It’s a time of unprecedented change, not only within our industry, but across the world as our day to day is re-shaped by technological advancements and AI. Humanoid robots are doing kung fu in China, while a surprising number of people are starting to ‘marry’ their AI companions. We’ve suddenly been thrust into an era that feels more like science fiction than the reality we’re used to and yet much of the time we can barely register these cataclysmic developments as our attention is elsewhere – watching the global political landscape and the ripple effects of decisions that will impact us all for years to come.
We talk often as an organisation about how the future is becoming more volatile; the pathway forward harder to see. As both a membership and publishing organisation supporting chemists to make the world a better place by accelerating the creation and exchange of knowledge, we are mission bound to shape a future where chemistry is a force for good. What this means and how we achieve this needs to flex as the world around us shifts. Like we did with our open access strategy, we need to change with the times – we must embrace the developments that can accelerate our mission while being conscious of the implications, the risks and the impact.
Our publishing business sits at the heart of this. Not only does it generate the revenue that funds much of our broader charitable activity from grants and prizes through to education, policy and community programmes, but it’s also one of the ways we deliver against our Charter Objectives which include the dissemination of chemical knowledge. In many ways, that mission has remained remarkably consistent since the RSC was founded 185 years ago, even as the world around us has transformed beyond recognition.
Today, the scale and reach of our mission is truly global. Through our journals, books and digital resources, we provide trusted platforms for researchers to share discoveries that have the potential to shape everything from healthcare and advanced materials to energy and sustainability. Meanwhile, AI is beginning to fundamentally reshape researcher behaviour and their associated expectations – researchers are finding information in new ways and beginning to engage with content differently. As a community-focused organisation, understanding these changes, and what they mean for the future of scholarly communication, is becoming increasingly important, and something we are paying close attention to.
Publishing research is also about more than making information available; it’s about creating connections between people, ideas and disciplines and about enabling the advancement of science beyond the lab and into the real world where it will have the greatest societal impact. For this to happen effectively, there needs to be trust in science, the scientific process, and in the systems that underpin it. At a time when misinformation is increasingly pervasive and trust in institutions can no longer be taken for granted, the role of rigorous peer review, editorial oversight and scientific integrity feels more important than ever.
As the world around us continues to change, maintaining that trust means continuing to evolve alongside the needs of our community. With that in mind, we wanted to share some updates on how we’re adapting our Journals Business and preparing for an increasingly uncertain future.
Exploring AI opportunities
One of the biggest technological shifts reshaping our industry is, of course, the rapid development of generative AI. While the pace of change can at times feel overwhelming, it also presents exciting new opportunities for knowledge dissemination from improving discoverability to supporting new ways of engaging with content.
At the RSC, we’ve been exploring these developments collaboratively across the organisation and drawing on expertise from our Technology Advisory Group – a network of specialists across the industry and beyond. As an early step in shaping our approach, we established and published our Guiding principles for AI. Our primary focus now is on understanding where these technologies can meaningfully support our mission in alignment with our values as a professional body, learned society and trusted publisher.
Richard Kidd, who leads our internal publishing AI working group, has been closely monitoring developments in AI technologies, licensing models and the evolving policy landscape.
“Given the collection of technologies under ‘AI’, it’s been crucial for us to understand what can help us and where the challenges are. We have been building up our internal capabilities, while concentrating on the art of the possible in applying new technology. Already the use of AI-assisted discovery is changing how our community find and access the research we publish – we are partnering to license our publications through these new channels, and will be testing out new models that will better enable trust and citability as discovery evolves.”
As with revenue generated across our wider publishing and commercial activities, any additional income arising from new AI-related models or opportunities will be reinvested back into the RSC’s charitable mission – supporting the chemistry community while continuing to evolve our publishing programmes, platforms and approaches to knowledge dissemination. As the needs of researchers and the wider scientific landscape continue to change, ensuring that we can adapt and invest for the long term remains critical.
Alongside the opportunities, we are also acutely aware of the broader questions generative AI raises for the research community. Concerns around transparency, attribution, copyright, environmental impact and research integrity are increasingly shaping discussions across the community and the wider industry. As publishers, we have a responsibility not only to innovate, but to do so thoughtfully.
Emma Wilson, our Publishing Director, is helping shape the RSC’s approach to these challenges and opportunities.
“Our community has been central to shaping how we think about AI - both through our formal governance structures and the many conversations we continue to have across our networks. What’s abundantly clear is that researcher behaviours and expectations are changing. There’s understandably a lot of excitement around the opportunities AI presents, but also a growing number of questions that we need to engage with seriously as a society publisher.
“For us, this can’t just become a conversation driven by technological change alone as we’re also starting to see changes in researcher behaviour. Our mission, values and organisational commitments around inclusion, diversity and sustainability need to remain part of the framing, otherwise it becomes very easy to get swept up in the pace of change without properly considering the implications.
“Ultimately, our role is to ensure that the research we publish remains trusted, rigorous and impactful. The technology will continue to evolve quickly – probably faster than any of us can fully predict - but we’re confident in both the role we play and our ability to adapt responsibly alongside it.”
A new platform for our journals
In June, we’ll also be launching our brand-new Journals platform in partnership with Silverchair – an important milestone in the ongoing evolution of our publishing infrastructure as we prepare for a more AI-centric future.
This strategic partnership will deliver a state-of-the-art publishing platform designed to enhance the experience of our authors, editors and readers. Users will benefit from a more intuitive interface, improved accessibility and enhanced functionality that better supports the new ways they are discovering and engaging with scientific content today.
Behind the scenes, the move also represents a significant investment in the future visibility and discoverability of our journals content. By transitioning our content onto the Silverchair platform, we are improving metadata quality, strengthening search optimisation and expanding integrations with major research indexes and scholarly tools. As AI-enabled discovery continues to evolve, these foundations become increasingly important. Researchers are starting to engage with content in very different ways, making trusted metadata, clear attribution and strong links to the scholarly record critical for maintaining discoverability, citability and scientific integrity.
You can read more about the partnership here: RSC announcement on the Silverchair partnership
A change for our flagship journal
Chemical Science has operated under a diamond open access model for more than a decade, with publication costs fully supported by the RSC. During this time, the journal has grown into one of the world’s leading open access chemistry journals, providing researchers across the world with the opportunity to publish high-quality work without financial barriers.
Over the past 10 years alone, we have funded the publication of more than 14,000 articles from authors spanning 88 countries – a significant investment in openness, accessibility and the global chemistry community. We remain immensely proud of what this model has enabled, both for researchers and for the visibility and reach of the science published within the journal.
At the same time, the scale and success of Chemical Science has continued to evolve – over the past few years the journal has started to see unprecedented levels of submissions. Supporting this growth has required continued investment in specialist editorial expertise, peer review management and publishing operations.
As we look to the future, we need to ensure that Chemical Science remains sustainable not only as an individual journal, but as part of a broader publishing portfolio that supports our charitable mission. With this in mind, we have made the decision to introduce an article processing charge (APC) from July this year.
This decision was not taken lightly. Diamond open access has long reflected our commitment to equity and openness in scholarly communication, and those principles continue to guide our approach. However, maintaining a high-quality global publishing program requires us to balance those ambitions with the financial realities of an increasingly uncertain scholarly communications landscape.
The introduction of an APC will allow us to continue investing in the journal’s future – supporting authors, maintaining rigorous editorial standards and ensuring that Chemical Science continues to provide a world-leading platform for exceptional chemistry research in the years ahead.
Expanding the reach of our journals
Against a backdrop of ongoing market uncertainty, shifting funding priorities and continued pressure on institutional budgets, we are continuing to work closely with universities, consortia and funding bodies around the world to ensure the broadest possible access to our content.
Institutional agreements – particularly institutional OA agreements – remain an important part of enabling more open research, helping to reduce barriers for authors, while supporting broader access to high-quality chemistry research.
To highlight just a few recent examples, in our home market we renewed our latest three-year agreement with Jisc allowing access to our portfolio for over 60 institutions across the UK. As an additional opt-in institutions have the option to cover APC payments for authors in our gold OA journals via central invoicing.
In India, we are thrilled to participate in the Government’s One Nation One Subscription scheme making our journals open to over 6,500 Indian Institutions, empowering approximately 18 million researchers, students and educators in India.
This year, we also signed our first OA deal in Türkiye with TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM, the Turkish Academic Network and Information Center. The three-year deal grants full access to our journal portfolio and OA publishing for corresponding authors in both our hybrid and OA journals.
Alongside our institutional agreements, we continue to support authors without access to funding for APCs through our OA waiver programmes. Last year alone, we provided waivers to more than 2,000 authors worldwide, helping ensure that financial barriers do not prevent researchers from publishing their work.
Evolving with our community
While much of the conversation right now is understandably centred on AI and technology, ultimately our greatest strength continues to be our people. The expertise, creativity and commitment of colleagues and our community across the RSC remain fundamental to how we evolve and move forward. As the world around us continues to shift in ways that are often difficult to predict, creating the space for our teams to experiment, learn and stay closely connected to changing researcher behaviours will be critical to ensuring that we continue to adapt in response to the needs of our community.
None of us can say with certainty what scholarly publishing, or indeed the wider world, will look like in five or ten years’ time. What we can do is continue to evolve thoughtfully and responsibly, ensuring that the Royal Society of Chemistry remains trusted, sustainable and capable of supporting the chemistry community through whatever comes next.