M&A activity in scholarly publishing, 2021 to 2025, an LLM assisted overview.
I had to put a slide together recently where I wanted to evidence some of consolidation activity taking place in our industry. We all know a lot has been going on.
I took posts from https://www.ce-strategy.com/the-brief/ - the excellent industry newsletter from Clarke and Esposito, and I put them into Google's Notebook LM - https://notebooklm.google/. I added a few other local sources, and ended up with about 30 sources of data.
I asked Notebook LM to extract any mentions of merger or acquisition activity. I took the resultant document and asked DeepSeek to create a table with dates and commentary.
I then took this table and asked Claude to create a nice visualisation for me, and it produced the following:
It's not perfect, e.g. PeerJ is not mentioned here, I didn't go in to look for deal values for each activity, but the effort to get this slide ready took me about 15 minutes, and demonstrated the point that I wanted to make.
Hi, I'm Ian - I work on academic publishing systems. You can find out more about me at mulvany.net. I'm always interested in engaging with folk on these topics, if you have made your way here don't hesitate to reach out if there is anything you want to share, discuss, or ask for help with!
