We are pleased to welcome Todd Toler to Ithaka S+R as the inaugural practice lead for a new area of focused work on artificial intelligence in scholarly communication, beginning June 8.

AI is rapidly reshaping how knowledge is created, discovered, and disseminated. Across higher education and the research ecosystem, leaders are grappling with how to harness its potential while preserving the core values that make scholarship trustworthy.

The new practice area is grounded in a simple but powerful idea: that AI in research and publishing must be “scholar-ready,” aligned with expectations for integrity, provenance, rights awareness, and transparency.

Todd brings deep experience in STM (science, technical, and medical) publishing, focused on building and scaling platforms that support research and discovery while navigating relationships among publishers, libraries, infrastructure providers, and researchers. He was until recently vice president of product and market strategy for Wiley’s largest business, Research and Learning, where he was responsible for market analysis, platform strategy and product management. Most recently, he spearheaded Wiley’s AI Gateway strategy, which positioned the company at the forefront of the industry’s AI transition.

His career at Wiley began in 2007, when he was hired as the company’s first director of user experience, the job being to understand how researchers actually experienced scholarly publishing and fix what was broken. Todd helped launch Wiley’s open access journals program in 2010, which became the company’s core growth engine; initiated and grew scholarly society partnerships including with the American Geophysical Union and Cochrane; and drove Wiley’s acquisition of Atypon in 2016. Among other field-building efforts, he co-founded GetFTR, the shared infrastructure service that routes researchers to authoritative, entitled versions of research content across publisher platforms, and has served on the boards of Crossref, CLOCKSS, and the Friends of the National Library of Medicine.

The new practice area will add to a growing body of work across Ithaka S+R on AI in higher education and research. For the past three years, we have supported institutions in navigating the AI transition in teaching and learning, the research enterprise, and library operations, and have led AI literacy initiatives engaging dozens of colleges and universities. As practice lead, Todd will extend this work into the scholarly publishing ecosystem, where many of the same questions around trust and responsible adoption are taking shape.

It also represents a renewed and expanded focus for Ithaka S+R on STM publishers and the broader scholarly communication ecosystem. While we have long engaged in this space, AI has made it more central, and this effort deepens our engagement with publishers and tool providers while drawing on the perspectives of librarians, researchers, and institutional partners to define how AI products can meet the standards of scholarship.

More broadly, Todd will collaborate closely with colleagues across our program areas and ITHAKA Labs, further strengthening how we connect research, strategic initiative leadership, and innovation to broaden access to postsecondary education, improve student and workforce outcomes, and advance scholarship.

We are excited to welcome Todd, and we look forward to working with partners across the scholarly communication ecosystem to shape how AI strengthens trust, access, and discovery in research and publishing.