Startups to watch – Innovators of tomorrow

The seminar presented three innovative startups addressing critical challenges in scholarly publishing. Pure.Science introduces an agentic workflow platform designed to enhance publisher operations by enabling the creation and orchestration of flexible, AI-powered workflows. This platform facilitates bespoke solutions for various publishing functions, from typesetting to editorial triage, integrating publishing-specific tools and ensuring auditable, deterministic steps. Its flexible, composable, and integrable architecture allows for rapid prototyping and seamless scaling into production systems, empowering publishers to adapt quickly to evolving landscapes. Global Campus focuses on improving peer reviewer recruitment, a persistent challenge for publishers, funders, and universities. Leveraging OpenAlex, a rich, open dataset, the platform employs AI transformer models to perform high-quality semantic matching between manuscripts and potential reviewers. This approach aims to reduce out-of-field rejections and provide a more diverse pool of experts, with its intuitive interface designed for seamless integration into existing submission workflows. Publishing Gateway offers an institutionally-driven, publisher-neutral platform to provide greater control and transparency over research outputs. It streamlines the article submission process for researchers through a single, standardised workflow, conducting initial integrity checks and peer review. AI tools then match quality-checked manuscripts to suitable journals in a marketplace, offering publishers pre-vetted submissions and enabling institutions to gain earlier financial oversight and process efficiency for their publishing activities.