From chaos to clarity: why structured content is the key to responsible AI in scholarly publishing

The past year has seen an explosion of interest in generative AI across scholarly publishing. Editorial teams, product leads, and technology partners are racing to test AI-driven tools for peer review, metadata enrichment, classification, and chatbots. But with this innovation has come fragmentation: disconnected pilots, brittle scripts, and inconsistent results. In his recent talk at the Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting in Baltimore, Colin O’Neil of SiteFusion ProConsult captured the current state aptly: “AI is everywhere—and nowhere.” The technology is powerful, but without strategy, it risks becoming another layer of chaos.