12 June 2026
By Tiberius Ignat, Director, SKS Knowledge Services
One of the risks in scholarly publishing is social, and it’s not discussed enough.
We often talk about polarisation as though it belongs to politics, culture wars, or social media. But scholarly communication has its own softer version of the same problem. It happens when researchers mostly speak to researchers, librarians mostly speak to librarians, publishers mostly speak to publishers, and each group gradually becomes fluent only in its own internal logic, enjoys it, and, often unintentionally, cares less about the others.
The result is not necessarily an open conflict every day. That’s good! But the menace remains, less visible and overlooked. Dangerous mutual simplifications grow and coalesce. Publishers become “the commercial side”. Librarians become “the people who always say no”. Researchers become “the people who do not understand systems”. Funders become “the mandate machine of dislocated politicians”. Vendors become “the black box”. None of these descriptions is wholly invented, but all of them are incomplete. And when incomplete descriptions harden into professional instinct, they become a problem. This matters especially for the younger generation entering the sector.
Those of us who have spent years in our profession, moving between conferences, committees, workshops, advisory boards, and informal conversations, have had the benefit of friction. We have heard arguments we did not agree with. We have seen thoughtful people defend positions that, at first glance, seemed self-interested or naive. We have learned that many tensions in scholarly publishing are not created by bad actors, but by legitimate differences in mission, incentives, timescales, and vocabulary. That kind of learning rarely happens from reading online mission statements and project deliveries. It happens from exposure. It happens in rooms.
A librarian who hears directly from a publisher about platform investment, legal risk, product maintenance, and failed experiments leaves with a more serious understanding of what “service provision” actually entails. A publisher who listens to librarians describe procurement requirements, local budget pressure, accessibility duties, licensing complexity, and institutional politics begins to understand why sales are not just a matter of persuasion. A researcher who spends time with either group sees, perhaps for the first time, that scholarly communication is not a lean pipe through which research flows when validated by peers. Outdated ideas, such as the notion that no one is paid in scholarly publishing and that articles can be deposited on websites with a single click, are ugly simplifications that still impoverish research communities.
Without meaningful and extramural encounters, younger professionals may develop their identities in narrower ways. They may become highly competent, but learning only a single story about the system. They may inherit rhetoric before they inherit perspective. That is how bubbles form professionally.
The danger is not disagreement itself. John Stewart Mill wrote (On Liberty, 1859) that knowledge advances when different views are allowed to confront one another. Disagreement can be productive. The real danger lies in growing up professionally in one corner of the system while imagining that you understand the whole of it. When that happens, critique becomes easy, but solution design and action become poor. People become skilled at naming what frustrates them, yet less skilled at recognising what constrains others.
This is one reason I have come to value cross-sector spaces so highly. Not because they magically produce consensus, and certainly not because every stakeholder enters them on equal terms. They do not. Power imbalances remain real. Institutional inequalities remain real. Commercial asymmetries remain real. But cross-sector spaces still do something important; they interrupt the caricaturists.
A good conference, forum, discussion group, or training programme does more than showcase projects. It exposes participants to the worlds of others. It lets people hear not just polished positions, but priorities, anxieties, blind spots, and practical realities. It creates the possibility that someone might say, “I still disagree with you, but I understand better why you think that.” That is no small achievement!
In recent years, our sector has become more fractured. Specialisation has deepened, accelerated online, often through tweets (remember, designed for caricature). Silently, the professional discourse becomes shaped by platform logic. We get used to and expect faster takes, sharper language, idealistic moral positioning, and one photo (funny or scary, must be!). At the same time, people increasingly learn the field through niche communities, targeted feeds, and institutional agendas. This is the receipt for insulation and echo chambers. They are highly dangerous in scholarly publishing because this field is built on interdependence. Researchers need publishers, even when they challenge them. Publishers need libraries, even when negotiations are tense. Libraries need researchers, even when researcher behaviour seems elitist and irrational. Everyone now depends, in different ways, on infrastructure providers, technology companies, metadata standards, discovery systems, and emerging AI tools. We are not separate camps, occasionally forced into contact. Quite the opposite, we are strongly intertwined.
That is why spaces such as meaningful, thought-provoking events and conferences matter to me, especially those that capture a wide spectrum of views, including opposing ones. Their value is not only in content, however strong that content may be. Their value lies in rubbing shoulders. They place different parts of the system close enough to unsettle each other’s assumptions. They make it harder to maintain easy social media stories about who is right, who is wrong, who creates value, and who captures it.
For younger colleagues, this matters even more. The future of scholarly communication will be shaped by the professional development of those who inherit the sector. Policies, licensing models, platforms, or business models, no matter how good, come second. If they inherit only arguments from within their own tribe, then the system will become more suspicious, more rhetorical, and less capable of serious collective problem-solving. If, however, they inherit habits of listening across roles, then even sharp disagreement can remain constructive.
I suspect this challenge will become more pressing, not less, as AI matures. We are already entering a world in which many systems promise convenience through personalisation, prediction, and invisibility. The black box is expanding from the algorithms, adding unknown to the content environments wrapped around them. We will be assisted by algorithms to meet only like-minded individuals, situations and events. In such a world, exposure to other human viewpoints in person becomes more important because it will no longer, unfortunately, happen by accident. Exposure and friction will need to be designed for.
That is why I would argue for protecting and enlarging the spaces where our sector still meets across difference. Not because harmony is a bad thing, but because an unquestioned consensus is a big risk for our sector.
Scholarly publishing does not need less debate. It needs fewer sealed rooms. And the next generation does not need to be protected from disagreement. It needs to see how intelligent disagreement looks when people understand that no one in this system sees the whole picture alone.
Author’s note: AI-based writing assistance was used in preparing this editorial. All ideas and viewpoints presented here are the author’s own, and full responsibility for the text remains with the author.
Author Bio
Dr Tiberius Ignat is the Director of SKS Knowledge Services, a mission-driven company operating in the quaternary sector (knowledge) and dedicated to integrating research into mainstream culture. In 2026, he became the director of the Researcher to Reader Conference (R2RConf.com) in London, a well-established independent forum for researchers, libraries, publishers, technology organisations and funders involved in research.
His company runs the Focus on Open Science workshop series, now in its twelfth year.
He developed and launched BESPOC (Broad Engagement in Science – Point of Contact), a structured model for public engagement in research that has been implemented by several European universities. Since 2023, he has been working on the concept and practice of research security, undertaking research and consultancy in this field through his company.
Tiberius serves as an EU expert, regularly evaluating research proposals under European funding schemes and selected national programmes.
He is a founding member and former Chair (until February 2025) of the LIBER Citizen Science Working Group. He also co-founded and served as Vice-Chair of the Citizen Science at University Working Group within the European Citizen Science Association. He is an active member of the European Association of Research Managers and Administrators (Open Science Thematic Group), the European Platform for Sport Innovation, and the Association for Advancing Participatory Sciences (USA). He serves on the Scientific Committee of the OAI – CERN & University of Geneva Workshop on Open Science.
Dr Ignat holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and a PhD in Information Science from the University of Bucharest. He remains an active researcher in research management, participatory science and research security.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/tiberiusignat
tiberius@knowledge.services