A strong theme of the ALPSP Annual Conference and Awards 2025, held at The Manchester Deansgate Hotel on 10th–12th September, was ‘equitable participation’ and what this should look like for the many different stakeholders in scholarly publishing. Having been named a Rising Star in part for co-managing an access-to-publishing internship, I was keen to glean as much insight into achieving longevity for outreach initiatives as I could from this gathering of industry professionals.

As Godwyns Onwuchekwa (Global Tapestry Consulting) underlined in Session 2 of the conference, community engagement is all too often a short-lived add-on that falls by the wayside when motivation or funding runs out. More commitment and creativity are required to embed such initiatives into our organisations and help them evolve with changing market conditions. Hearing practical examples of projects that have improved inclusivity from the other ALPSP delegates – whether they focused on readers, reviewers, authors, editors, librarians, local partner organisations, the general public or publishing professionals themselves – was therefore extremely helpful in thinking about the durability of the EDIA projects upon which I have worked. 

From Diamond OA and Subscribe2Open to ‘One Nation One Subscription’, the conference addressed a wide array of publication models that seek to disseminate research to people who may not otherwise be able to access it. Speakers in Session 4, on ‘Innovations in Peer Review’, also had fascinating recommendations for how to reach and support early career academics.

To tackle the issue of ‘ghostreviewing’ by PhD students, Laura Feetham-Walker explained how IOP Publishing’s reviewer training programme allows junior researchers to be formally mentored and credited as peer reviewers. This has myriad advantages, including for the senior co-reviewer (mentor) who gets assistance with their workload, the junior co-reviewer (mentee) who gets practical experience and official acknowledgement of their labour, and the journal editor who receives a high-quality report and knows exactly who has written it. While co-reviewing pairs have predominantly been based at the same institution as each other so far, an audience member pointed out exciting possibilities for the future if this system could be utilised to match, for instance, mentors from the so-called Global North with junior researchers from Global South universities. I was impressed not just with the successful implementation of this programme but also with how others immediately had ideas to take it further and bring its benefits to more ECRs who feel themselves to be on the fringes of academia. 

We were in fact reminded not to forget the ‘fringes’ from the very start of the conference, when keynote speaker Max Hui Bai (Political Belief Lab) emphasised the importance of ‘edge cases’. ‘Edge case testing’ is a software development term that describes running tests to guarantee a system still works if interacted with in an unexpected or unconventional way. Bai proposed that ‘edge case thinking’ has wider applications, as an ethos that believes enhancing a system’s functionality for marginal users strengthens it for the main audience too. Closed captions are a prime example of this: while introduced primarily for D/deaf and hard-of-hearing people, they have proven useful to others, such as language learners who want to see the spellings of spoken words or viewers trying to watch videos in noisy environments. Thus, there is no reason not to dedicate the time to consider all users’ needs; doing so has positive consequences across the board.

Bai’s keynote suggestion turned out to chime very well with the ALPSP Award finalists’ lightning talks later that afternoon, during which the Bone & Joint Journal explained how they employ Artificial Intelligence (AI) to turn articles into podcasts. This new audio format makes cutting-edge scientific research more accessible to blind people and people with low vision, but also any orthopaedic surgeons who find it easier to listen on the go than carve time in busy schedules to read physically. The podcasts are convenient and constructive for everyone.

Generally then, the conference pointed to the future of academic publishing being ‘article plus’: going beyond the written word to include accompanying audio resources, plain language versions that laypeople can understand, and rapid translations to reach non-Anglophone researchers. Our traditional methods of publishing were rightfully acknowledged as limited and the question underpinning every session was ‘how are new technologies like AI about to transform scholarly communication?’  

This tipping point was what I found myself thinking about the most after returning from Manchester. It looks like AI will be advantageous to equity of access in some respects. Nevertheless, how will we in the UK, US and Western Europe mitigate the environmental impact of our GenAI use and reckon with the fact that related climate disasters are disproportionately affecting communities in the southern hemisphere – the very communities we are utilising new technologies to connect with? Moreover, how will the rise of AI translation affect the job prospects of human translators around the globe who make their livings carefully rendering English into their local languages? There is a thorny irony and inherent contradiction to AI-for-inclusivity that will likely be the topic of many conferences to come.

I was grateful to hear about the latest accessibility developments happening in the scholarly publishing industry in 2025 and hope we continue to look at equitable participation initiatives in the round, remembering there cannot be social justice without environmental justice.  

About the author 

Elizabeth Fraser is Assistant Commissioning Editor for Literary Studies at Edinburgh University Press. 

She was selected as a recipient of the ALPSP Rising Star Award 2025.