We have more tools than ever. So why are we still stuck?
The scholarly publishing sector needs interoperability, not more tools, argues ChronosHub’s Anthony Apodaca
The landscape of scholarly publishing tools and platforms is barely recognisable from even five years ago.
Entire categories that we now take for granted didn’t exist: AI-powered integrity screening, open bibliometric infrastructure, standardised OA metadata exchange.
Looking at just the research integrity space, STM’s Integrity Hub, launched in May 2022, already screens over 125,000 manuscripts a month across 40 publishers. Then there’s Clear Skies’ Papermill Alarm, Springer Nature’s Geppetto and SnappShot, and Wiley’s Papermill Detection service. All released with impressive speed to combat the surge of AI-fuelled research fraud.
So, we’re living in something of a golden age for publishing technology. But for publishers, this isn’t spurring the efficiencies and breakthroughs you might expect. Because managing these tools, and ensuring they actually work in sync, is a huge challenge.
Three strands, one tangle
To understand why the landscape looks the way it does, and why it still isn’t working for many publishers, you need to look at the forces driving it.
Firstly, modern user expectations have outpaced what’s currently on offer. Researchers today navigate their personal and professional lives through seamless digital experiences. They book flights, manage finances, and collaborate on documents without thinking about the infrastructure underneath. Yet the moment they enter the scholarly publishing ecosystem; they are dropped into a patchwork of disconnected systems. Each has its own login, data requirements, and interface logic. The contrast is jarring, and it is getting harder to justify.
The second pressure is AI, both as a development accelerant and as a problem generator. AI is helping developers build tools faster, meaning the barrier to entry for new products has dramatically lowered. This is great for innovation but creates a crowded market for publishers to navigate. GenAI’s hand in accelerating the paper mill crisis has also driven the integrity tools explosion. In addition, AI-powered writing assistants, reviewer-matching systems, and research discovery engines are multiplying at pace.
The third market force is consolidation. Silverchair acquired ScholarOne from Clarivate in late 2024. Elsevier owns Editorial Manager, Scopus, ScienceDirect, and Mendeley. Wiley owns Atypon. The paradox is sharp: the number of available tools is growing, but the number of truly independent platforms on which to run them is shrinking. For publishers, particularly small and mid-sized societies, this narrows the choices that matter most.
The integration tax
If the issue were merely having to choose between hundreds of tools, that would be challenging enough. Unfortunately, there are additional issues: the costs of time, money, and technical capability to connect them into a sensible user experience.
Recently, we hosted a customer workshop and learned how far some editors go to work around software that doesn’t meet their needs: manually tracking editor assignments with spreadsheets, for example. We also learned that they’ve introduced innovative technologies into their peer review systems at high cost only to experience low adoption rates due to poor user experiences. So, while product teams achieved the output (e.g., new feature launches), they failed to deliver measure outcomes (e.g., reduction in editorial admin costs).
The burden extends to authors too. A study in PLOS One estimated that researchers worldwide spend around 23.8 million hours reformatting manuscripts every year. When the time of the full research team is factored in, the cost runs to approximately $1.1 billion annually. That figure reflects a system where disconnected tools force authors to repeatedly carry out time-consuming and wholly unnecessary work.
This pattern repeats across the sector. Editorial data, production workflows, OA compliance, usage analytics, and financial reporting typically live in separate systems with no shared data model and inconsistent metadata. Connecting a new integrity tool to an editorial workflow sounds straightforward until you discover the submission system doesn’t pass on the metadata the tool requires. Adding a new APC management layer sounds simple until three different systems need to agree on which institution an author belongs to.
For a society publisher with a small team, the real cost of a new tool is the time required to evaluate, procure, integrate, and maintain it. When that cost is weighed against the risk of disrupting a workflow that currently works well enough, inertia wins. The tools exist. The capacity to adopt them does not.
Vendor lock-in compounds the problem. When your hosting platform, submission system, and payment infrastructure are all owned by a handful of large commercial entities, switching costs are high and the incentive for those vendors to make their tools interoperable with competitors’ offerings is structurally low.
Integrations that scale
The publishers navigating this landscape most successfully are investing in connective tissue: the standards, identifiers, and integration layers that make it possible to swap tools in and out without rebuilding everything.
At ChronosHub, we believe the opportunity is not to replace everything, but to connect everything. And this is why we’ve built our zero-fee integration framework designed to avoid vendor lock-in. It empowers publishers to experiment and deploy different applications that achieve the outcomes they desire.
This can completely transform the pre-submission space, helping publishers test and adopt things like scope and grammar check tools, without negatively impacting the front-end experience for their authors.
The infrastructure imperative
In a recent SSP presentation, I made the point that the value of data is not in any single data stream, but in the ability to traverse across streams. That’s where a data layer that collects business facts becomes a major win for publishers navigating a fragmented data landscape.
But this is only possible when systems are designed to talk to each other. And today, many aren’t. That’s the gap our integration framework was built to close.
Anthony Apodaca is Head of Product at ChronosHub