How AI Will Transform Scholarly Publishing

In the 2024 Publishing Tech Trends report from Silverchair and Hum, industry leaders predicted transformations in author services, peer review, integrity management, and content discovery. At Silverchair, we're experimenting with both back-end and user-facing applications via our recently announced AI Lab. Hear more from Tech Trends report contributors below, then download the full report here. (PLUS: Read more about the biggest worries / hopes around AI in a blog from Hum.)

What area of scholarly publishing do you predict will be most transformed by AI in the coming year?

 

1) Author Experience, Author Services, & Peer Review 

From the writing of actual manuscripts to the review, curation, and add-on services of those outputs, AI is predicted to have a serious effect on author experience. One particular area it is posed to make a big difference in is translation and editing services for non-native English speakers. "Author services" was listed by Tasha Mellins-Cohen (Executive Director, COUNTER), Phoebe McMellon (CEO, GeoScienceWorld), and Avi Staiman (CEO, Academic Language Experts & SciWriterAI). Additional insights:

• "In the coming year, AI is set to most transform scholarly publishing by revolutionizing the writing of manuscripts, making it more accessible and inclusive for non-native English speakers and facilitating the use of AI as a language service – not content creation." —Christian Grubak, Founder & Co-CEO, ChronosHub 
• "Peer review, internal workflows, and content search will be entirely transformed by AI." —Emilie Delquie, SVP, Product and Customer Success, Silverchair 
• "Authors will increasing take help of AI for development of manuscript, literature search, and preparing the first drafts. The non-native English-speaking authors may find this particularly useful." —Anjali Chadha, Senior Associate, Maverick Publishing Specialists 
• "Peer review and the entire peer review process. Many of the processes are a deterrent to authors and really aren't necessary with today's technology. AI will make it easier to do away with those obstacles to submission much more quickly" —Ann Link, Principal,Linked Strategies 
• "Much like grammar check in Word three decades ago helped democratize grammar, AI will help researchers structure their thoughts in their writing and code and help them spend less time typing and more time researching." —Tim Barton, CEO, Hum 
• "It will completely transform editing and peer review." —Christian Kohl, Director, Technology & Engineering, PLOS 

2) Research Integrity

Of course, from the use of AI in producing manuscripts comes new concerns about copyright, integrity, and other ethical implications. The tools to address these concerns are barely keeping pace with the new methods of manipulation.

• "Research integrity is of top line importance. Publishers want to ensure that their submissions are not fraudulent, that the underlying research is truthful and ethically-based. As it becomes simpler to identify problematic research from past publications, we should expect more retractions and corrections. AI services will help to clean up the scholarly record where needed." —Heather Staines, Senior Consultant, Delta Think 
• "Verification & review." —Dave Oakley, VP, Licensing, MEI Global
• "I don't think we can talk true transformation in as little as a year, but the seeds are laid to change writing, integrity management, and peer review." —Neil Christensen, Sales Director, Morressier
• "Author services, publishing integrity, and search and discovery." —Phoebe McMellon, CEO, GeoScienceWorld

3) Marketing & Business models

The advancements in generative AI in particular offer some compelling and construct-breaking use cases for marketing, discovery, and end-user engagement. This has the potential to increase marketing volume, but also improve targeting and open new venues for direct-to-consumer outreach.

• "Marketing & Customer Experience." —Colleen Scollans, Marketing & CX, Clarke & Esposito
• "Shift from B2B to B2C revenue growth." —Phoebe McMellon, CEO, GeoScienceWorld 
• "Marketing teams have huge potential to adopt and utilize AI, and will be left behind if they don't. By exploiting AI tools to help generate templates and text, marketers can build a foundation for better marketing. Of course, as with anything, we need to take care and be transparent, but if adoption of more AI tools is going to bring around better, more accessible content, then surely it's worth a try to test, review, adjust, test, review, adjust, etc." —Lou Peck, CEO, The International Bunch 
• "AI will touch every aspect of scholarly publishing, but as a marketer, I'm most excited about AI's impact on discovery and post-publication promotion. Publishers large and small are either gearing up or are already in the process of implementing strategies assisted by AI. It's going to be a productive year." —Rory Williams, Director of Communications and Marketing, Rockefeller University Press

PLUS:

Artificial Intelligence can streamline manual tasks through automation, and it can facilitate the collection of data and insights to improve how we work. AI can also improve how people engage with content, and how we understand that engagement. With improved data, personalization and discovery can have a profound impact. Here are other areas we can expect to see transformed:

Publisher-specific LLMs:

• "I predict that publishers who develop their own LLMs based on supervised machine learning that uses the publishers' verified and structured content will experience a transformation in how their audiences discover and consume journal content. I think it's still unclear all the true business cases that will arise from subject/publisher-specific LLMs and still TBD whether revenue can be generated from this approach in 2024. But I strongly feel the experimentation with LLM development needs to happen now with publishers feeding both unstructured large data sets and then fine tuning the models with peer-reviewed structured content." —Marianne Calilhanna, VP, Marketing, Data Conversion Laboratory 

Personalization:

• "Deep in the bedrock, interpretive AI contextualizing full-length papers and user behaviors will allow publishers to understand content and audience like never before. If I had to bet, the deep understanding and personalization from interpretive AI will generate more interaction with content and move the needle." —Will Fortin, Lead Data Scientist, Hum 

Access the full 2024 Publishing Tech Trends report here.