A little over a year ago, Cabells dipped its toe into the AI ocean and launched the beta version of CompassAI – an independent, cutting-edge tool for researchers to identify the journals with the best fit for their research. The launch has been incredibly successful, with great customer feedback and new use cases we hadn’t even thought of ourselves. Twelve months on, and we have used that feedback…

Manchester, which ALPSP has adopted for its annual conference, is famously known for having prodigious rainfall – and right on cue, the heavens opened midway through the event. But the rain has come as a welcome relief for many who have suffered the hottest summer on record in the UK. It is with this backdrop that the UN Sustainable Development Goals has risen back up the agenda for publishers, somewhat ironically as we hurtle towards the 2030 end date with very few, if any, of the goals likely to be met.

What is a journal? What is research? What is AI’s role in either of these things? These and other existential questions have been bothering academics and publishers alike since the advent of Generative AI tools for common use nearly four years ago. One byproduct of this has been a sudden boost to the worth of philosophers, as they exhibit both the skills to prompt and analyze AI outputs, as well as the critical faculties to debate their use.

Criticisms of universities and their lack of formal training of PhD students are nothing new – 20 years ago, I personally heard this many times while giving talks on publishing at some of the top research universities in the UK, Australia and Western Europe. At the time it seemed shocking, but not surprising. Very little information seemed to shared by universities about how their faculty could publish their research, despite the fact that the resulting publications were the very thing universities were judged on to show their worth.

Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash Anyone who has published an academic article will recognize the feeling of despair when receiving an email like the one below – clashing color schemes, weird formatting and multiple typos all point to the same conclusion – some predatory publisher is trying for the sixth time this week to entice me into publishing in their poor imitation of a journal.

Many ideas focused on improving scholarly communications are borrowed from adjacent industries, where there is some overlap in concepts or procedures that lend themselves to more easily envisaging how new ways of working may be adopted. Think the use of Agile project management processes in publishing, or the increasing adoption of trust markers in research integrity issues. Ideas that make sense in another context and can be mapped to our own area have a better chance of being adopted to improve outcomes of immediate concern. 

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash The first half of 2026 has offered no shortage of reminders that scholarly publishing is changing rapidly - and not always comfortably for those of us in scholarly communications. Reviewing the Cabells blog so far this year, one theme has come through again and again: researchers, librarians, publishers and institutions rrequire improved evidence, habits and tools if they are to navigate a landscape being reshaped by AI, predatory practices and shifting norms about the notion of research impact.

Photo by Fr0ggy5 on Unsplash On Monday 13th July the deadline passed for stakeholders to comment on the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposal to “revise the Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance to improve government-wide policies and requirements related to the management of grants, cooperative agreements, and other forms of assistance”. Sounds kind of benign, but it has caused outrage across the industry.

Science through time has always represented truth. Logical truth, verifiable truth, empirical truth – whatever the scientific method employed the single goal has been to find out whether something was true or false. Most of the time this might not be anything very exciting or innovative, but from the high school lab to cutting edge R&D, the pursuit of science seemed pretty clear cut.

April saw the curtain come down on one of the most remarkable resources available in business and management research. The Harzing Journal Quality List ( has been meticulously researched and updated an incredible 72 times over the 26 years of its existence, providing a reliable snapshot to academics and publishers alike how ranked journals compared across disciplines from different journal lists published round the world.

June 2026 marks the 10th anniversary in the UK of its tectonic vote to leave the European Union. The so-called Brexit debate consumed the country at the time, and has continued to factor in almost every major political change the UK has had in the last decade – right up to and including the resignation of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, heralding the arrival of no less than the seventh inhabitant of 10 Downing Street in that time. 

To state the obvious, words matter – but sometimes the wrong words in the wrong place can matter even more than the right ones. In the recent Cabells white paper on how to use data for choosing the optimal journal for publication, it was clear that both understanding terms used on social media and then using those terms to promote research work was key for scholars in the modern era to be successful in attracting interest to their work.

In his widely cited - and widely misunderstood - book The End of History and the Last Man, historian and author Francis Fukuyama was heavily criticized for saying that the West had ‘won’ and that there would be no meaningful conflicts to trouble the world with the fall of the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s. The following 40 years or so seem to bear this criticism out, with 9/11, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and most recently the war in Iraq providing ample evidence that history is indeed still happening.  

The simplest way to learn about predatory journals and their tricks of the trade is to look at the burgeoning number of articles on the topic. Since 2020, there have been over 2,000 research articles published that mention ‘predatory publishing,' with the rate increasing over time. Indeed, as you can see from the graph below, aside from the spike in 2021 and a fall back in 2022 following the pandemic, we have seen year-on-year increases so that 2025 was the biggest ever year for published research on the topic. 

Trust is something we all take for granted. From taking an umbrella with you on a day out because the weather forecast said it would rain, to watching a movie following a friend’s recommendation, we commit to dozens of actions each day based on trusting something we have seen, heard, or sensed in some way. Of course, we live in a world where that trust is being undermined, a ‘post-truth’ world where it seems the fabric of much of what we are exposed to is falling apart.

Within a couple of weeks of each other, two decisions have been made that will shape business research and education for years to come – but for very different reasons. One decision is a bold, risky decision that is global in reach and open in outlook; the other is small-minded and narrow, which nevertheless sends a strong message to those it will impact.  

Publishers that lack a deliberate library relations strategy are making consequential decisions without important and useful community perspectives.

Recent reporting from the respected Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant highlights a growing problem in scholarly publishing: the rise of AI-generated fake citations appearing in academic papers. According to the article, authored by Stan van Pelt, fabricated references — studies, articles, or journals that do not actually exist — have increased significantly alongside the widespread adoption of generative AI tools.

Sinds de opkomst van AI is er een vertienvoudiging van het aantal academische artikelen dat verwijzingen bevat naar publicaties die helemaal niet bestaan. 1 op de 275 biomedische artikelen bevat…

Imagine you wake up one morning with a set of unusual symptoms. Nothing to worry about, you think, but you had better check online just to make sure. Once you scroll through a few plausible-sounding, non-serious possibilities, your eyes alight on an illness you have never heard of before. But it sounds serious – really serious. You click on the link and the academic article you read then sends you into a blind panic as you think you might have a hitherto unknown condition... 

Discover how the documentary 'The Shadow Scholars' sheds light on academic integrity issues and the impact of essay mills in Kenya.

How do you choose the right journal? Some people might suggest this is an art rather than a science, only possible with years of publishing experience or a wide network of contacts of those at the top of a given field. Others might suggest that you can plan and execute a publication with near certainty, using data to proceed to a positive outcome.

Researchers compiled a dataset of more than 18,700 adverts posted between March 2020 and early April 2026 by seven paper mills

Businesses charging up to $5,000 for lead author credit with textbooks and design patents also for sale

A little-examined consequence of the predatory publishing phenomenon is the damage done to legitimate publishers that got swept up in it – not because they were truly predatory, but because they were listed alongside journals that were. Beall’s List, the well-intentioned and perhaps the most famous predatory publisher and journal list, has long been shuttered. Despite that, the digital record persists.

Today, we share the results of a global community poll that produced the theme for Peer Review Week 2026 (14–18 September): “Peer Review Capacity: Volume, Speed and Quality.”