In an invited review article out this week, Dr. Robyn Crook discusses recent progress in cephalopod welfare and husbandry, and outlines a strategy for engaging the public and other stakeholders in discussions of cephalopod use in research, regulatory oversight, and cephalopod welfare. Social license to operate (SLO) is a conceptual framework for examining how a given activity or industry is perceived and evaluated by external observers, whether they have a material interest in the activity or not. This framework has been applied already to commercial aquaculture, where interest in cephalopods is growing, and recreational animal use, including fishing. The application of this well-validated framework to cephalopod research can help structure joint effort from researchers to work to improve animal welfare and community engagement with our science at the same time. This article is currently paywalled and only available as an accepted proof, but will come out in an upcoming, cephalopod-themed special issue of Integrative and Comparative Biology.