Organizational Resilience through Collaboration: A 2026 NISO Training Series

Scope

From research infrastructure to consortia, collaborative models provide creative solutions to shared challenges, helping to scale capacity and reduce risk for all stakeholders. This four-week virtual training course will provide a practical guide to the pros and cons of cross-stakeholder collaboration in scholarly communications and its importance for organizational resilience. 

Participants will learn about the importance of establishing shared goals and values, ensuring effective communications, getting and maintaining buy-in from the community/ies being served, and measuring progress. They will hear from the leaders of two successful, community-led collaborations –a library consortium and ORCID, the de facto global provider of open researcher identifiers. Speakers will share key challenges and opportunities that their organizations have faced, and some of the lessons learned on their paths to resilience through collaboration.

This course is designed to be interactive, with participants learning through doing and discussing, as well as through listening. It will help attendees understand not just why community-led collaborations are important for resilience in scholarly communications overall, but also how they can use the lessons learned to improve resilience in their own organizations. 

• Week 1: Building an organizational collaboration toolkit
• Week 2: Case study one: ORCID (Guest lecturer Chris Shillum, Executive Director)
• Week 3: Case study two: [TBD]
• Week 4: Organizational resilience through collaboration, in practice

Training Facilitator

Alice Meadows, Independent Consultant and Founder, MoreBrains Cooperative

Alice Meadows has been working in scholarly publishing and communications for around 40 years, and has been consulting since 2020 (as a founder of MoreBrains Cooperative and now as an independent consultant). She held a series of increasingly senior positions in communications and marketing at Blackwell Publishing and Wiley before moving into research infrastructure—first as Director of Community Engagement at ORCID and then in the same role for NISO. 

Alice is a skilled communicator who has facilitated events and discussions for a wide range of organizations, including COS (Center for Open Science), CRKN (Canadian Research Knowledge Network), IPLC (Ivy Plus Library Confederation), and UKRI (UK Research and Innovation).

Course Duration and Dates

The series consists of four (4) weekly segments, each lasting 90 minutes. Specific dates are:

• June 4, 11, 18, 25

Each session will be recorded and links to that archived recording will be disseminated to course registrants within 2 business days of the close of the specific session.