STM Trends 2025

This year’s infographic depicts a river delta landscape as a metaphor for the stream of research outputs and scholarly publications.
And the motto is - Let’s Go Upstream – Seeking the Source of Trust and Truth

The image conveys how crucially important the publishing process is for establishing trust and integrity across research and academia – not just downstream at the conclusion of research projects, when articles are being written, peer reviewed and published, and also when they find their home in Article City, get shipped in Read and Publish Deals and arrive on platforms in the Content Sea.

Now, even more than ever, our focus moves upstream, where trust and integrity find their bedding within the flow of research. The river estuaries represent streams of research outputs, from many different sources and fed by a variety of rivulets. The path of the river takes myriad routes through the publishing process before it emerges into the Content Sea. The main path of the flow passes through Peer Review Works – the main body of infrastructure of our river delta landscape. It is sourced from high up in the scholarly landscape, where we find the Lake of Knowledge, a Funder’s Reservoir and further down it also originates form Universities, Labs, Academic Acres and Scholarly Fields. On its journey it passes the Orchards of Reproducibility and moves through Preprint Town, Data Mines, Free Sharing Fares and AI Factories.

It is an eco-system that is continually in flux, containing a wealth of new trends and possibilities.

Join us as we find its secret treasures whilst meandering the diverse landscape. Let’s Go Upstream.

STM Trends and STM Tech Trends is the outcome of an annual forecasting exercise by STM’s Future Lab Forum in the form of an infographic.

Its aim is to identify the main trends expected to impact scholarly communications and the STM publishing sector in the next 3 to 5 years.

For this year’s edition, STM Trends 2025, STM’s FutureLab forum held two brainstorm discussions via Zoom in December 2020 following the forecasting technique of the Delphi Method.

This is the collaborative work of a group of 27 people from various STM member companies with backgrounds in innovation, product development, strategy, technology, UX-work, platforms and IT.

Members of the editing committee were: IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg (chair of STEC/ FutureLab), Daniel Ebneter (Karger), Renny Guida (IEEE), Heather Staines (SeamlessAccess), John Sack (Highwire), Anita de Waard (Elsevier), Liz Marchant (T&F), Joris van Rossum (STM), Eefke Smit (STM).

Our sponsor: IEEE

CCBY-NC-ND STM-2021

POSTER, made available by IEEE: Download the full infographic here for printing on A3.

VIDEO: Available on YouTube

Presentation: Available here

Past editions of STM Tech Trends

Tech Trends 2024
Tech Trends 2023
Tech Trends 2022
Tech Trends 2021
Tech Trends 2020
Tech Trends 2015
Tech Trends 2014
Tech Trends 2013