Publishing Predictions: What to Expect from 2026

In a volatile world, where we can barely anticipate what will happen from one day to the next, identifying publishing trends that are coming down the track has become more challenging than ever. However, in keeping with a long-held company tradition, at the start of each year KGL gathers its brightest minds and aims to second guess what will be the big themes of the year ahead.

Last January, our forecast focused on a range of burning issues—from how the evolving political landscape could impact the industry and the challenges surrounding AI regulation, to the implementation of the European Accessibility Act and the decentralizing of education in the US.

In this year’s predictions, we turn our attentions to how AI will continue to shape the publishing industry and why research integrity will carry on setting the agenda in academia, while also examining the strains impacting peer review, the divisions in US educational policy and the growing importance of literacy initiatives.

AI and Redefining Roles

AI is completely reshaping our relationship with work and having a profound impact on the job market. As in many industries, within academic publishing our complicated relationship with AI is creating both opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, AI is helping to reduce our workloads, especially in areas like manuscript screening, copyediting, proofreading and certain aspects of peer review. But on the other hand, it has also led to an increase in the volume of outputs and submissions, putting greater pressure on editors and reviewers, in particular.

The net effect is that AI is not necessarily replacing roles—although there are some job displacements taking place in specific areas—but in many cases restructuring them. This redefinition of our roles will continue to gather pace, with an increasing requirement for higher level skills and human work centred around more strategic, analytical and judgement-oriented tasks.

Regulating AI—Disclosure and Standardization

Keeping up with big tech’s speed of innovation is proving to be a major sticking point in academic publishing. The last few years have seen many publishers caught off guard by AI and struggling to protect their standards, processes and IP against numerous types of threats and disruption.

This year we will likely see publishers take a more rigorous and unified approach towards AI governance. The disclosure of AI assistance in manuscripts will become more strictly enforced as publishers seek transparency, and public declaration, from authors on which AI tools are being used and for what purpose. In addition, we should also see greater coordination from across the industry on AI policies as momentum builds towards sector-wide standardization. Expect to see synchronized frameworks being implemented across the sector from the likes of COPE and ICMJE, or across various disciplines, communities or consortiums.

New Weapons for the Battle for Integrity

With concerns growing about fraud, plagiarism, fabricated citations, manipulated data and fake reviews slipping through the net, publishers are progressively looking towards AI-powered tools to help them detect integrity issues and weed out bad players.

In 2026, it’s likely publishers will continue ramping up their use of AI tools to help with fraud detection, acting as a triage or flagging tool alongside human editorial oversight. We also expect publishers to experiment more with blockchain technologies and decentralized identity systems that help provide immutable records of authorship and contribution.

Research Funding Pushbacks and Uncertainty

In the US, the Trump administration’s proposal to slash the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget by 40% has been met with strong resistance by Congress, which is pushing through a fresh bill that will see the overall budget increase year-on-year by $415m. The bill, which—among many things—seeks to limit the administration’s influence over biomedical research grants and protect funding for the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, will still need the blessing of the House, Senate and President before coming to pass.

While the bill is the cause for renewed optimism in the research community, the volatile funding outlook has been steadily ebbing away at confidence, delaying and interrupting research projects and causing a “brain drain” in academia. As the political drama unfolds on Capitol Hill, we expect this air of uncertainty to continue to hit the community hard throughout 2026.

ADA Deadline Looms

This April, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Title II web accessibility rule comes into force, meaning that academic institutions and government entities must adhere to new standards in website accessibility, mobile apps and digital course material. While the institutions will ultimately be held responsible for meeting these requirements, this responsibility also flows downstream to journal publishers and platform providers who will be expected to fall into line.

As with the European Accessibility Act (EAA), which came into force last year, publishers will be expected to ensure compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA. The next few months will be critical as publishers align with the guidelines and ensure that they, and the institutions they support, are meeting these new expectations.

Curriculum Fragmentation in K-12

In the US, political forces continue to reshape the education landscape, with book bans, censorship and state-wide restrictions fragmenting the market. With conservative states doubling down on legislation, K-12 education publishers will continue to be directly affected in a variety of ways.

Perhaps most significantly, publishers are having to choose between creating alternative versions of content to comply with different state mandates or avoiding certain “controversial” topics altogether. We expect to see this dynamic continue to play out with publishers diversifying materials and exploring alternative curricula to maintain market access.

Tackling the Decline in Reading and Literacy

According to research by the National Literacy Trust (NLT) in the UK, reading enjoyment among young people has fallen to its lowest level in two decades. This is a pattern commonly reflected around the world as reading for pleasure is worryingly being replaced as a pastime by smart phones and screen-based activities, which is in turn having an adverse effect on literacy levels.

Tackling this problem head on, the NLT, British government, and UK publishing industry are investing heavily in its National Year of Reading (the “Go All In” campaign), aiming to promote reading to consumers and combat this sharp and worrying decline. As the initiative rolls out, we can expect other countries around the world to adopt similar measures to help address this growing issue.

As the year progresses and these big themes unravel, we will be taking a closer, more analytical look at each of them. Stay tuned!

KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. (KGL) is the industry leader in editorial, production, online hosting, and transformative services for every stage of the content lifecycle. We are your source for society services, research integrity, intelligent automation, digital delivery, and more. Email us at info@kwglobal.com.