How ALPSP is Supporting Growth in the Scholarly Publishing Industry
with Meera Tailor,
Membership Manager,
The Association Of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP)
with Meera Tailor,
Membership Manager,
The Association Of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP)
The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) represents not-for-profit organisations in scholarly and professional publishing worldwide. With over 300 member organisations and a mission to advance academic communication, ALPSP fosters best practice, training, and representation across a vibrant global network.
One way ALPSP brings this mission to life is through its mentoring programme—a powerful initiative designed to remove barriers, build connections, and support professional growth across the publishing community.
Before Mentorloop, ALPSP’s mentoring was a manual, spreadsheet-driven pilot, coordinated by a volunteer working group with little visibility into who was progressing or how. The push to formalise it came from members themselves: as publishing went more remote post-COVID, people had less visibility of colleagues even within their own teams, let alone across the wider industry. ALPSP built its scheme around three goals — knowledge-sharing across the membership, international connection, and removing barriers to participation through equity and inclusion.
"We recognised a growing need for structured support and connection. Our members wanted more opportunities to learn and share across organisations and geographies. A formal mentoring programme was the answer.”
The first iteration of ALPSP’s mentoring scheme in 2022 relied heavily on manual work—spreadsheets, a working group for matches, and significant coordinator time. With Mentorloop, ALPSP has transformed the programme into a scalable, efficient, and inclusive initiative.
The programme has scaled from a 66-person pilot to more than 300 participants this year, spanning 17 countries and 90+ organisations. The biggest structural shift has been moving from an annual cohort model to an always-on programme — people join when the timing is right for them, not on a fixed intake.
This year ALPSP also introduced self-matching, giving participants more ownership over who they connect with, alongside Smart Match and manual matching for those who want more support. Quality scores have climbed, historically at 4.56–4.58, now tracking at 4.6 and peaking at 4.66 — the highest on record, with a 4.59 lifetime average across 558 total mentor-mentee connections.
Other tangible signs of impact are:
At an in-person ALPSP networking event, a mentor and mentee who’d been matched through the programme met face-to-face for the first time. The mentee sought Meera out to say how much the relationship had meant to her career — and brought her mentor flowers and a card. Meera later received a note from her: with 15+ years in publishing, the mentee called the ALPSP scheme one of the most rewarding professional experiences of her career, crediting her mentor’s guidance with reigniting her passion for the industry. Watching her mentor’s reaction — visibly moved, realising the scale of impact she’d had — is the moment Meera points to as proof that goes beyond any platform metric.
Meera credits the matching toolkit — Smart Match, Self-Match, and Manual Matching — as the single biggest lever for scale. ALPSP built its own matching criteria into the platform to ensure cross-organisation pairings aligned with programme goals.
Self-matching alone has cut review-and-approval time significantly. Altogether, ALPSP estimates Mentorloop has saved 600+ hours of administration, a ~66% reduction in admin time, freeing the team to focus on strategy and connection instead of logistics and admin.
For Meera, the difference is clear:
"Before Mentorloop, we spent days trying to match people manually in spreadsheets. Now the algorithm ensures meaningful matches, while tools like group loops, goal setting, and integrated feedback make the programme more engaging and impactful.”
The platform also allows ALPSP to track diversity, engagement, and impact—turning anecdotal success stories into measurable outcomes that can be shared with members, leadership, and funders.
Rather than more structural change, ALPSP’s focus now is sustaining momentum: keeping the programme vibrant as it matures, encouraging mentees to progress into mentoring roles, and embedding a culture where mentoring is seen as ongoing professional development, not a one-off. They’re also encouraging participants to build their own “personal advisory boards” of multiple mentors across career stages.
Looking ahead, ALPSP aims to deepen mentoring’s role in scholarly publishing. Plans include:
“Mentoring has become a cornerstone of our member benefits,” says Meera. “It’s not just about professional growth—it’s about building a stronger, more connected, and more inclusive publishing community.”
Membership Manager, ALPSP
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Through our mentorship programme, we're gaining new members and also raising engagement with our current members. And it's actually cited as one of the primary reasons that many members join our association.
– Meera Tailor, Membership Manager, ALPSP
What Role Does Equity and Equality Play in Your Mentoring Program?
The right mentoring program should level the playing field to empower entire cohorts of people: workplaces, member associations, social groups and educational institutions. Equality should be a cherished value so that every individual can thrive—whoever they are, whatever their background, however they worship or whomever they love. But we can’t arrive at equality without it’s often forgotten partner, equity.
What does a Mentoring Program Coordinator do?
Being a Mentoring Program Coordinator is an incredibly rewarding experience that positively impacts the lives of many. And while mentoring programs don’t fully run themselves (even though Mentorloop can do a great deal of the heavy lifting!), they do require a point of contact that can steer the program in the right direction for the organisation that is running one.
Building Quality Feedback Into Mentoring Relationships
This is Part 8 of our 10-part series on the 10 Key Qualities and Habits of a Highly Effective Mentor.
In this post, we’ll look at how mentors can successfully build quality feedback into their mentoring. Quality feedback is priceless because it clarifies expectations, helps people learn from their mistakes, and builds confidence. It also allows mentees to more effectively take what their mentors say and turn it into action.
