Where scholarly publishing’s next ideas get built
The Silverchair Lab is where we build the tools scholarly publishing will rely on next, working alongside publishers from first prototype through beta and general availability. The way research is discovered, evaluated, and used is shifting quickly, and the Lab exists to meet those shifts early. We move fast with our clients, putting working prototypes into real publishing workflows, inviting early access and beta partners to shape what gets built, and carrying the ideas that prove themselves all the way to market, as we have with the Discovery Bridge and the Editor AI Console. AI is at the center of much of that work today, but the Lab takes on whatever technology the next challenge calls for.
Read more about these offerings and follow our progress via blog updates below.
Agentic search pathways
Discovery Bridge and Research Bridge enable researchers to access scholarly content directly through AI assistants while preserving subscription boundaries and institutional access controls. Using Model Context Protocol (MCP), Discovery Bridge connects AI assistants to a single publisher’s full-text content, while Research Bridge makes content from multiple publishers available through one shared connector, with each publisher keeping its brand, access policies, and attribution. Integration with existing entitlement systems extends value to current users and unlocks new revenue through consumption-based licensing and corporate content bundles.
Find What Matters, Faster
Dynamic Discovery transforms how researchers connect with scholarly content on the Silverchair Platform. It delivers more relevant results more quickly while strengthening publishers’ brands and showcasing the full value of their collections. Built on advanced RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) technology, Dynamic Discovery understands researchers’ questions in context. Instead of relying on perfect keywords, users can ask questions naturally and receive the most relevant articles, books, and conference papers with clear explanations of why each source was selected.
Editorial efficiency & integrity
The ScholarOne Editor AI Console helps editorial teams screen manuscripts more efficiently, delivering tailored summaries of methodology, ethical considerations, and publication readiness that reflect what matters most to their editorial community. Complete prompt transparency and control means you understand exactly how AI supports your editorial process, ensuring each journal’s unique standards guide the analysis.
Evaluate & Experiment, Together
Silverchair has expanded our successful AI Playground to ScholarOne Manuscripts for active experimentation with editors and publishers. We’re working directly with a select group of development partners to explore areas of potential AI support that are most impactful for editors and editorial office staff throughout the publishing process. This user-friendly environment allows publishers and editors to discover, stress-test, and hone when and where to leverage AI in their workflows and informs Silverchair’s future product development.
Participating publishers will make their content available to AI research assistants through a single connector, with each keeping its own brand, access rules, and independence while expanding their reach. (Charlottesville,...
We’re pleased to announce a new whitepaper on publishing analytics: Stop Measuring What’s Easy. This comprehensive guide explores trends in usage and peer review reporting through the lens of the current...
The leading AI systems can now conduct sophisticated investigations of a scholarly corpus — multi-step research that would take a skilled researcher hours or days to compile by hand. To...
(Charlottesville, VA) July 21, 2026 – Silverchair announced two complementary advancements to the editor experience within ScholarOne Manuscripts: the continued rollout of ScholarOne Gateway with new Editor dashboards and the...
In the latest Publishing Tech Trends Report from Silverchair and Hum, industry leaders offered their insights on how the most interesting tech/AI experiments they’ve seen in scholarly publishing in the last...
The final event in our spring 2026 Platform Strategies Webinar Series brought together a publisher, a librarian, and a technologist to work through a question that’s moved from speculative to...
There is significant energy in the scholarly publishing industry right now around Model Context Protocol (MCP). Publishers are exploring it, societies are being pitched on it, and a growing number of...
Working Without a Rubric Before I worked in scholarly publishing, I taught high school physics. Imagine you assign an open-ended project with very few instructions. As students start turning in work, you realize they...
When we launched the 2026 Platform Strategies Webinar Series, we built it around a question that’s been gaining urgency across scholarly publishing: as the definition of “end user” expands to...
Model Context Protocol has quickly become one of the most consequential topics in AI — and it’s landing squarely in the middle of scholarly publishing’s biggest strategic questions. This curated...
When we launched the 2026 Platform Strategies Webinar Series earlier this year, we framed it around a question that’s been reverberating across our industry: what does it really mean to...
(Charlottesville, VA) February 10, 2026 – Silverchair, the leading independent technology partner for scholarly publishers, announced the launch of the Discovery Bridge, leveraging Model Context Protocol (MCP) to connect end-users...
Every future capability starts as an experiment with publishers. We test the value of these ideas until they are ready to scale for every client.
We build fast prototypes for problems publishers are just starting to face, and development partners react to working versions early.
Volunteer clients see the capability before it reaches production, often through demos in our publisher working groups, and influence what we build.
Clients who opt in use the live capability in their own workflows, and their feedback shapes how we refine it before wider release.
The capability is available to every client, with everything the earlier stages taught us built into how it works.
How AI is Transforming Platform Strategy: Watch Silverchair CTO Stuart Leitch’s 2025 Platform Strategies talk about how AI is revolutionizing software development. As models become increasingly capable in domains like mathematics and programming, humans may be writing only a small fraction of code at progressive companies within five years. On publishing platforms, AI is transforming user experiences through enhanced workflows, discovery tools, and new capabilities, while also disrupting traditional traffic patterns as users rely on AI agents to search and synthesize research literature. This dual-sided AI transformation—affecting both platform development and user interaction—raises fundamental questions about the future positioning of scholarly publishing platforms.