Deanta

Brilliant day out with this fantastic team in Dublin. Beautiful walk around the hills of Dalkey bay followed by some refreshments and a lovely lunch at 1909 Restaurant & Wine Bar in the picturesque village. So refreshing to spend some time out of the office with this talented and hard working team after a very successful first half year! #deantadifference #academicpublishing

Great day out of the office with our management team in Chennai. Some really thoughtful presentations and contributions and really encouraging to see such wonderful alignment accross the team as we continue towards the Next Level! #deantadifference #academicpublishing

For our part, Deanta are both 'current' and 'enthusiastic future adopters' of AI (in all of its many guises). While many publishers have adopted a defensive stance against AI, particularly towards content creation via generative AI platforms, Deanta, as fierce advocates for digital transformation, regularly evangelize about the positive impact AI might have within the publishing world. We see AI as transformative and, alongside our existing AI technologies, are already working on next-generation tools to support our clients.

I personally believe that the vendor market, especially for journal publishing, will be unrecognisable in five years. The level of automation we have in our own platform already allows publishers to set aside their old workflows and have their skilled staff "audit" the production process, rather than spend time performing actual tasks. With the potential for AI and APIs to envelop other aspects of the workflow, this technology is only going to improve, leaving publishers with a choice of whether to invest in technology and wrestle back control of production, or continue to outsource to a diminishing set of offshore vendors.

Since outsourcing became a thing twenty years ago, many publishers have inadvertently kept their production vendors at arm's length. The work is passed on, managed, and passed back in what is essentially a transactional relationship. As this post from Patrick Shafe illustrates, this is hardly the environment in which meaningful change happens, especially when most vendor-client communications are focused around the RFP cycle.