5 March 2026
Kudos today announces a significant expansion of its fast-track research initiative, ‘Taming the Crocodile’, with five new sponsors joining the study: Elsevier, Wiley, BMJ Group, American Physical Society and Oxford University Press.
The new sponsors join the founding cohort of De Gruyter Brill, Emerald Publishing, IOP Publishing, Silverchair and Springer Nature. This brings together an unprecedented cross-section of publishers, societies and platform providers to examine the impact of zero-click search (“Google Zero”) and AI-generated overview panels on the scholarly communications ecosystem.
The Taming the Crocodile study takes its name from “the Crocodile Effect,” a term coined by SaaS marketing expert Tim Soulo to describe the widening gap between search impressions and click-throughs. In the scholarly context, this shift raises urgent questions not only about traffic and subscription revenues, but also about attribution, version control, research integrity and trust in the scholarly record.
“Our responsibility is to the research community and the scholarly record,” says Rachel Burley, Chief Publications Officer, American Physical Society. “As zero-click search becomes more common, researchers may get answers without seeing sources, context, or caveats. We’re sponsoring this project because we need to understand how that shift affects trust, attribution, and the availability of rigorous research.”
“The level of engagement from across the sector underlines the scale and urgency of the challenge,” says Charlie Rapple, co-founder of Kudos and lead investigator for the study. “AI-mediated discovery is already reshaping how research is surfaced, interpreted and cited. By bringing together publishers, societies and technology providers, we can develop evidence-based, practical responses that protect usage, revenues and research integrity, while ensuring that high-quality research remains visible and trusted.”