Between AI eating your traffic and bots flooding your servers, it's fair to have entered the new year wondering where exactly the money is supposed to come from.
In the 2026 Publishing Tech Trends report, Hum and Silverchair surveyed leaders across scholarly publishing on the biggest opportunities for revenue in the year ahead. Our panel of experts didn't pull any punches about the challenges to come, but there were some clear opportunities emerging from the chaos.
The AI Licensing Window Is Open (But Maybe Not for Long)
If there's one message that came through loud and clear, it's this: AI companies need your content, and they're willing to pay for it. But the clock is ticking.
"Though it feels like the window is closing, there still appears to be a lot of opportunity for licensing content for use within GenAI tools. Publishers are sitting on a vast resource of high-quality content at a moment when user habits and behaviors are being disrupted and shifted from search to GenAI tools. Finding a way to capitalize on this shift remains an opportunity for potential revenue," notes Michael Di Natale, Director of Journal Production and Platform at AACR.
Here's the strategic shift our experts are seeing: while training deals for large language models may taper off as those models mature, inference-based licensing is just getting started. Jonathan Woahn, Chief Experience Officer at Cashmere, puts it succinctly: "Inference-based (RAG) licensing opportunities will accelerate as AI platforms open their ecosystems to external data."
Think about what this means practically. Pharmaceutical companies aren't just building models anymore—they're building workflows that need trusted data at every step. Research institutions need AI assistants that won't hallucinate clinical trial results. Regulatory agencies need systems they can actually rely on. Your peer-reviewed, authenticated content is exactly what these systems need.
However, as Woahn cautioned this morning in The Scholarly Kitchen, AI isn’t going to “just pay for content” by default. Discovery alone won’t generate revenue, and visibility inside AI systems doesn’t automatically translate into value capture. The publishers best positioned to benefit are those investing in the fundamentals—research integrity, authentication, metadata, and access controls.
From Content Provider to Intelligence Engine
Several experts pointed to a more fundamental transformation: using AI to turn your content into entirely new products. Teo Pulvirenti, Vice President of Global Editorial Strategy at ACS Publications, frames it as an identity shift:
"The focus should be on turning content into intelligence. In other words, publishers should evolve to deliver actionable knowledge—powered by AI, data, and discovery tools. This is about creating smart, connected experiences that help people find insights, not just information. Everything else—sales models, consulting, partnerships, global reach—should help serve this mission: become the engine of knowledge, not just the content provider."
This isn't just philosophical posturing. We're seeing publishers experiment with AI to create monetizable products from both individual pieces of content and their corpus at scale. The question isn't whether your content is valuable. It's whether you're packaging that value in ways that solve real problems for specific audiences.
Natalie Jacobs, Chief Product Officer at Emerald Publishing, sees opportunity in responsible deployment: "Whilst I anticipate that a lot of customer-facing AI features will become hygiene, I think that efficiencies in processes to support authors/editors and utilizing AI to transform content could offer opportunities to drive revenue growth. Content transformation and curation to reach new audiences is an interesting angle to be exploring."
The Authenticated Access Premium
As the broader internet becomes increasingly polluted with AI-generated slop, your authenticated, peer-reviewed content becomes more valuable, not less.
Jeremy Little, AI Technology Lead at Silverchair, explains the opportunity:
"The growing need for AI systems to access authenticated, peer-reviewed content presents a significant opportunity. Publishers have spent decades building trusted repositories that are exactly what AI research tools require for credibility and accuracy. By creating machine-readable access tiers alongside traditional licensing, publishers can serve both their human readership and this emerging machine audience. Those who develop thoughtful pricing models for both consumption patterns will open up revenue streams that simply didn't exist before."
Think about this as dual-audience monetization. Your human readers still need PDFs and HTML. Your machine readers need APIs and structured data feeds.
Don't Sleep on the Fundamentals
While everyone's scrambling to figure out AI licensing, a few of our experts reminded us not to ignore the fundamentals—or the emerging markets that still represent massive growth potential.
James Butcher, Director of Journalology, points out an often-overlooked opportunity: "China will produce over a million research articles for the first time this year, with output tripling over the past decade. Western publishers need to engage with Chinese researchers as authors, peer reviewers, and editors."
And Adam Day, CEO of Clear Skies Ltd, offers perhaps the most sobering reminder: "Growth isn't what it used to be. Publishing is a numbers game right up until the number of problematic papers hits critical mass. Maintaining high standards of peer-review and integrity is critical to maintaining revenue and that's sure to continue."
The Bottom Line
Revenue opportunities in 2026 cluster around a central theme: the value of trusted, authenticated content is skyrocketing, but you need to be strategic about how you monetize it. Whether that's through inference-based licensing, content transformation, authenticated access frameworks, or maintaining the integrity that makes all of this valuable in the first place, the key is recognizing that your business model is evolving from gatekeeper to intelligence partner.
The publishers who thrive will be the ones who thoughtfully reimagine how their content creates value across multiple audiences—human and machine—and build sustainable revenue models around that value.