Did you know digital natives will make up the majority of the global workforce by 2030?!

Up-and-coming researchers and publishing professionals have different UX expectations for software platforms and websites than previous generations and changing task management and content consumption styles. These new entrants to the industry bring fresh perspectives on addressing scholarly communication challenges and harnessing emerging opportunities to improve digital workflows.

What can seasoned scholarly communication professionals learn about optimizing publisher technology stacks from the next generation of publishers and researchers and vice versa?

We explored this question during “The Next-Gen Scholarly Publishing Tech Stack,” a free webinar from Scholastica and the GWU Graduate Program in Publishing on April 18, 2025.

John W. Warren, director and professor of the George Washington University MPS in publishing program, and Danielle Padula, head of marketing and community development at Scholastica, moderated the discussion, which featured the following speakers:

  • Janaynne Carvalho do Amaral: Postdoctoral Research Associate at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  • Brian Cody: CEO and Co-Founder of Scholastica
  • Alicea Hibbard, MHA: Ethics and IDEAA Senior Associate at the American Society for Microbiology
  • Mikayla Lee: MPS in Publishing Student and E-Publishing Lead for the GW Journal of Ethics in Publishing, George Washington University

Below, we round up some highlights from the webinar, which you can watch on-demand here.

Webinar highlights

The roundtable-style discussion focused on:

  • The primary drivers of industry change today — from advances in AI and search to shifting research integrity check needs
  • How technology requirements/UX expectations are evolving with the next generation of researchers and publishing professionals
  • Which areas of publisher tech stacks will demand the most attention in the coming years

Here’s a preview of some of the key takeaways from the speakers.

Seeking low-friction technical solutions

A webinar theme that stood out from the offset and permeated the conversation is a mounting desire for more integrated and seamless online experiences among those using peer review and publishing tools as well as readers. The speakers discussed how the definition of “publishing tech stack” now extends beyond tools directly in publishers’ control to the growing external scholarly communication infrastructure they must integrate with.

“When I think about this, I think about two axes of the publishing lifecycle,” said Brian. “So there’s all the software involved in submitting scholarship and peer review happening and storing data all the way to hosting. Then there’s getting analytics and then feeding citation data back into systems. That’s sort of one axis for thinking about the tech stack. Another one would be front end to back end. So, the thing people are seeing versus maybe the data being stored […] and, interestingly, that’s often very dispersed. So, when I think about the tech stack for a lot of publishers, it can be both the tools you’re paying for, but it really is relying on things like Crossref also. Crossref is part of your tech stack even though it’s a separate organization.”

Building off of Brian’s point, Alicea said, “I think what’s important is to have things that work together well and are integrated well. You need workflow management tracking, KPIs, and things like that actually integrated into software […] and especially with the younger generation, customization is super important.”

She later noted “You need to ask yourself what problem are you solving and how are you going to measure success. […] You can waste so much emotional time and energy dealing with systems that aren’t easy to use and navigate. We’ve been trying to streamline a lot of things at my organization as far as automating reviewer finding, keyword generation, and stuff like paper mill checks.”

Keeping up with increasing user engagement expectations

In addition to incoming publishing professionals seeking to integrate digital tools and systems, the speakers discussed increasing expectations among younger generations of readers to be able to engage with content across multiple platforms and devices.

Janaynne said she sees a greater desire among students to interact with research in the classes she teaches at UIUC. “When I teach about peer review and open peer review and ask my students to propose solutions about how we can improve editorial workflows, they usually come up with ideas related to things like Instagram and TikTok, and I was thinking how these types of tools that we have for comments on Instagram and Facebook [how we could] also push journals to implement them.”

Janaynne also discussed changing research processes among upcoming generations, including the expectation to be able to find information via web browsers, access information on desktop and mobile devices, and use AI tools to engage with content in different languages.

Mikayla added that younger generations also expect an enjoyable online browsing experience. “I think that people put a lot more value on their attention now. [..] We are a lot more particular about what we want to spend our time looking at. I think that’s why having something aesthetically pleasing is a big deal because people have so many options. I think that comes back to visuals and aesthetics and just the user experience […] and not having to click through a million different things before you get to what you want. I think it’s a bigger deal than people realize.”

To appeal to different reader styles and use cases, Alicea said the publishing team at AMS thinks about arranging information for their publications in what they refer to as “bites, snacks, and meals.” For example, they might offer bite-size synopses of articles for readers at a discovery stage where they are likely to be seeking cursory information. “Not everything needs to be a whole meal,” she said, referring to lengthy content or full articles. “Sometimes you just want a snack, and being able to determine what can be a snack versus what has to be a meal and presenting things in that way is important for users.”

Balancing AI opportunities and risks

As some of the newest entrants to publisher and researcher technology stacks, AI tools were also a key component of the discussion. The speakers considered how publishers are and will increasingly have to defend against the research integrity risks posed by unethical AI use while also exploring practical AI applications for their teams, authors, and reviewers.
Speaking about AI risks from her perspective working in research integrity at ASM, Alicia said, “For our journals, which are in microbiology, […] the biggest risk is AI-generated imagery. A lot of the image integrity sleuths and other experts have noted that it’s becoming more and more difficult to tell the difference between, say, a real western blot or an AI-generated one. And that’s really concerning because it undermines trust in fields that directly affect people’s health. But blanket bans on AI are not the answer. There’s a lot of nuance and breadth in the definition of what even is considered as AI.”

Alicea said she’s hopeful that developing AI tools will make it easier to spot unethical AI use, noting it is a bit like “fighting fire with fire.” She advised publishers to avoid hastily categorizing new research integrity check software as a cost center and to instead conduct cost-benefit analyses for possible solutions. “That is something I would avoid that happens with consumer technology. […] In scholarly publishing, reputation is super important, and a huge part of maintaining that is the integrity of your publications. So, if you have to do the math to show why you need a tool, then you should do the math. You can show how much it costs to do a correction or a retraction and include personnel time because that is a powerful metric.”

Speaking about setting ethical AI use guidelines for authors and readers as generative AI tools expand and evolve, Mikayla said she thinks about her time as a high school English teacher. “For that year, my life was looking for AI. When I was dealing with students, my thought process was always what is the emotional driver behind wanting to use this tool to complete this task instead of doing it yourself.” She said she sees an opportunity for publishers to take a similar approach and consider how they can provide support during the editorial and peer review process in challenge areas, whether via publisher-sanctioned AI use cases or otherwise.

Ready to learn more?

Those are just a few key takeaways from the “Next-Gen Scholarly Publishing Tech Stack” webinar. To tune into the full discussion, check out the recording now available on YouTube here.

If you’d like to learn about future Scholastica events like this webinar, we encourage you to sign up for updates on our resources page.

We also invite you to join the webinar conversation by sharing your thoughts on the future of scholarly publishing technology in the blog comments section below and via social media. You can find Scholastica on LinkedIn and Bluesky.

Many thanks to all of the speakers who joined this webinar!