Does Publishing need a Pulse Check or Resuscitation?

Sharing my thoughts and fears on whether a major health crisis for STM publishing is coming or not.....

The recent STM Day that ran adjacent to the Frankfurt Book Fair got me thinking about the priorities and challenges for the academic publishing industry. I’ve not had a chance to travel to this or other events for a couple of years and wondered how much things had shifted in that time. It was clear that the changes were not as I had expected: there was little discussion on research integrity though some publishers are clearly investing and others are worried, and the dominance of publishing output from China was not the focus I thought it would be; whilst the author was seemingly forgotten. The Publishing Pulse Check from Research Consulting, taken after the STM Day during the book fair that followed, echoed my feelings, and has me pondering whether the academic publishing industry needs resuscitation or if things can muddle along until it kicks back into life.

Photo by Joshua Chehov on Unsplash

Back in 2023 (the last time I was able to attend a publishing conference) there was alarm around the rise of AI, too much consolidation in the market to keep up to date, and a lot of work on managing research integrity (alongside thousands of retractions); so what was STM Frankfurt 2025 like?

Firstly, it was busy. Very, very busy. So the fear around travel budgets has reduced since 2023. It was then good to sit back and observe the room and the reaction to the presentations: the big guys are increasingly anxious about geopolitical instability impacting publishing, while the tech providers seemed on the whole upbeat. Those from smaller publishers or the not for profit sector were in the ‘doing ok’ camp: so not quite in critical care but not off the ward and back home.

My greatest surprise was the lack of engagement on research integrity. It seems unlikely these challenges are fixed, but perhaps no-one sees it as the pressing issue any more. The STM research integrity hub has launched, thousands of papers have been retracted and many publishers have their own tools for identifying and managing ethics, but can we afford to drop our guard? I doubt it. As soon as one integrity issue is fixed another arrives – like publishing ‘whack a mole’ (please view here for anyone who hasn’t played this game) – and while the dominance of publish or perish remains this is unlikely to shift.

Another seemingly ‘off the radar’ issue was the peer reviewer crisis: this was everywhere two years ago. Again I don’t believe this has gone away but I don’t understand why it is no longer part of the discussion. Knowledge sharing and promoting best practice on both of these issues cannot have fallen off the radar.

These thoughts remained with me after travelling home, so I was pleased to see the pulse check from Research Consulting: although it is a small sample size, this survey shows a similar view from publishers and workflow providers. Overall, publishers are not hugely confident in the market improving over the next 12 months, while vendors are more bullish. This is reflected in what publishers care about – as I hypothesised above, they aren’t that concerned with research integrity or peer review but increasingly by geopolitical uncertainty and that long-established fear of ‘budget or funding pressures’, which is now so intrinsically linked with geopolitics it may never be disentangled. Conspicuous in its absence was Open Access, whereas AI remains a concern but perhaps not the driving force it recently was.

So if publishers don’t think things are going to improve in the next year, what does that mean for those of us working in the sector – and more importantly for the authors who rely on us? Researchers still want to know their paper is robust and fairly reviewed by experts, and in short timeframes. If publishers’ eyes are elsewhere, does this mean vendors step in and develop the tools and services to meet these needs? Or will others move into the space while the focus is elsewhere. This seems unlikely, but yet again it feels like we’ve forgotten the needs of the author, without whom we have no industry.

It does seem that the use of AI is still driving the long overdue dismantling of print driven workflows across the sector with the promised land of quicker turnaround times and reduced overheads, so this technological development remains in people’s minds but this is a never ending journey. We will forever adapt workflows, find new processes and aim to reduce costs in ever more robust processes – but to forget what authors want is to miss the chance of ensuring they remain your authors and don’t move somewhere else.

The lack of comment on and interaction with the fascinating summary from China on their publishing programme indicates, to me anyway, that eyes are most definitely not on supporting the biggest author group in the world and one that will be steering the decisions vendors and publishers make in decades to come – something a future post will cover in more depth that I can do justice to here.

Overall, I left Frankfurt thinking that AI was still not driving things in the way it could (like we are keeping it in a box and only letting it out to play when we want – which isn’t sustainable), that research integrity isn’t fixed and we definitely don’t have a diverse enough pool of global peer reviewers. I was perplexed why there wasn’t more focus on issues that have dominated publishing news over the last 24 months. There was also one big omission from all the discussions – and that was the authors and academics who drive our industry. Somehow we must ensure we are ahead of what they need whilst providing them with the robust, ethically intact, publishing process (in whatever language they require and whatever format they need) both now and in the future. To me that felt like the biggest gap in all the discussions and presentations and one that I hope we can reengage with over the months to come. To keep authors at arms length has never brought anyone a positive way forward regardless of geopolitics and research integrity – and without keeping them central to our thinking in this rapidly changing ecosystem then it’s likely we’re heading for a full resuscitation rather than anything that can be remedied by minor surgery.