APE 2025: Conversations on Community, Context and Capital

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With the holidays fading into the distance and huge political uncertainty on the (very) near horizon, it was great to start the year at the 20^th anniversary Academic Publishing in Europe (APE) Conference in Berlin. An opportunity to check in with friends and colleagues, and to see what themes are going to be driving the agenda in scholarly publishing in 2025.

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One thing which has always characterised APE, in the years that I have been attending the event, is the high quality of debate and some welcome dissent and disagreement between the panellists on stage – all done in good spirit and with appropriate courtesy, of course!

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There were three panel sessions in particular which provided notable talking points and some welcome food for thought, with each panel being extremely well moderated by Roger Schonfeld, James Butcher and Heather Staines respectively.

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In Roger’s Rethinking Scholarly Outputs panel, Daniel Ebneter (Karger), Hemai Parthasarathy (Hemaisphere, LLC) and Henning Schoenenberger (Springer Nature) mused on topics ranging from sustainable development goals, the use of technology (and the ubiquitous AI), and a broader look at the role of the publisher.

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The panel discussed how SDGs can provide evidence of real-world impact (for instance, in the case of pharma needing to know whether clinical behaviour is positively changed by the research it undertakes) and how SDGs also give a framework for public engagement.

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On AI, Henning shared a telling anecdote about a recent control experiment, in which two teams of researchers were given a problem to solve. One team had AI tools at their disposal, the other team did not. On day one, the AI-less team initially struggled and felt unhappy at being deprived of AI tools, but by the second day of the experiment they had more time to read research around the topic. The overall outcome of the experiment showed no discernible difference in the originality of the work delivered by each team.

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Daniel warned that the industry is characterised by a level of inertia (and in some cases comfort) due to publishers not being directly challenged to innovate by the communities they serve. His call to action was for scholarly publishers to be open to new ideas and to be ready to adapt – or even pre-empt – change which is triggered by the wider science ecosystem.

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The panel finished with a discussion around the value delivered by journals and publishers in ‘storytelling’ to provide narrative and context around research outputs. There was a divide in the room between those who want to see a greater focus on machine-readable research outputs; and those who passionately feel that just delivering machine-readable data without narrative and context is highly problematic. Sara Rouhi’s impassioned comment from the floor in favour of narrative approaches merited the round of applause she received! Worth also noting the post-APE comments from Lou Peck around what storytelling actually means – it isn’t just publishing the research paper, it’s the wider context and communication to various audiences.

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James started the Balancing Quantity and Quality in Research Communication panel with an eye-catching set of figures. Compared to average revenue across the industry for subscription articles of ~$8,000, an equivalent APC Open Access article only delivers ~$4,000. On this basis, publishers typically need to publish at least twice as many articles simply to maintain existing revenues. As has been often discussed within our industry in recent times, there is a systemic issue in scholarly publishing around incentives and behaviour, exacerbated by pay-to-publish models – and this applies both to some authors and to some publishers.

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Panellists Kamran Abbasi (BMJ), Antonia Seymour (IOP Publishing) and Fred Fenter (Frontiers) then had an entertaining and at times very lively debate around how their publishing operating models differ, particularly in terms of differing incentives for editors and journal teams, and benchmarks for acceptable desk rejection rates and post-peer review rejection rates. The BMJ and Frontiers, for example, are patently different beasts in terms of where they position themselves in the market. Kamran was arguably a tad too vociferous in how he challenged Fred to justify the Frontiers operating model; but Kamran was absolutely right to point out that all scholarly publishers have a responsibility to root out poor-quality papers which don’t contribute novel research to the scientific record.

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In discussing the merits of anonymised versus open peer review, Antonia pointed out that peer review at IOPP is not intended to evaluate the science, but to evaluate how well scientists can make informed decisions based on that particular research content. IOPP reviewers are only asked whether they want to opt-in to a transparent peer review process at the point of manuscript acceptance. Fred outlined Frontiers’ longstanding commitment (since 2007) to open peer review, in order to foster transparency and trust. In a similar vein to Henning’s control experiment anecdote about AI, Kamran shared the insight that in a control trial at BMJ between open and anonymised peer review, there was surprisingly little difference in output and review quality – but there was a general improvement in politeness with open peer review, which has to be a good thing!

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Heather moderated the panel Scholarly Infrastructure at a Crossroads, with some excellent discussion between panellists Todd Toler (Wiley), Will Schweitzer (Silverchair) and Sami Benchekroun (Morressier).  

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The nub of this conversation was around who drives technological change in scholarly publishing and how this change is financed. Sami’s remark that being funded by venture capital partners has bought his business time to develop its products and its GTM strategies over a number of years raised a few eyebrows in the room, given the usual impatience of venture capital investors to see a return on their investments.

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Will made a good case for his company working with one specific smaller capital fund as a growth investor, selecting one (Thompson Capital Partners) which has a track record of working with relatively niche companies and taking a longer-term view. Whatever you might feel about the size and profits of the largest players in scholarly publishing, we are a comparatively niche and small sector overall, compared to other publishing and technology verticals. Todd explained how shareholder investors, mainly from US institutional investments for pensions, are happier with the relatively low growth and steady profits typically delivered by Wiley.

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There was also a more fundamental, almost philosophical question, about whether technology vendors should take their lead from scholarly publishers in how and when they innovate; or whether technologists should be leading this innovation and driving demand with new ideas and new paradigms for publishers. In my view, there is a middle ground to be found – relying solely on an industry characterised by inertia (as per Daniel Ebneter’s comment in a previous panel) to self-innovate isn’t going to deliver change at the pace or scale required to cope with the challenges we face. But any technology business adopting a ‘build it and they will come’ mentality for their latest concept, without engaging with the wider scholarly community, risks coming unstuck and being left with a white elephant!

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In summary, the general feeling about this year’s APE when speaking to colleagues was that the content of the panel sessions was excellent, but the overall event over two days was arguably a little panel heavy and needed some light relief!

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With my Kriyadocs hat on, the conversations at APE reinforced the ethos behind our approach to supporting scholarly publishers and their user communities with technology-driven solutions. Balancing innovation and fresh thinking with a focus on current and future challenges faced by the community is at the core of Kriyadocs’ product development. Speaking – and listening – to the scholarly publishing community will continue to be central to what we do, which makes events such as APE always worthwhile and enjoyable. Congratulations to Ingo Rother and the organising team on delivering an event which was fitting for APE’s 20^th anniversary!

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Next stop – Researcher to Reader 2025 in London on February 25-26! See you there?

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