AI-written papers are flooding journals, pushing the $22B publishing industry toward consolidation
rohanpaul_ai · x · 2026-10-12
Machine-written papers are flooding academic journals, and the rising cost of screening them is pushing the $22B publishing industry toward consolidation, per FT.
- Elsevier has grown its reviewer pool by more than a third since 2022 to 1.9M;
- Springer Nature still trades below its €22.50 IPO price two years on, as investors fear chatbots devalue paid research;
- Consolidation is the answer: Wiley bought Emerald for £337M in June, and Informa decided in October to separate Taylor & Francis, a unit nearing $1B in annual revenue;
- Ironically, Wiley earned about $40M in 2025 licensing content for model training—the same AI flooding journals also pays for them.
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