Entering the AI Era

Resistance to adopting technology in publishing has reduced significantly over the past few years as people have gotten used to the idea, and as people have learned more about it

Last month, STM launched the newest version of its TechTrends series. Edition 2022 bears the motto: Entering the AI Era, Creative Humans & Smart Machines. A half-day brainstorm session by STM’s Future Lab Forum in London on December helped identify the different impacts and opportunities that artificial intelligence (AI has for the world of scholarly communication and STM publishing.

As Phill Jones, CTO of Emerald Publishing, explained, scholarly publishers have grown accustomed to thinking about such futuristic technologies.

“A few years ago, when I would talk about applications and workflow tools and data and analytics and all of these things, I would sense a certain amount of resistance from publishers, particularly smaller publishers in learned societies – a fear that this isn’t what we do.  Right?  We don’t do this technology.  We publish content.  This isn’t our wheelhouse,” Jones told CCC’s Chris Kenneally at a panel discussion marking the launch of TechTrends 2022.

“That resistance to adopting newer types of technology, I feel, has reduced significantly over the past few years as people have gotten used to the idea, and as people have learned more about it,” he added.

Panelists for the Innovations Day program in Philadelphia at the annual STM US conference were –

• IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg is Senior Vice President of Research Integrity for Elsevier, where he is responsible for new technology initiatives to safeguard the integrity of both content and the content-based products that Elsevier offers to the research community. In this role he is also responsible for user privacy. IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg earned a PhD in Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Leiden. He has published scientific articles and holds patents in the areas of document retrieval, research data linking, and user interfaces.
• Gerry Grenier is Director of Publishing Technologies for IEEE—the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He leads a 40-person electronic publishing team that is responsible for the development and operation of IEEE Xplore — a digital library containing over 3 million journal articles, conference papers, and standards in electrical engineering and computer science. He serves on the boards of CrossRef and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO).
• Phill Jones joined Emerald Publishing as CTO earlier this month. He previously worked at Digital Science in a variety of positions that involved product development, business intelligence, outreach, and scientometric consultancy. He holds a PhD is in Atomic and Plasma Physics and held a faculty appointment in Neurology at Harvard Medical School.
• Stacy Malyil is Director of Strategic Marketing of texts, services, and online learning, reference, and practice solutions for Wolters Kluwer’s portfolio in Medicine, Nursing and Allied Health. Stacy has also held marketing, business development, and product strategy positions at McGraw-Hill Education, SpringerNature, and Taylor & Francis.