Now back home in France, after a terrific trip to London on behalf of Kriyadocs for #STMWeek2023 with great conversations, exciting innovations and really insightful panel discussions. Here are my main takeaways from the week:

Innovations in AI offer opportunity and risk in near equal measure. We need to support and empower genuine authors with tools to help them publish their work in the right places to the right ethical standards.

At the same time, we need to detect and deter malpractice, which is increasingly happening at scale. The AI ‘arms race’ makes trained human experts, supported by automated tools where possible, as relevant as ever in the pursuit of research integrity. We need to engage with illegitimate practices at source – be that the authors, institutions or papermill agents looking to game the system.

And whilst we are behind where we need to be globally in meeting the UN SDGs, and we are seeing an increasing number of reactionary populists in positions of political power (typically old, pale and male) there is still scope for optimism. The scholarly publishing community is increasingly engaged and, as UN expert Steve Kenzie suggested in his plenary, the next generation is largely on board with the sustainability agenda… if we can keep the world in one piece until then!