MANCHESTER, United Kingdom, September 11, 2026 — NEW HORIZON PRESS LIMITED took part in the ALPSP Annual Conference and Awards 2026, held from 9 to 11 September at The Manchester Deansgate Hotel, joining publishers, learned societies, librarians, funders and technology partners from across the scholarly communications community.
Organised by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), this year’s programme looked beyond scholarly publishing for inspiration, with sessions spanning artificial intelligence, industry benchmarking, community engagement, global markets and diversity, lean operations for small teams, and priorities including the Sustainable Development Goals, author diversity, publishing equity and research integrity.
NEW HORIZON PRESS LIMITED attended the full Day 2 programme on Thursday 10 September, taking in parallel sessions on AI-ready metadata and rights, diversifying global author pipelines, and collaborative approaches to research integrity, as well as the ALPSP Awards 2026 ceremony.
AI has moved from a publishing tool to a condition of the workflow
A theme running through the day was that the central question is no longer whether publishers use AI, but how existing editorial and production practices need to change now that AI sits between researchers and the literature.
Speakers returned repeatedly to metadata. Author, affiliation, abstract, keyword, rights and provenance information has always been part of publishing work, but as AI systems mediate discovery and read content directly, incomplete or unstructured metadata increasingly determines whether an article is found and correctly identified beyond the publisher’s own site. For smaller publishers, the practical route discussed was not to re-process an entire catalogue at once, but to secure metadata quality on priority content and fold the new requirements into existing editorial workflows.
Afternoon discussion turned to how that content is then used. A survey of approximately 11,500 researchers cited during the meeting indicated that around one third of research discovery now involves AI in some form, with AI systems reading beyond the abstract into introduction, methods, results and discussion. One speaker summarised the shift plainly:
“Zero click does not mean zero usage. Research is migrating to AI.”
The implication drawn in the room was that page views and downloads no longer describe usage on their own, and that the groundwork for machine readability is largely unglamorous: clear abstracts and keywords, well-formed tables, alternative text on figures, and complete metadata.
Where automation stops and scholarly judgement begins
Sessions on peer review set out a working principle rather than a prohibition: automation can support technical checking, including reference verification and scientific claim checking, while scholarly judgement remains with editors and reviewers. The open question identified was governance. Reviewers are already using AI tools, but many journals have not told them what is acceptable, and uploading unpublished manuscripts to external platforms raises confidentiality questions about whether content is retained or used in training.
Discussion in the session on research integrity focused on collaborative, community-led responses to paper mills and systematic manipulation, drawing on the multi-stakeholder approach taken by the United2Act initiative.
Reviewer networks, not country counts
On author and reviewer diversity, data presented during the day did not support the assumption that researchers in the Asia-Pacific region are less willing to review. Acceptance rates were reported as comparatively high, while familiarity between reviewer and handling editor emerged as a clear influence on whether invitations are accepted. The practical conclusion for newer journals was that internationalising an editorial board is measured less by the number of countries represented than by whether board members build durable reviewer networks and take an active part in the journal’s work.
Applying the discussion
NEW HORIZON PRESS LIMITED is currently developing its website and publishing policies, and will use the conference discussion as a reference point in that work — in particular on machine-readable metadata and rights information, AI policies that address reviewers and editors as well as authors, confidentiality of unpublished manuscripts, and the composition and active engagement of editorial boards.
About the New Community portfolio
Beginning with Biochar and Carbon Research, the New Community portfolio has expanded to 12 journals. Alongside those two titles it now works with Agricultural Ecology and Environment, Artificial Intelligence & Environment, Biochar X, Biocontaminant, Energy & Environment Nexus, Environmental and Biogeochemical Processes, New Contaminants, Nitrogen Cycling, Sustainable Carbon Materials and Lignin Research, covering biochar, carbon science, agricultural ecology, AI for the environment, emerging contaminants, energy, biogeochemical processes, nitrogen cycling, sustainable carbon materials and lignin research.
About NEW HORIZON PRESS LIMITED
NEW HORIZON PRESS LIMITED is an academic publisher based in Hong Kong, China, focusing on open access journal publishing and scholarly communication services. Its priority areas include environmental science, agriculture, energy, carbon science, biomass, sustainable materials and artificial intelligence. The publisher works to build a more equitable, open and professional publishing environment for researchers, editors, institutions and scholarly communities.