Ian Mulvany

May 21, 2025

slides from my talk about the future of scholarly publishing

I gave a talk at the publisherspeak event yesterday here in London.

I wrote a somewhat tongue in cheek post at the beginning of the year about what might be true about scholarly publishing (https://world.hey.com/ian.mulvany/what-things-might-be-true-about-scholarly-publishing-11d227f3), and I've been wanting to put a more constructive view together about what I think is really important. The invitation to give this talk as a good opportunity to start to do this. 

As a keynote it was aimed to be fairly high level, and I really enjoyed the process of putting it together. I got a lot of good feedback on the talk. 

I used this tool from Simon Willison - https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/6/annotated-presentations/ to upload the images from the talk and to create an annotated outline of the talk, and you can read that here - https://mulvany.net/talks/2025-05-publisherspeak-keynote-london/annotated_talk.html. You can download the slides directly here - https://mulvany.net/talks/2025-05-publisherspeak-keynote-london/2025-05-london-publisherspeak.pdf

The key recommendations I make are:
- Publish data.  
- Take identity far more seriously than we have before.  
- Integrate with ORCID Trust Markers.  

In the talk I go into some of the thinking about trust and identity from the recent STM report. At the event I met someone from a major publisher who has already built a proof of concept of how to evaluate scaled trust based on role, it was really cool to see, I hope they get the green light to continue to work on that and to share more widely. 

Following on from the thoughts in this lecture, I have a number of other ideas that I am hoping to find time to explore later in the year. 

About Ian Mulvany

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!