The Year Ahead: AI in Scholarly Publishing 2024

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The Year Ahead: AI in Scholarly Publishing 2024

For the last year and a half, the media and publishing world have generated a lot of buzz and discussion about one particular disruptive technology—artificial intelligence (AI). Though AI is not new to the publishing ecosystem, the launch of ChatGPT and the increased daily usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) for web research, writing assistance, and idea generation has raised questions (and problems) with how developer OpenAI trained its chatbot, how we are using this tech in our daily and professional lives, and what it all means for the future.

As an industry innovator in the use of AI to automate workflows and one of many entities experimenting with new applications of this technology, KGL is taking this opportunity at the start of the year to boldly forecast where AI will take scholarly publishing and beyond during 2024.

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How to Use Data-Driven Strategies to Increase High-Quality Submissions

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How to Use Data-Driven Strategies to Increase High-Quality Submissions

Last month, customers, friends, and guest speakers from across the globe convened once again for our annual KGL PubFactory Virtual Series. During the course of the three-day event, a packed and topical agenda enabled the scholarly publishing community to share valuable insights, learnings, developments, advice and trends with their peers.

One of the highlights of the Industry Day (day two) program was a fascinating discussion chaired by KGL Senior Consultant, Annette Hager, entitled, Data-Driven Strategies for Increasing High Quality Submissions. This session explored practical ways in which publishers can integrate bibliometric and citation data into their editorial strategies in order to attract both larger volumes of submissions and, perhaps more importantly, higher quality content submissions.

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Getting Real With AI

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Getting Real With AI

During our recent community event, PubFactory Virtual Series: Industry Day, KGL’s Waseem Andrabi, VP of Learning Solutions, presented the different areas where the company is exploring artificial intelligence (AI) in publishing workflows to improve efficiency and reduce errors. Potential applications include content creation, copyediting, plagiarism checks, translations, adaptations, animations, videos, voiceovers, and more.

The session provides insights into the challenges faced, particularly in AI-generated alt text for images where KGL has been testing APIs for over 10 months, with examples that illustrate the evolving capabilities and limitations of AI models. Despite mixed results, Waseem emphasizes the importance of ongoing evaluation and adaptation to leverage AI's potential benefits in various service areas. Watch the recording to learn more.

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The Future of Peer Review: an Interview with Zara Manwaring, Managing Editor at Portland Press

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The Future of Peer Review: an Interview with Zara Manwaring, Managing Editor at Portland Press

For Peer Review Week, KGL interviewed journal editors and publishing experts on the state of peer review in 2023. In this insightful Q&A blog, we share the full interview conducted with Zara Manwaring, Managing Editor at Portland Press, which is the publishing arm of the Biochemical Society. We sat down with Zara to discuss the challenges posed by paper mills on the peer review processes and how the journal, Bioscience Reports, responded to these issues.

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OSTP and Public Access: One Year Later

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OSTP and Public Access: One Year Later

As part of the 2023 KGL PubFactory Virtual Series, on October 11 we hosted Industry Day, a half-day online seminar of insights, discussion, and practical takeaways for the scholarly publishing community. Headlining the event was an informative discussion with KGL’s Cara Rivera and Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library and Chef at The Scholarly Kitchen on the evolving implications of last year’s US policy memo recommending free and immediate access to all federally funded research.

Cara asked Lisa about implications on APCs, data sharing, sustainability of journal business models, and long-term consequences of OA mandates. The recording of the 30-minute interview can be viewed below.

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Frankfurter Buchmesse 2023: The State of AI

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Frankfurter Buchmesse 2023: The State of AI

When ChatGPT launched last November, the publishing industry began to discuss and write about how we can use AI in our industry—will it be used to help with research, to produce journal articles, to create marketing copy or content, to conduct scholarly communication, in peer review, or in ways we have yet to discover?

Here at KGL, as discussed recently on our PubFactory Virtual Series: Industry Day community event, we have been experimenting with AI detectors for peer review, media creation, alt-text generation, and a “conversational manuscript” using ChatGPT, among other potential use cases.

Though new applications (and implications) of AI are being discovered every day, one panel at the Frankfurt Book Fair this month seeks to provide the most up-to-date information on AI and its impact on the industry in “The State of AI in Publishing Today:”

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Knowledge Sharing: KGL’s Vanessa Vaughn Discusses Content Development, DEI, and the Future of K-12 and Higher Education Publishing

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Knowledge Sharing: KGL’s Vanessa Vaughn Discusses Content Development, DEI, and the Future of K-12 and Higher Education Publishing

Earlier this summer, KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. welcomed Vanessa Vaughn as Senior Director, Content Services in our K-12 and Higher Education group to oversee content development for science and humanities subjects. Vanessa brings to KGL 20 years of experience developing high-quality K-16 content and a deep understanding of changing state and national standards.

Vanessa started her KGL tenure by contributing to the updated edition of our industry report, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Educational Content: What You Need to Know Now. I sat down with her recently to discuss her new role, content DEI in educational publishing, and how she sees the industry changing in the next five years.

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What to Make of ChatGPT in Scholarly Communications?

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What to Make of ChatGPT in Scholarly Communications?

No matter what you are reading, watching, or listening to, everyone today is talking about ChatGPT and how it can help our daily lives and, perhaps, even our work. Released in November 2022 by OpenAI, ChatGPT is an Artificial Intelligence chat bot that “interacts in a conversational way” and it can “answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.”

ChatGPT was quickly embraced by the world for fun and frivolous purposes, but it has also been used to write press releases, news articles, corporate documents, and even essays and journal articles. Though many industries are jumping to see how this new AI can help their business, there are just as many who are being more cautious. In scholarly publishing, there has been much debate about how this new AI can help our industry. KGL has pulled together a round-up of some of the most recent articles to help you make your own decision about ChatGPT.

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Bias Awareness in Scholarly Publishing

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Bias Awareness in Scholarly Publishing

Earlier this year, we published a report entitled Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Educational Content: What You Need to Know Now, providing publishers with a starting point and ongoing solutions for how to make their content more representative of the audience engaging with it. 

As publishers and their stakeholders begin to work toward making their content more inclusive, one of the most difficult challenges they face is not recognizing their own implicit biases and how they might impact the quality and reach of their publications. 

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Five Unmissable Event Highlights at LBF 2023

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Five Unmissable Event Highlights at LBF 2023

Running from April 18–20, 2023, the London Book Fair is one of the most important events in the international publishing calendar. This year, organizers are confident that the event will be “back in full force” with global exhibitor and attendee numbers likely to approach pre-pandemic levels and many US attendees returning to the halls of Kensington Olympia following a four-year hiatus.

Despite a paring back of its academic publishing seminar output, LBF still has plenty to offer visitors from all corners of the industry—a bustling program of on-stage panel discussions, interviews and presentations and a neatly programmed day-long scholarly industry conference. As we gear up for the fair, we’ve prepared a short guide to our top event highlights in this year’s seminar program and beyond.

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Tackling Global Social Challenges through Technology

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Tackling Global Social Challenges through Technology

Optimizing Content Delivery to Advance the UN Sustainable Development Goals

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have undoubtedly been among the hottest topics on the scholarly publishing agenda since we’ve come out of the pandemic. Although the 17 goals were established back in 2015, the publishing industry’s response to them has certainly accelerated since 2020, when a raft of publishers signed up to the SDG Publishers Compact, affirming their commitment to its 10-point action plan.

At the most recent Charleston Library Conference, KGL PubFactory’s Platform Services Director, Tom Beyer, hosted a lively panel debate which combined the perspectives of several prestigious social science publishers and an open resources librarian, showcasing how they are each adopting new technologies, implementing new initiatives and adapting their content delivery offerings to advance the SDGs and tackle global social challenges.

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Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Educational Content: What You Need to Know Now

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Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Educational Content: What You Need to Know Now

A free report from KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Over the last decade, in response to a changing, better-informed world, the publishing industry has taken steps to bring more diversity into the workforce as well as to make their content more inclusive. However, those changes have at times been criticized for moving too slowly.

Recent legislation, social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, and global disability rights and transgender equality campaigns have helped accelerate the industry’s desire for equity and better representation for all. As many publishers have seen, though the need and desire to make content and companies more inclusive are there, the path forward on how to implement these changes is not always clear.

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Publishing Predictions for 2023: CDEI, China, Chatbots, and More

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Publishing Predictions for 2023: CDEI, China, Chatbots, and More

Looking to the year ahead once again, the KGL experts across book and journal publishing, scholarly and education markets, technology and business development, weigh in to highlight some of the industry trends we expect will be prominent in 2023. 

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The World is Yours: Globalization Trends in Scholarly Publishing

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The World is Yours: Globalization Trends in Scholarly Publishing

Globalization is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a new trend. For decades, our world has steadily become more interconnected and, without doubt, this is a pattern that is set to continue long into the future. In scholarly publishing, this pattern is no different. But journal publishers are increasingly noting that globalization is progressively affecting every facet of the business—from editorial and production right through to financial and sales and marketing.

This is why at this year’s KGL PubFactory Virtual Series we dedicated a special session to the topic. Hosted by Kevin Lomangino, KGL’s Director of Consulting, platform customers were led through a fascinating presentation on how globalization is currently impacting scholarly publishing and how journal publishers can best position themselves to capitalize on this trend. The following highlights some of the most striking takeaways from the session.

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(Smoothly) Transitioning to New Publishing Business Models

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(Smoothly) Transitioning to New Publishing Business Models

With all the recent discussion around the US OSTP memo recommending free and immediate access to all federally funded research, we think it’s worthwhile to take a step back to assess the current state of subscription and Open Access business models and review how we got here, before considering how to best navigate this changing landscape. The following article details the history of business model innovation in scholarly journal publishing, from a Trends Talk by KGL Consulting.

For over a hundred years, the business of publishing academic journals has been sustained by the subscription model. It was always an impeccably simple premise: institutions paid, authors authored, publishers published, readers read, institutions renewed, and repeat. The 1970s marked something of a heyday for this model - an era that is often viewed by the industry as some kind of utopia—when the scholarly publishing ecosystem seemed to thrive, with an abundance of journals entering the market, bursting library shelves, institutional agreements aplenty and high renewal rates.

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Publishing Events Rebound in 2022

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Publishing Events Rebound in 2022

The KGL Team Reflects on a Busy Season of Live Conferences and Book Fairs

We at KGL have been out attending in-person events in force over the past three months for the first time since 2019, including #LBF22, #PCPA2022, #CSE2022, #SSP2022, #AUPresses2022, and #ISTELive. On the heels of such an intense burst of reacclimating, travel, and community engagement, we asked our resident industry experts across the scholarly, education, journals, and books publishing sectors to share: what was it like to be back out in the world and what are some of your impressions of the publishing industry in 2022?

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Publishing and the Climate Emergency: the Monumental Challenge Ahead

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Publishing and the Climate Emergency: the Monumental Challenge Ahead

The global publishing industry has always had a conflicted relationship with the environment. On the one hand, no single industry has done more to educate and inform the general public about environmental issues. Whether through peer reviewed research and journals, consumer magazines, news reporting, books sold in shops or loaned through libraries, pretty much everything we know about the climate crisis is down to publishing, in some shape or form.

Yet, on the flip side, the industry cannot shy away from its own impact on climate change. Hundreds of years of deforestation to serve the print publishing industry are taking its toll. In the US alone, it is estimated that 32m trees are felled every year in order to make books—25 per cent of which are sent back to publishers unsold. Throw in reliance on fossil fuels, water usage, the use of chemical dyes and solvents, and the toll of shipping and flying physical products around the world, and you’ve got yet another manufacturing industry with a resource-heavy supply chain.

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Knowledge Sharing: KGL’s Sonny Regelman Discusses Educational Content Development

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Knowledge Sharing: KGL’s Sonny Regelman Discusses Educational Content Development

KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. has long provided product development services to the preK-12 and higher Education markets, working with many of the big players in addition to smaller and niche education publishers. For the last several years, one of the key leaders of KGL’s Learning Solutions group has been Executive Director, Sonny Regelman, who has experienced working in this field both on the content provider side as well as the vendor side.

Recently, I interviewed Sonny on the ins and outs of educational content development, where publishers experience pain points that partners can solve, the digital transformation of the market accelerated by the pandemic, and what new initiatives are on the horizon for the industry.

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Publishing Predictions for 2022

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Publishing Predictions for 2022

Global Accessibility, Advanced Analytics, New Content Types, and More

In what has become an annual tradition here at KGL, we take stock at the start of the year, consult our publishing experts, and go out on a limb to try and foretell what the future holds for our industry. After two years of uncertainty in life as we know it, here are nevertheless some of the top predictions for ongoing and emerging trends that we think publishers should bear in mind as we all make our way carefully into 2022.

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Accessibility Continues to Evolve in Education Publishing

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Accessibility Continues to Evolve in Education Publishing

In an article we published on this blog back in 2017, we highlighted some of the challenges, complexities and benefits associated with making digital educational content (K-12 and Higher Ed) more accessible for visually and cognitively impaired readers.

Fast forward several years and the sector’s commitment to digital equality has really been put to the test. As millions of students all over the world switched to remote learning, educational publishers and learning providers had to act quickly to ensure that all the right resources and content were available digitally in order to support students’ rapidly evolving needs.

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