We’ve all felt the shift: across the publishing lifecycle, connections are evolving. Author-to-editor collaboration. Publisher-to-reader discovery. The economics underlying all of it. At Silverchair, we're building infrastructure that strengthens what works today while reaching for what's possible tomorrow. And we're excited for 2026.
Strategic areas of investment across Silverchair’s products
Our products are managed independently, each with their own strategy tailored to distinct publisher needs and operational realities. But our strategic pillars stretch across all of them, and increasingly, will connect between them:
- Analytics that understand impact across the entire research lifecycle. In 2026, Fathom (our new analytics tool on the Silverchair Platform) launches as the foundation of our analytics infrastructure, powering better decision-making about content strategy, monetization, and resource allocation.
- Intelligence through our AI Lab, where we deploy proven AI tools with less risk. While others bolt on third-party AI, we co-create with publishers in playground environments—you get innovation without being a guinea pig. We rigorously test tools that support rather than replace human expertise.
- Identity that builds trust infrastructure for a fragmented knowledge environment. Persistent researcher identity across submission, review, publication, and AI discovery means you understand your community in ways fragmented systems never will. This is a longer-term investment, but we're laying the groundwork now.
- Ecosystem partnerships through the Silverchair Universe that let you adopt best-in-class tools without vendor lock-in, powered by our APIs.
The Silverchair Platform: built for performance and discovery
Our platform development balances immediate operational needs with structural transformation. We're improving content discovery and user experience through AI features like Dynamic Discovery (on-site semantic search) and the Discovery Bridge (authenticated semantic pathways powered by MCP integration).
But AI is just one piece of the platform development puzzle. We're investing heavily in platform performance and modernization, informed by user journey analysis and UX research. We're building flexible monetization infrastructure so you can experiment with access models and optimize conversion. Our proactive accessibility work positions publishers ahead of the ADA Title II deadline, while SEO optimization ensures content reaches maximum audiences. Site security, performance, and discoverability remain baseline requirements, not trade-offs.
ScholarOne Manuscripts: where user experience meets workflow intelligence
User experience drives everything we're building in ScholarOne. We're continuing development of Author Gateway for streamlined submissions and prototyping an Editor Gateway based on extensive editor interviews to understand what editorial teams actually need.
Our Editor AI Console (beta) will embed AI directly in publisher workflows, finding efficiency without overriding editorial judgment. Citation Check prototypes automate tedious integrity checks (because nobody got into scholarly publishing to manually verify reference formatting). We're connecting reviewers and editors with manuscript analysis tools that augment expertise rather than replace it.
ScholarOne Conferences: connecting research to publishing
We're connecting conference research more deeply into the publishing lifecycle, leveraging our extensive experience with integrations to create pathways from presentation to publication. We're also exploring how to improve the user experience by exploring AI support for scheduling and sessioning, the kind of operational tasks that consume disproportionate time and energy during conference planning.
Conference presentations become manuscript submissions become published research that references back to the session: only possible with lifecycle integration. Your conference content doesn't disappear; it will become part of the continuous story of research development.
How we're building: learning fast, breaking nothing
The truth is, nobody knows exactly what "AI-ready publishing" will look like in the long term. The winners won't be whoever builds the most features fastest. The winners will be whoever learns fastest and adapts without breaking what already works or pivoting away from the things that make scholarly publishing impactful.
We have a strong vision combined with an agile approach that helps us be proactive in times of change. We work collaboratively with our community through Publisher Working Groups, sharing early prototypes, testing our ideas and making them better. In 2026 our market research will dive deep into editor experience and understanding what questions publishers want to answer with the future of their analytics.
Markets shift and things change. Our product development approach ensures we’re ready for what comes next.
Your Timeline, Your Priorities
Whether you're ready to experiment or focused on optimizing what already works, our infrastructure adapts to your timeline. Our 2026 development plans balance publisher-led feature requests with forward-looking infrastructure investments, because the best vision in the world doesn't matter if it ignores what you need right now.
The question isn't whether publishing becomes AI-mediated or disaggregated. That ship has sailed. The real question is whether you'll have infrastructure that sees across your entire operation, or whether you'll be stitching together tools that can't talk to each other.
Welcome to 2026. Our infrastructure is becoming more unified. The intelligence—both human and artificial—is real. We're building what's needed for today, and we know where we're headed. Let's get to work.