As we approach the release of our 2025 Publishing Technology Trends report with Silverchair, it's time to reflect on the themes of our 2024 predictions and set the stage for what’s to come in 2025.
Need to refresh your memory on the full 2024 report? Download a copy.
Looking Back: How Did We Do?
1. Rapid advancement in the applications of AI
Prediction: 2024 would bring rapid advancements in AI applications, including commercial marketplaces, research ecosystems, and impacts on various publishing processes.
Outcome: Scholarly publishers have embraced AI with a mix of enthusiasm and caution. Many have integrated AI tools into their workflows, particularly in areas like content discovery, manuscript screening, and peer review matching.
- Commercial AI marketplaces have proliferated, offering tools tailored for academic research and publishing.
- AI-powered writing assistants and peer review systems have significantly advanced, and publishers are successfully integrating these tools to improve efficiency, add value, and reduce language barriers.
- Publishers are exploring the trade-offs of building on top of large foundational models or on smaller custom models.
- Despite the rapid progress of AI tools and capabilities, many publishers have approached adoption with caution. Some are still navigating the upfront costs to integrate AI systems, gain access to data, and upskill their teams.
In 2025, we’ll start to see early adopters begin to reap the rewards of their experimentation.
And if you were hoping for reprieve from endless AI topics dominating content and conferences? Buckle up – there are plenty more discussions around the implications of AI on author services, manuscript writing, peer review, and research integrity to be had.
2. Sharpened B2C Focus and Marketing Technologies
Prediction: 2024 would mark a shift from a B2B mindset to a B2C focus, and with that, wider adoption of key marketing technologies like CDPs and customer experience tools to manage digital experiences for readers, authors, and other audiences. Maintaining relevance amidst the growing volume of content and ensuring discoverability would be both a challenge and a top priority for publishers.
Reality: Scholarly publishers have made significant strides in adopting B2C strategies, recognizing the importance of direct engagement with readers and authors. This shift has been driven by the need to stand out in an increasingly crowded digital landscape and to meet the rising expectations of tech-savvy researchers and readers.
- There has indeed been a noticeable shift towards B2C strategies among publishers, with many investing heavily in advancing reader engagement and author experience.
- AI-driven content repurposing and recommendation systems have become commonplace, with numerous publishers leveraging AI to create derivative works and reach new audiences.
- The push for machine-readable content has accelerated, enhancing discoverability and data mining capabilities.
Expect to see increased focus on brand and content integrity in 2025. Maintaining trust is critical as AI-generated papers grow more sophisticated and as Google and other search companies continue to provide more direct answers to users' queries in the SERP.
3. Investments in Core Systems and Processes
Prediction: Market uncertainty, disruptive threats, and faster technology adoption would lead publishers to invest more in core systems and processes. We also anticipated that publishers would prioritize extracting value of existing datasets.
Reality: Publishers have recognized the critical importance of data and flexible infrastructure in navigating the rapidly changing landscape. While progress has been made, the complexity of legacy data systems and the need for substantial investment have meant that this transformation is ongoing for many organizations.
- Many publishers have undertaken significant digital transformation initiatives. There's been a notable focus on strengthening technological foundations to improve efficiency and adaptability.
- Data analytics capabilities have expanded,and some publishers are turning to AI to uncover trends within content repositories.
- While organizations have doubled down on data cleaning efforts, the bottleneck for many publishers has been access to data.
Looking ahead to 2025, publishers are going to have to understand not only how to experiment with AI, but also how to scale. As publishers continue to push towards AI applications, embeddings will become essential to ensure that relevant data can be easily accessed and used by AI systems.
Setting the Stage for 2025 -
Fast Following and Adaptive Leadership
So what have we learned from 2024?
- The most successful publishers in 2024 have indeed been those who quickly adapted consumer market trends to the scholarly publishing context.
- Small, strategic bets on emerging technologies have yielded significant insights and competitive advantages for many organizations.
- The need for different decision-making frameworks for experiments versus established products has become widely recognized in the industry.
- Adaptive leadership has been crucial, with the most successful leaders demonstrating flexibility and a willingness to learn and pivot quickly.
As we prepare to release our 2025 report, we anticipate several key themes to dominate the discourse:
- AI Ethics and Governance: With AI rapidly becoming a part of our daily lives and being integrated into publishing workflows, expect a strong focus on establishing industry-wide ethical guidelines and governance frameworks.
- Hyper-Personalization: Advanced AI and machine learning will enable unprecedented levels of content personalization. A research experience tailored to individual user needs will become the expectation.
- Intelligent Research Tools: We’ve only just scratched the surface of possibility for how researchers and readers will engage with scholarly content! AI-generated media, Conversational search tools, and AI research assistants are on their way.
Want to share your thoughts on the future of publishing? Which big technology challenges and opportunities do you think the publishing industry will take on in the new year? Have exciting insights, experiments, or actionable strategies to share?