Five things we’re excited to build for the Silverchair Platform in 2026

We believe that these challenges are solvable with the right infrastructure. For us on the Product team, turning the calendar to a new year doesn’t mean we’re starting a clean slate: many of our projects and areas of focus carry over from last year as continuous areas of improvement. But a new year is still a good time to reset, reflecting on development priorities through fresh eyes and prioritizing key projects. We've got a full development slate for 2026, but here are the five areas we're particularly excited about right now: 

1. Smarter on-site search with Dynamic Discovery

The way people search has fundamentally changed. Researchers expect Google- and ChatGPT-like experiences everywhere, but traditional boolean keyword search still dominates scholarly publishing platforms and discovery spaces. When your search doesn't work the way users already search outside of an academic context, researchers have to context shift to find the content they need and know is out there.  

For example, if a researcher searches "diabetes treatment outcomes" on your site and gets zero relevant results, even though you published three relevant articles last month, that experience is both frustrating for the researcher and represents lost usage for your content. Our Dynamic Discovery tools use semantic search to understand intent, not just keywords. Researchers find what they need even when they can't articulate the perfect search terms, which means they stay engaged with your content instead of bouncing to other platforms. 

2. AI-powered discovery that publishers control 

AI assistants are already answering research questions, but you have no visibility into this usage, no control over access, and no way to ensure proper attribution. Our Discovery Bridge MCP infrastructure changes that by creating authenticated pathways for AI agents to discover your content — a powerful monetization opportunity that designed to grow with the industry's direction of travel for researcher discovery. 

Here's just one example of how the Discovery Bridge MCP can work in practice: A researcher asks their library's preferred LLM about recent diabetes research. If that LLM is connected to your MCP, the LLM can check your content directly and return the latest information, giving emerging research visibility it needs to grow and thrive. Crucially, it can also surface information like retractions and corrections, which are often overlooked in LLM training data due to the cadence of retraction publications. This preserves research integrity while giving you and librarians attributed usage data to understand discovery through AI agents, not just traditional human browsing patterns. 

3. Monetization tools that adapt to your strategy

But there are other ways to monetize too, and we're invested in helping you explore what works. Your access and business models can't stay locked into technical decisions made years ago. We're building monetization infrastructure that lets you adjust access controls and test conversion strategies without rebuilding your foundation. 

We're conducting market research right now to identify methods that work and give you the tools to explore different strategies. We don't have set features here we're planning to build just yet—this is an area where we welcome your ideas through our PDR process or by starting the conversation with your account manager. 

4. Accessibility and discoverability across every channel

Platform health NFRs are a key piece of our 2026 strategy, and that shows up in two major ways: accessibility and SEO/GEO infrastructure. 

For accessibility, compliance with the ADA Title II changes is table stakes. But we also see this as an opportunity to help your content broaden its reach. Our Accessibility Hub already provides publisher staff with guidance to help you make the right decisions and have the right conversations with purchasers and users. We’ll continue to grow the Accessibility Hub this year, and will soon augment it with a dedicated, transparent accessibility roadmap that evolves with your needs. 

For SEO and GEO, the landscape is always changing, and your content also needs to surface wherever researchers are asking questions, from Google Scholar to ChatGPT.  This means it's critical that the platform's infrastructure has all the health markers to let search engines and AI engines know your content is trustworthy, indexable, and relevant. We're making steady investments in underlying infrastructure to ensure great performance as these standards and technologies continue to evolve.  

When your content is both accessible and discoverable, you're reaching the full potential audience instead of leaving readers on the table. 

5. Analytics that answer the questionsyou'reactually asking 

Your current analytics tell you 50,000 people visited last month. What you need to know is why 45,000 left without converting, which content drives subscriptions, and where to invest next quarter. Fathom, our redesigned analytics tool launches in a couple of months, revealing reader behavior patterns before the paywall, after the paywall, and on an institution basis. You'll understand not just what happened, but why it matters and what to do about it.  

Right now, answering a question like "which articles are driving the most institutional engagement in China?" can mean pulling multiple reports, exporting to Excel, comparing your results with a data dictionary, and even spending an afternoon with a pivot table or two. You end up with an answer, but by the time you get there, you've lost the thread of what you were trying to understand in the first place. 

Fathom, our redesigned analytics tool launching in March, changes that, providing consolidated functionality that replaces multiple tools and complex workarounds, helping publisher teams get more insights with less effort. Build and customize reports that answer your specific business questions without waiting for technical support. Analyze where readers find value and encounter barriers with detailed content intelligence —abstract views, TOC views, PDF-only views. Examine institutional usage with strategic segmentation by content type, geography, and more for those critical subscription renewal conversations.  

And this is just the foundation. We're excited to do research throughout 2026 to build a roadmap that gives you even more answers to the questions you're asking. 

How these work together 

These capabilities reinforce each other by design. Improved discovery (whether through semantic search or AI agents) creates engagement opportunities that flexible monetization captures. Analytics reveal which strategies work so you can continuously optimize and tweak your approach. Accessibility and discoverability expand your audience while you track and understand the impact. 

Our iterative approach means we're responsive to market shifts rather than locked into plans that made sense two years ago. When AI discovery accelerates faster than expected, we can prioritize MCP infrastructure mid-year. When you tell us a particular feature matters more than we thought, we can adjust. That flexibility is our strength. The landscape is evolving too quickly for rigid roadmaps built 18 months out. 

There's more coming in 2026 beyond these five areas, but these are the ones we're particularly energized by as we kick off the new year. We’re excited to build what solves your challenges today while staying ready for what comes next.