A panel of scholarly publishing executives discussed TechTrends 2024, STM’s annual forecast of technology trends impacting scholarly communications, for the recent STM annual US conference.

In 2020, at least as the STM Future Lab Group sees the scholarly publishing universe, the individual user stands at the center of a cloud of media and data.

Yet in an age troubled by fake news and fake science, and especially as the world battles the coronavirus crisis, information consumers must take great care lest they become lost in that cloud, says Heather Ruland Staines of the Knowledge Futures Group.

“There’s such a higher bar that researchers need to meet in order to ensure reproducibility, replicability, and trust,” she says. “It’s going to be the connection of different researchers together, different lab environments, perhaps workflow tools like their electronic lab notebook and maybe even their AI assistant.

“So when all of this comes together and we want to look under the hood, again, we want those trusted partners. We want to be able to see that a publisher asserted that this data is connected to this article and a researcher asserted this lab is responsible for this data. That trust is really the underpinning upon which we’re all trying to move forward now.”

Ms. Ruland Staines joined a panel of scholarly publishing executives to discuss TechTrends 2024, STM’s annual forecast of technology trends impacting scholarly communications, for the recent STM annual US conference. Also appearing were Renny Guida with IEEE; Liz Marchant of Taylor & Francis; and Sameer Shariff, CEO and founder, Impelsys.

STM Tech Trends 2024
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