Scholarly publishing technology is the software running behind every research paper ever published – from the tools researchers use to find literature and manage references, to the systems that submit, review, check, and disseminate the finished work.

Almost no one outside scholarly publishing knows this sector exists by name, and the companies building it have done little to change that.

This article covers what the sector is called and why the naming matters, the full pipeline of tools it serves, how it has grown into a genuinely global industry, what the AI wave changed, and where it is heading. The argument is that the companies building these tools communicate almost entirely within scholarly publishing, and for a sector this size, that gap is becoming harder to ignore.

Takeaways

The sector doesn’t have a widely recognized name outside scholarly publishing – and that naming gap is part of the visibility problem
The pipeline runs from literature discovery to long-term impact tracking across more than fifteen distinct tool categories
ResearchTech is an emerging industry designation – these tools have existed in isolation but they’re now recognized as a connected sector serving global research output, and they’re rapidly growing in number
The AI wave turned niche research tools into mass-market products overnight – then made it hard to tell which tools actually delivered
The companies building these tools are largely invisible to mainstream technology press, and for a sector this size, that’s a problem

What is scholarly publishing technology and what does it include?

Scholarly publishing technology is the full set of digital tools that support the research and publication process, from the moment a researcher begins searching the literature through to the point where a published paper has been disseminated and its reach measured. It covers literature discovery, reference management, manuscript writing, journal submission, peer review, research integrity checking, production and typesetting, data management, impact analytics, and grant intelligence – among others.

It’s a pipeline of distinct tool types, each addressing a different stage of a workflow that most researchers move through without thinking of it as a technology sector at all.

The sector goes by several names, none of which has fully stuck. “STM publishing” (Scientific, Technical, Medical) is the frame large publishers have used for decades – it describes a business model, not a technology category, and it predates the current AI wave entirely. “Scholarly communications” is how librarians and academics describe the space, and that conversation tends toward access policy debates rather than the questions that matter to the companies building tools. “EdTech” sounds like student learning platforms and has nothing to do with this.

“ResearchTech” is the label gaining ground among the companies and investors working in this space, following the same logic as FinTech and LegalTech: a recognizable term for a technology stack built around one industry’s specific professional processes. Scholarly publishing technology is the fuller descriptive phrase. ResearchTech is the shorthand. This article uses both.

The scholarly publishing technology pipeline from discovery to impact

Research doesn’t start with writing and it doesn’t end with publication – and that’s the part most people outside ResearchTech miss entirely.

The pipeline begins with discovery. Tools like Elicit, Consensus, Research Rabbit, and Semantic Scholar help researchers search across millions of papers before they’ve written a word. Reference management comes next – Zotero, Mendeley, and EndNote have been the standard for two decades, now joined by ReadCube Papers and Citavi. Manuscript writing has its own distinct category – Jenni.ai, Overleaf, Writefull, and SciFlow each handle different parts of the process from drafting to structured formatting.

Submission tools carry a manuscript from the author’s desk to a journal’s editorial system: Editorial Manager, ScholarOne, Scholastica, and Janeway are the most established, with ChronosHub and ARPHA handling specific publishing models.

Reviewer-finding and peer review management tools come next in the sequence – Prophy, JANE, ReviewerZero AI, and DeSci Reviewer Finder.

Research integrity checking covers text similarity (iThenticate, Turnitin, Copyleaks), AI-generated content detection (GPTZero, Pangram, SynthID), and image manipulation screening (Proofig AI, ImageTwin, Forensically).

Production and typesetting come next (Typefi, eXtyles, Kriyadocs), alongside research data management (Zenodo, Figshare, Dryad, Harvard Dataverse), impact and analytics (Altmetric, Dimensions, Kudos, TrendMD), grant-finding (Instrumentl, Grantable, Pivot-RP, Fundwriter.ai), and identification standards (ORCID, CrossRef, DataCite, Ringgold) that tie everything together.

MacroLingo’s AI Tool Finder indexes tools across these categories as a free searchable resource. More than fifteen distinct categories in that index shows why ResearchTech is a sector in its own right, not a product category someone invented.

The new ResearchTech industry – Scholarly, EdTech, and more

ResearchTech is a new industry designation – and the newness is in the designation, not the tools. Reference managers, submission platforms, and plagiarism checkers have each existed for decades, built by different vendors, used by narrow audiences, and treated as entirely separate products. The recognition that they form a connected stack serving a common workflow is what makes ResearchTech an industry rather than a collection of products.

The scale of what that industry serves is substantial and growing. Global publication output reached 3.3 million scientific and engineering articles in 2022, a 59% increase from 2012, according to NSF analysis of Scopus data. Research is produced on every continent, across thousands of institutions with widely varying levels of resources. The tools serving that output were built primarily in the US, the UK, and Western Europe – but the researchers using them are in Seoul, São Paulo, Singapore, Nairobi, and Tokyo as much as in London or Boston.

That global footprint is reshaping the sector. Tools originally designed for well-resourced English-speaking universities are now used by researchers working under very different institutional conditions. The grant-finding platforms, author identification systems, and literature discovery tools built for one type of research environment are being tested by a much broader user base. ResearchTech companies taking that global reality seriously are building for a considerably larger and faster-growing market than those still designing for the original user base.

What AI actually changed in scholarly publishing technology

Before 2022, most tools in this pipeline were software that handled specific tasks for people who knew they needed them. AI was a feature inside an existing product – a smarter suggestion engine in a reference manager, basic text matching in a plagiarism checker. These were tools used by researchers and editors, mostly invisible to anyone else.

Generative AI changed that. Elicit, which reports being used by over 2 million researchers in academia and industry, raised a $22 million Series A in early 2025 to expand beyond academic users – a sign of how far the tool had moved from its origins as a graduate student literature review assistant. Consensus and SciSpace followed similar paths. Literature review and manuscript assistance went from niche tools to something people outside research were discussing in months.

Every tool in the pipeline soon claimed AI – reference managers added summaries, submission platforms added checks, production tools added copyediting. The phrase “AI-powered” stopped meaning anything useful, which made it harder for buyers who needed specific capabilities to find tools that actually delivered them.

The integrity tools grew in direct response. GPTZero, Pangram, and SynthID were built to detect AI-generated content. Proofig AI and ImageTwin addressed AI-assisted image manipulation. These are genuine technical responses to problems the AI wave created – and they’re products most journal editors discover through conference conversations and peer recommendations, not through any communications effort reaching the broader technology world.

Where scholarly publishing technology is heading

ResearchTech is moving in two directions simultaneously. Large publishers and database providers are building their own tool suites rather than leaving the market to standalone companies. Elsevier now offers ScienceDirect AI, Scopus AI, LeapSpace, and Mendeley; Clarivate runs Pivot-RP alongside Web of Science and Journal Citation Reports. The shift is toward tools bundled through publisher relationships rather than chosen by individual researchers.

Running in the opposite direction is the open-source movement. Open Journal Systems, Janeway, PubPub, Manubot, JabRef, and Zenodo are tools built by and for the academic community. These projects put access and transparency ahead of generating revenue, and they argue that research software shouldn’t be owned by the same publishers whose output it supports.

The more consequential near-term shift is harder to name without jargon, so here is a plain description of it: right now, almost every tool in the pipeline requires you to open it and do something. The direction of travel is toward tools that run checks, flag problems, and update records automatically in the background, without anyone opening them at all. Penelope.ai, ReviewerZero AI, and EditorialPilot are early examples. When this approach reaches scale, the pipeline will look less like a collection of specialist tools and more like background infrastructure that most researchers never think about directly.

The companies building that infrastructure have spent most of their existence communicating within scholarly publishing – through trade publications, conferences, and working groups the technology press has never read. Reaching buyers and audiences outside that circle is the work that comes next.

Build visibility outside the scholarly publishing bubble

MacroLingo and Ellerton & Co. work with ResearchTech companies on PR and media communications that reach audiences beyond academic and publishing trade press. Ellerton’s specialist PR services for science and technology cover Asia-Pacific, Europe, India, and beyond. Get in touch if you’re building in this space and the world outside scholarly publishing doesn’t know about it yet.