripts as a temporary measure. And when I showed my supervisors that I could handle that with confidence, they started passing me manuscripts. Because when I interviewed, I actually interviewed to be a copy editor. And I was so bad at it, I couldn't spell, I couldn't do anything. But again, they gave me a chance.

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They started feeding manuscripts, I picked it up and I immediately recognized my own faults, my inability to spell. So, I started helping others create word macros to make things go faster, make things easier. And very soon I moved from editorial assistant, a copy editor, to assistant production manager. And I worked my way through for about 15 years doing different roles in, in that publishing servicing house, experiencing things from a vendor perspective which is completely different from non-profit society which I work for now. The perspectives are different, the, the goals are actually different as well and that helps me in my current role because I see the ugly underbelly of how to get things done quickly and it's really important to recognize when you're working with vendors and partners, they're in that active stew of trying to produce work. It's taught me a lot about understanding different perspectives and keeping the goal in mind as you do that. That's something I've really embraced over the last, I don't know, eight to ten years.

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Sowmya: That's quite fascinating. I actually did not know that you started off as a machinist. I think that's something. But it looks like process driving efficiency, understanding how systems work has sort of been the theme in your life. I think you're sort of bringing that to your current role at ASM as well. Would you?

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‍David: Yeah, 100%. When I joined ASM, I joined as a sort of XML person. They put me in a little room. I got to stare at XML all day long, looking at structure and trying to solve problems through improved structuring of documents, and I was always in the background.

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But my path at ASM was similar to the path I had at the publishing servicing house because they quickly pulled me into other things and it, my role expanded as the industry expanded and ASM tried to make changes to keep up. So, because of my background in XML and sort of systems, we had to become more efficient at ASM. We had to find ways to go faster with the same high quality standards that we embraced when publishing science. And it's been a slow, steady process of looking at the end product, the goal and trying to systematically move changes back in the process to make it as smooth and easy as possible for everyone. So, change management has become like the thing I embrace the most at ASM.

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And it's not easy, it's very difficult. It's one thing that changes system; it's another thing to change behavior. And it's a very slow and collaborative process that you have to listen and you have to just be patient.

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‍Sowmya: Absolutely. I think change management is a topic I do want to talk to you about further in the podcast.

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‍David: Okay.  

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‍Sowmya: But I'm, but you know, you have had some sort of like an accidental entry into scholarly publishing. So, is that something that you really love about this industry? It's a very niche industry. You know, it's difficult to attract talent. Is that something that you really love about what we do in scholarly publishing?

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‍David: Yeah, I love the puzzle of it. Because on the surface this is really easy. We are trying to advance science by communicating that science. There's nothing easier than that. Put words out there, share it with people and make sure that science is understood and read. It's a simple, simple idea. But the complexity and all the moving parts specific to STM publishing is fascinating to me because of the way the industry has shaped and grown over the past, you know, 50, 60 years.

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It makes it challenging to keep up with the current fast paced technological changes because by nature, science is slow, STM publishing is slow. And at the same time you're faced with, well, we have to figure this out quickly, so how can we do that? So, the puzzle of it all just fascinates me. Like early in my career, I dreamed of being an editor at Penguin or DAW or Science Fiction Tour, like one of those places, but it wouldn't have been the right fit because that's just step that focuses on the skills I know I don't have, which is editing skills. I'm a horrendous editor and, but I'm a good puzzle solver and STM is like perfect for that kind of mentality.

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Sowmya: That's very interesting. I think as you have seen the industry evolve over the years, the skill sets that somebody needed to have within this industry, say 10, 15 years ago, is probably very different from the skill sets that you would be looking for as you are hiring, say, new talent into ASM. I did see some new posts that you had put on LinkedIn looking for talent. So, is there a specific set of skill sets or is there any advice that you would give to somebody who wants to enter into this industry with respect to the mindset that they should have coming in and what to expect?  

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‍David: Yeah, when I started, this industry was the people that were being hired were detail oriented, very focused on finding errors because everything revolved about, around quality and copy editing when I started, when, when we hire now, we don't look for those skills. We expect them, but they're not the priority. The priority is flexibility and the ability to collaborate in, in a way that is both empowering and creative and what I mean by that is you have to be able to digest multiple different perspectives in order to solve the problems in STM because they're all balanced in different ways.

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Whenever I'm hiring, I try to look for people who have that kind of balancing skill and the ability to take on different perspectives and balance them and shift the way they think. Sure, 100% being detail oriented and being able to find errors and those kind of skills are important, but those are skills we look more for behavioral attributes now, which is a little different.

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‍Sowmya: Absolutely. I think just a while back you talked about leading change and change management, which is something that you are passionate about given your focus on continuous improvement, given your focus from a systems oriented thinking. I think that's what you're talking about when you're looking for behavioral skills, skill sets that you would be looking for when you're hiring people. So, change management seems like something that you're very passionate about. And I think I get your point.

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In today's world, you have to be very good at driving change. You have to be very good at collaborating to find a better way of doing things than what worked, say yesterday. But talk to us a little bit about your experience driving change, specifically within ASM, but also generally within different areas in your career.

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‍David: Yeah, I failed a lot and I remember those failures and they.

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‍Sowmya: Those are not failings, those are lessons that we learned.

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‍David: Yes, lessons. Okay, fine, you are absolutely right. They're lessons learned, but they're really important lessons and I feel like I learn them every day. Something new, something different. Especially when it comes to trying to manage change across an organization.

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When I first came to ASM, I was always focused on XML, which meant the final product. And any sort of change we implemented was backwards. It dealt with how things appeared online and we trickled it down. And it meant that we didn't have to implement change involving people as much. It was always more systematic and programmatic.  

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And over the past two or three years we've had massive change across ASM in terms of how we approach our journals and how we approach growing our journals and how we approach publishing in general. And that has been a massive learning experience for me. It's one thing to say one is collaborative and one listens, but it's another thing to actually do it. And it's really, really hard. It takes an incredible amount of patience, which I frankly don't always have.

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And I'm constantly reminding myself to step back and just listen and hear what people are saying. Because change is always about fear. And it's fear of the unknown, fear of making a mistake, and helping people understand that no one's going to die in what we do. Yes, it's important. Yes, we're going to make mistakes, but that's okay.

If we can get over that hump, then we can think about this change that we're trying to implement and then being flexible enough to recognize that actually this is the wrong change we're trying to make, we need to do something else. So both flexibility, listening, and this sort of idea of collaboration as a moving entity rather than a static sort of activity, you do in one meeting and you listen and then you move on. It's been an interesting three years in particular.  

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Sowmya: So I'm going to ask you to share perhaps some examples of changes you have driven at ASM, because I think it would be very interesting for our listeners to hear about and these could be small changes that you've driven or like larger organizational changes that you have been at the forefront of. But, you know, are there any examples that you would be able to share about some of these change initiatives you have pushed?  

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David: Yeah, about three years ago at ASM, four years ago now, maybe I can't remember. It was during the pandemic. So, it's hard. We as a group decided that our current structure at ASM wasn't suitable to where we had to get. We had a lot of internal resources.  

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We did our own copy editing in house. We had production editors trying to manage the whole production process while also maintaining relationships with editors in chief and editors and growing journals. And, and their attention was fragmented. And like, it's. It's really hard to find people who can do both those things really well, manage production and also manage relationships with scientists.  

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It's not easy. So, we decided that we were going to, in an effort to grow the journals over time, we were going to split our structure into two kinds of pieces. More operational and then editorial growth. And it's been a challenging three years because we created a bunch of new positions that weren't defined.  

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We took a bunch of old positions and redefined them. So, people moving into the undefined roles had difficulties just Knowing what to do. People in the newly defined roles were so used to what they did that and the jobs changed and it was slow and hard. One thing we did right away. I took over production and we knew that we were going to consider new partners in our production processes. And because we knew that we were able to step back with people who remained on the production team and really think about the things we did every day.

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What we didn't feel like we needed hands on, in the weeds kind of activity anymore, where we felt like, no, this actually makes sense to keep because it's more of an author service. How can we help our authors?

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And so, what we ended up doing is what we, we found a new partner, Kriyadocs. We are systematically trying to improve and change our processes through collaboration with you as a partner with our production editors, as a partner with our editorial development team. Now because they have different goals than just straight production. So, how can we manage all these things together and move forward? So, it's been a really interesting.

It's again, it's a puzzle. Like how do we solve this puzzle with the idea that we actually at the core just want to publish scientific content? So, that's one thing we've been working on for the past three years. But that's a big thing, a small thing.

I'm going to tell a little story if that's okay, because accessibility has been a passion of mine in the background from my days in XML land. And, and one thing that we did is we knew there's changing compliance laws both in the EU and in the United States. So, we had to solve this alt text problem. The problem being like, how can we produce something that's worthwhile, that is useful without breaking production processes and over taxing either our production staff, partner production staff, or spending oodles of money trying to solve this problem, which we couldn't.

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So, we took the approach of what is our long term goal? Our long term goal is to provide explanations about figures in a format that is useful to people who either can't see or have difficulty with images. Right? And if we want to do that with value, how can we accomplish that? Now our natural instinct is to go. Well, let's put it all back on the author. Because the authors, they're the scientists, they must know how to do this.

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But we know from experience that they don't. They, they're not, they don't use E readers, they don't know what alt text is and how it's used. And to be honest, neither did we. So, what we decided to do was build a process around messing messaging to authors. This is what we are doing.

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This is why we are doing it. Please read this, review it, see if it makes sense to you, add any corrections. And because we're doing it this way, we feel like in the long term we'll be able to move this process earlier. We're like teaching the authors at the same time as teaching ourselves with the hope that they can take this on themselves or we can find a better technological solution later. But people are learning and we are producing something that actually has value rather than just saying something like figure one as alt text.

So, something small like that is how we're trying to approach everything at ASM as a opportunity to learn something new, to help teach our authors and to move processes forward that way, rather than just sort of doing things blindly where we just throw change at a wall and hope it sticks.

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Sowmya: So, David, I think those are fantastic examples of how you have driven change through, but I just want to come back to it. It's like you said, it's all about the people. And I think running another business over here, I do realize that it's so important to take people along. How you communicate about the change and how you champion the change makes a lot of difference about it being a success or it failing, it fizzling out.

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So, are there any books that you would recommend or are there any mentors that you have looked up to or podcasts that you listen to? Because this is not a trivial thing. And I certainly don't want to look at it as, oh, let's make a change and it's not going to happen. It's a very hard process, like you said.

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David: Yeah, I constantly struggle with this. I read all kinds of things, you know, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, or whatever. I've read all those books. I find that the books and podcasts that help me the most are the ones that tell me stories. So, I really appreciated Loonshots.

I feel like it's a story that struck me and it's a story about embracing grand ideas but finding a way to implement them in the face of failure. Right. And I feel like it, it's this change management piece as it relates to people is something I'm constantly reevaluating myself. And I feel like the key is making sure you're listening and you're hearing what all your Collaborators are saying to me, that's the key. And I don't always do that.

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And it's hard to do that when you're in the middle of this grand change. You're trying to reach this goal and, and the only way you can bring people along is listening to them and making sure that one. You're all on the same page. That's a hard thing in itself, like getting on the same page, making sure that the goal is clear to everyone.

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But even when you're on the same page, like making sure you are going as slow as the slowest person, that is, that is one of the keys. You can't, you can't just speed ahead. Even if you, you have a team of five people and four rushing ahead, you have to slow down for that fifth person to make sure they are carried along with you. And recognizing that the strengths of each person is critical. Not everyone's good at everything and not everyone wants to be good at wherever you're taking them and that's okay. They have something to offer. You just have to find it and help them along with you.

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‍Sowmya: I feel like I need to set up a longer conversation with you, learn a lot more about change management and leadership because it's very fascinating what you're talking about, but so true. It's through listening that you will drive change. It's very contrary to what a lot of leaders think that you have to keep communicating about the change. You have to just keep bombarding people with respect, with all the information about the change. But that's just so counterproductive.  

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You have to listen, you have to take the slowest people along with you. I think that's some true nuggets of valuable information for me to take back to Kriyadocs for sure. So, coming back from your personal experience as a leader, just looking at the industry, the overall industry landscape, are there new developments that you're really excited about? Let me step back and ask you this question. What are the top three things about the industry that keep you worried and what are the top three challenges that you're actually excited about and you're looking forward to how that shapes what we all do within this industry.  

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David: I'm trying to decide if I should go with the challenges first or the excitement first? Hard. I'm going to start with one of the challenges.

To me, AI is a massive challenge to online publishing. What is Online publishing? When you have large language models feeding search engines, what does that mean? What does it mean as a publisher to my platform, what does it mean to do? What does it mean when one defines what a published article is? Like, what is that thing?

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That's like the biggest challenge, like trying to find what this means and anticipate it, because it's going to be a fast change when it happens. And we know that STM publishing is relatively slow to change. So how can you anticipate and prepare for that kind of thing? I'm really worried about what it means as a publisher to have an online platform in five years. Like, I don't know what it means.  

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I think some truly exciting things and it's, somewhat related to this because things are more interconnected than ever.

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Helping scientists build communities and within their subsets of whatever their research is and wrapping those in the community in a journal or something like a journal. That is really exciting to me, just thinking about what a journal is in a new way and how that can help move science forward. What it means for editor in chief now to be in charge of a journal, but not as a journal, as a published object, but as a community, a community that has peer reviewers in it, a community that has editors in it, a community that maybe libraries subscribe to support. Like, that's really exciting to me, that dynamic. Like, it's different now. The journal isn't a thing where people subscribe and read. It's an online representation of a community. So, what does that mean and how can we enable it and what sorts of new, exciting things can come out of that? That's what really excites me about this.

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Sowmya: That is such an interesting thought and an idea. And if I can look back at, if I can rephrase that, what you're talking about is rather than talking about a PDF or a journal as an object, you're looking at the industry moving back to the people and it's more. Becoming actually more people centric. So perhaps this thing about new technology that's coming in is actually going to make us all go back to the people who make that happen, whether it's the authors, it's the, the researchers and figuring out new ways to sort of bring them together and have more conversations and have more access to information and collaboration within that particular community. So, that's such an interesting thought.

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So, the role of the publisher, the role of the journal could morph. And I Think you're absolutely right. It's probably something that's coming our way, and as an industry, we have to be ready to receive it and be at the forefront of that change. And, yeah, I think navigating that change is probably what all of us within this industry have to figure out how to do. Yeah, go ahead.

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David: Well, I was just going to piggyback on that because to me, it seems all the new tools and all the new technology need to be built around that idea of community building. What. And focusing on what early career researchers expect and how they expect science to move forward. It's really funny.

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I heard an editor tell me a story once, and it really struck me. We were talking about preprints. I have opinions about preprints that I'll keep to myself for now. I see why they exist. But this editor said something to me that was very, very, very striking.

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He said he no longer volunteers to review manuscripts because one of the drivers for him to review manuscripts was early access to research in that community. And when everything's just posted on a preprint and you can just go look at that and you have your bots going out and your alerts triggered to, like, BiorXiv or whatever, what's the reason to review anymore? And I was like, I, at first, I was like, that can't be true, because he was telling it in the abstract and he said, no, it is true, because that's what I do. And I don't necessarily like generalizing to the, to the, to the extreme, but there's something in that story of the untold consequences of something that on the surface seems to make sense and how that something has contributed to the fracturing of the community you're trying to build. Like, I'm not saying that's the cause of this peer review crisis, but there's something to that. And that single story points to, like, where this industry might need to go. Right. It really struck me that story.

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Sowmya: No, I think, that's very telling. It's very telling as to what, what are some of the changes that are happening in front of our eyes that probably are not really something that we know about, we are able to comprehend. So, you talked about community building. Are there any special initiatives that you are driving at ASM, or you would like to drive at ASM towards this sort of like this new normal or the new way in which you look forward to this industry operating?  ‍

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David: Because I'm a pseudo technology person. I'll take it from that lens and leave the community building piece to our editorial teams. So, from a strict technology perspective, I'm really interested in stripping down what peer review systems do to the simplest kernel of what we actually want, which is a place where people can collaborate. Right. That's the simplest.

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That's what peer review is, right. And then thinking about okay, if that's what it is. We know these digital first early career people use mobile phones. We know many people don't use computers anymore.  

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So mobile peer review, audio peer review ways to make the concept of volunteering to something larger than yourself valued again. Like how can you add value to it and how can you make it easy in the context of how people actually do things? I think that that's what I'm really interested in. Like these ways and systems that can marry how younger people are currently thinking about their daily activity, how people in different countries use technology. It's different than what we do in the US, right?

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It's just the mobilization of small devices we have not accounted for. And all our solutions so far are sort of not mobile first solutions. So that's something I think we're going to have to embrace and figure out in an elegant easy way, not in one of these complex tack on, add another piece of duct tape to the current shaky system way.

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Because the tools and systems should be there to support and make easy the activities the community needs to support itself. And right now I don't think that's the case.

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Sowmya: You know, absolutely. I think, with the new generation sort of being digital first, the whole concept of information has undergone a lot of changes. And I think the industry which deals with information also needs to morph everything that it does in its not just the final output or it's not just the input.

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But I completely get your point. I think there is a sort of a need to step back and look at the whole, everything that we're doing with a radically different lens and see how it would look and sort of vision and imagine a new future and then look at how you can walk the steps towards that. I think that's wonderfully put. So, David, it's been such a lovely time talking to you. I think I've certainly learned a lot from how to handle change.

I think that's certainly a lot of takeaways. You shared some of the books that you have read, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I think we will share all those book suggestions in the transcript of the podcast, but those are real actionable takeaways for me. Also running another organization and looking at driving change here. You also spoke about where you see the scholarly publishing industry going and what it would look like, say even as recent as like five years down the line.

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Where do you see this going with all the changes that are coming about from a technological perspective? Are there any last thoughts or any other things that you would like to share from the your side?

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David: Just that I am constantly amazed and surprised each day by the new things that are happening and just trying to keep up. And if, if people earlier in their career remember that this, this is a very flexible industry and, and you can find a spot in it. If you had told me 20 years ago that I'd be doing this, I would have been surprised.  

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But it fits my personality and I found a spot and I think this industry is really inclusive this that way because there is so much change. There's always something that you can contribute and it's really fun.

Sowmya: Wonderful. Thank you once again, David, for being on The Publisherspeak Podcast and thank you so much for all your insights.

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‍David: Thank you.  

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