Welcome to STM Trends 2028
Each spring, the scholarly publishing sector looks forward to the release of STM Trends, which provides a thematic representation of the major advancements in research and publishing — as they exist in the future.
In December 2023, our STEC committee and Future Lab members met in London to deliberate and predict the evolution of scholarly communications over the next five years, using the Delphi method for collaborative forecasting.
The focus extended beyond just technological advancements, incorporating wider perspectives from STM committee members including those from Research Integrity, Open Research, and Social Responsibility — as well as representation from journal editors.
This Year's Theme
RE-IMAGINING THE HUMAN FACTOR
Defining our place and values in the networked machine era
This year’s STM Trends edition imagines a future in which AI has become an essential part of the fabric of research and scholarly publishing. We see a blended workforce with humans and machines working together to advance trusted research, building a vast network of knowledge that links articles to research data, experiments to code, authors to institutes and funders, and scholarly works to podcasts. Content is produced and consumed by both humans and machines, traditional peer-review is supplemented by automated checks, and trust is a quality that flows between nodes in the scholarly network.
But this future is not a technical utopia: Papermills and pirates attempt to exploit technology for their own gain, and fissures appear in the global scholarly network. And, for some, the world has just become too complex and it’s time to go back to basics. In this hyper-complex system, how do we ensure accountability, transparency, ethics, and equity? How do we preserve the Human Factor?
Three main strands
Central to this theme are three main tenets — key factors that underpin this year’s story.
Humans and Machines
The rise of generative AI marks a new chapter in the ongoing narrative of technology’s impact on research and scholarly communication, introducing unprecedented questions, possibilities, and challenges. How will humans and machines work alongside each other to curate the scholarly record in 2028? Will AI be weaponized to pollute the scholarly record and fan the flames of disinformation? Or will AI help us to bring trusted research into the hands of the public and policy-makers?
Sources of Truth & Trust
In a world where humans and machines build and interact with the scholarly record in many different processes and novel workflows — how do we know what is real and what’s been fabricated? What can be trusted? Who can be trusted? This year’s Trends explores these questions in a world where traditional peer-review is supplemented by automated checks — and trust is a quality that flows between nodes in an ever-evolving scholarly network.
Cohesion
The highly complex, networked future that is envisioned in this year’s STM Trends is not a naïve technological utopia. Paper mills and other actors will find clever ways to apply technology for personal gain, introducing misinformation and disinformation that fuel mistrust in science. Looking at the world around us, geopolitical tensions will also have an impact on the research enterprise, risking fragmentation. Will age-old beacons of trust, stability and cohesion be able to keep us together?