PLATFORM STRATEGIES 2026 attracted 180 thought leaders and decision-makers from across our industry for a day of engaging discussions and networking. This year’s theme, “Signal and Noise,” looked at how we’re handling overloaded submission queues, telling quality work apart from misinformation and AI-generated slop, and separating the hype around AI from its real promise. We heard case studies from publishers, ideas from innovators in adjacent industries, and in-depth conversations about the challenges that will define the next chapter of scholarly publishing.
Watch the recordings of Platform Strategies and our 2026 Spring webinar series below.
Welcome Address
Silverchair CEO Will Schweitzer kicked off the event with a reflection on this year’s theme, Signal & Noise, looking at market shifts, broader global trends, and examples from adjacent industries.
Opening Keynote: Wendy Queen
Drawing on collective learnings from across the scholarly publishing community, Wendy Queen examined at how AI has reshaped researcher workflows over the past year, moving beyond early-stage questions about potential to honest reflection on real-world impact. Including data from an attendee survey, she discussed what progress actually looks like and offering the kind of grounded, experience-backed perspective that only comes from doing the work.
Beyond integrity: why quality is the next frontier for the research record
The research integrity field has spent decades building tools to catch bad actors, not bad science — flagging suspicious co-authorships, non-institutional emails, citation rings, AI-generated text. Now add a 30% surge in submissions, driven by AI-assisted research, thin-slicing, and outright slop. The integrity toolkit was never built for this, and the stakes extend well beyond peer review process. As LLMs increasingly serve as the first point of contact between a researcher and the published literature, low-quality work that clears the integrity bar doesn’t just pollute the record; it gets ingested, synthesized, and surfaced as fact to the next generation of researchers.
Truth has a platform problem: technology’s role in the misinformation era
Scientific misinformation doesn’t win by accident. It wins because it’s well-packaged, emotionally resonant, and algorithmically rewarded — and because the systems meant to surface verified research weren’t built with that adversarial dynamic in mind. When a language model mediates the relationship between a researcher and the published literature, the decisions publishers and platform providers make about architecture, metadata, and content surfacing have consequences that extend far beyond a single search session.
What’s your strategy if there is no platform, REDUX
Two years ago, we asked the uncomfortable question: what happens if platforms as we know them disappear? Today, these conversations have become very real. AI systems now synthesize answers from across the published literature without sending users to the publisher platform. Discovery increasingly happens in environments that publishers don’t own, can’t instrument, and have limited ability to influence. The disintermediated future that panel imagined is, in meaningful ways, already arriving.
Hello from the other side: what other industries can teach publishing
Scholarly publishing has no shortage of insiders. What it has less of is the outside view — the perspective of people who have watched adjacent industries wrestle with the same forces and come out the other side with lessons that don’t yet have a scholarly publishing translation.