[Keynote] Surviving the Disruption: Scholarly Communication in the Age of AI

By Ian Mulvany, Chief Technology Officer, BMJ Group

AI is not on the horizon for scholarly communication — it is already here, and it is reshaping every stage of the research lifecycle. For publishers and librarians, this moment is both an opportunity and an existential challenge. Roles that seemed stable are being redefined. Workflows built over decades are being automated. And the audiences we serve — researchers, institutions, funders — are changing how they find, consume, and create knowledge.

This talk takes stock of where we are and where we might be in five years. Drawing on direct experience building AI systems for editorial and peer review workflows, it explores the practical and philosophical questions our community must grapple with: What does "discovery" mean when AI agents read on behalf of humans? How do open access principles hold up when content is consumed by bots rather than people? What is the role of the librarian — or the publisher — when the research lifecycle is increasingly mediated by AI? And what is the environmental cost of the infrastructure we are building?

This is not a talk about whether AI is good or bad. It is an invitation to think clearly, together, about how we shape it — and how we avoid being shaped by it instead.