Research Bridge
Reaching researchers directly in AI assistants, with wider reach, visibility, & scale
Shared Infrastructure, Independent Publishers
Research Bridge is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) channel operated by Silverchair on behalf of participating publishers. This shared pathway allows AI assistants to connect to trusted content sources, making content from multiple publishers available through a single connector that any AI platform can integrate.
Rather than each publisher building and maintaining its own AI infrastructure, participating publishers share the technical layer while keeping everything that makes them distinct. Your brand, your access policies, your attribution, and your commercial strategy remain your own. The rails are shared; the destinations stay independent.
Key Benefits
YOU STAY IN CONTROL
One connector delivers your version-of-record content, attributed and entitlement-aware, while you maintain complete control of their content, publisher brand, customer relationships, and business models. Alongside a cohort of other independent publishers, you get the benefits of scale, without the tradeoffs.
YOUR REACH GROWS WITH THE NETWORK
On its own, even a large publisher reaches only part of the research community through AI tools. A broad, cross-disciplinary corpus attracts more AI platform integrations, which creates more researcher touchpoints for every participant, and each publisher who joins makes the channel more valuable for all.
YOUR BUSINESS MODEL STAYS YOURS
The infrastructure is agnostic to how you choose to monetize access, so publishers with different commercial approaches can participate in the same channel. In-workflow access for entitled users helps protect existing licensing arrangements while opening potential for new revenue streams.
About the pilot
Research Bridge launches as a six-month pilot with Silverchair Platform clients across a range of disciplines, including the Royal Society, the American Association for Cancer Research, the American Diabetes Association, Rockefeller University Press, and Portland Press, with additional publishers expected to join in the coming weeks. The pilot grew out of conversations with our publisher community, and those working sessions have shaped how the channel handles attribution, entitlements, and publisher-specific access strategies.
Over the course of the pilot, we’ll be looking closely with participating publishers at how researchers use the channel, how AI platforms engage with the combined corpus, and which commercial models best serve the community, with plans to open additional options once the pilot concludes.
Email your account manager to talk through how Research Bridge could fit your content strategy and to learn more about the pilot.
FAQs
How does the infrastructure work?
We prepare your content for AI retrieval by structuring it and enriching it with metadata and citation context, then make it available through one MCP endpoint, one authentication portal, and one integration for AI platforms. Access controls, licensing rules, and attribution are enforced at the point of retrieval, so content reaches only the institutions and individuals who are already entitled to it. Because Research Bridge extends capabilities that already run in production on the Silverchair Platform, including documented institutional entitlements and per-publisher, per-institution usage metering, it builds on the foundation you have today rather than asking you to adopt something new.
What is the researcher experience with Research Bridge?
When a researcher asks an AI assistant to help with a literature review or a cross-disciplinary question, Research Bridge allows the assistant to retrieve peer-reviewed content directly, returning grounded answers with citations that resolve to the publisher’s own content and respecting each publisher’s access rules along the way. Direct retrieval is also more efficient than broad, open-ended web searching. Researchers get to useful answers faster, AI tools use fewer computing resources, and publisher sites see less load from AI crawlers repeatedly requesting rendered pages, which makes the whole exchange lower in cost and lower in environmental impact.
Without a connection: the assistant answers from open access content and preprints, without the version of record, publisher citations, or entitled full text, and spends extensive resources on broad search.
With your content connected: the assistant delivers a grounded answer with citations resolving to your content and access rules respected, efficiently and with the quality and integrity researchers expect.
Who can participate in the pilot?
The Research Bridge pilot is currently open only to Silverchair Platform clients, since it leverages entitlements and other existing platform infrastructure.
Does Silverchair take a share of revenue?
No. Publishers keep 100% of any revenue generated through the channel. Participation in the pilot is free.
What is shared, and what is not?
The infrastructure is shared: one connector, one authentication portal, one integration. The access is not shared: your content flows only to institutions that already hold entitlements to it, mirrored one-for-one from the web.
Will this be Silverchair-branded to end users?
No, by design. Silverchair holds no end-user brand; your brands stay in the foreground. The shared channel carries its own neutral identity (Research Bridge) representing the collective of independent publishers, shaped with you.
Can publishers still maintain our own MCP or API arrangements?
Yes. Research Bridge is designed to coexist with publisher-specific MCPs and direct API relationships. We see these offerings as complementary: individual publisher channels offer depth for specialists seeking engagement with a specific corpus, while the shared channel delivers wider reach and visibility and lowers the individual effort and cost.
Which AI platforms can connect to Research Bridge?
Research Bridge is built on MCP, an open standard, so it’s designed to work with any AI platform that supports it.
``Scholarly publishers have always done their best work when they make their own decisions about their content and their communities, then come together around shared infrastructure that serves everyone. We built Research Bridge so publishers can reach the agentic channel on their own terms, with the technology, data, and support to experiment, build new products, and maintain their connection with their audiences. Research Bridge maintains provenance, keeps each publisher's brand front and center, delivers full context rather than isolated chunks, relays content safely, and directs readers back to the version of record. Every publisher who participates makes the channel more valuable for the others. No publisher should have to give up control to participate in the future of scholarly communication.`` —Will Schweitzer, Silverchair CEO