Operationalising Trust
Knowledge Infrastructure · Responsible AI

Trust in research can no longer be assumed. It must now be designed, governed, and demonstrated across borders, technologies, and institutions—particularly as national research policies diverge, AI reshapes scholarly workflows, and global research production accelerates.

This year’s STM Dinner and Conference in Frankfurt asks a practical question: how do we actually operationalise that trust — through policy alignment, human capacity, governance choices, accessibility, licensing, and technology design?

What’s this? 

Every year, the STM Community convenes in Frankfurt for STM’s Annual Conference — held conveniently right before the Frankfurt Book Fair. It brings together academic publishers, innovators, societies, funders, and universities with a common goal: advancing trusted research. 

What to expect? First, a welcoming dinner on Monday, 5 October, gives us a chance to connect in person and network. Tuesday, 6 October, will offer a potent line-up of speakers, sessions, and ample opportunities for collaboration and connections.

As global research output increasingly shifts toward Asia, publishers are navigating new policy frameworks, evaluation models, and knowledge infrastructures emerging from China and India. Together, these countries now account for a growing share of global scholarly output and are reshaping how research is funded, assessed, disseminated, and measured.

In China, investments in domestic journals, publishing platforms, and new research assessment approaches are strengthening national publishing capacity while expanding global influence. In India, initiatives such as One Nation One Subscription (ONOS), expanding open access activity, and growing international collaborations are transforming expectations around access, visibility, and research impact.

This session will examine the drivers behind these developments and their implications for publishers, technology providers, and research organisations. Speakers will explore evolving approaches to research assessment, infrastructure, integrity, metadata, and AI, and discuss how these changes may influence future publishing strategies and measures of success.

Participants will gain practical insights into the opportunities, challenges, and strategic considerations for engaging with two of the world’s most consequential and rapidly evolving research markets.

Trust by Design: Who Decides Where AI Stops and Humans Begin?

AI is making decisions across research and publishing. The question is: who is accountable for them?

AI adoption in research has accelerated faster than the systems designed to govern it. Elsevier’s Researcher of the Future report (November 2025), a survey of more than 3,000 researchers across 113 countries, shows that 58% of researchers now use AI tools for work, up from 37% the previous year. Yet only 22% find those tools trustworthy, and just 32% say their institution has good AI governance. Wiley’s ExplanAItions study (2024), drawing on nearly 5,000 researchers, finds that 63% cite a lack of clear guidelines as the single biggest barrier to using AI more, not a lack of interest, and not a lack of capability.

The gap between adoption and governance is widening. This session is about what happens in that gap, and who owns it.

Rather than asking what AI can do, this session takes a provocative focus on what leaders could start thinking towards: where AI should be trusted to act independently, where human judgment must remain in control, and who is accountable when the boundary between them shifts. Ownership of trust, of risk, of the decisions that define how AI is used, is the thread that runs through every question this session asks.

The session opens with two researchers, one early career and one mid-career, framing the conversation from inside the research process, grounding the discussion in the lived reality of how AI is reshaping scientific work before the panel engages.

Designed as a structured debate, not a traditional panel, the session is built around four questions every research and publishing leader needs to answer, and most have not yet resolved.

Panel Composition:  The panel brings together voices from across the research ecosystem, each speaking from direct experience of where the human–machine boundary is being drawn, contested, and governed in practice.

• Researchers (early career and mid-career): grounding the debate in how AI is already reshaping day-to-day research, where trust is breaking down, and what institutions still owe them
• Publishers: enforcing integrity, provenance, and validation across the research record
• Librarians: navigating institutional governance and researcher support at the point of practice
• Technology providers: building the auditable, transparent systems that trust depends on

CEO Session: Trust Under Pressure: Decisions Leaders Can Make in an AI-Driven Research Ecosystem. 

Leading in the Trust Era: Governing AI, Defining Boundaries, and Scaling Responsibility:  What can CEOs do differently—starting now—to operationalise trust at scale?

This closing CEO-level session brings the conference theme of operationalising trust into the boardroom. Rather than asking what AI can do, the discussion will focus on what leaders may want to decide: who owns trust inside the organisation, where human judgment must remain in control, which governance mechanisms are strong enough to hold under pressure, and how organisations should balance innovation, risk, transparency, and accountability.

Designed as a candid boardroom discussion, not a traditional panel, the session will explore how senior leaders are translating responsible AI principles into practical policies, workflows, disclosure practices, audit systems, and escalation processes. It will also examine where organisations are willing to take risk, where they are not, and how reputational and operational risks are being managed in real time.

The session closes with a forward-looking question for every executive in the room: in an AI-driven research ecosystem, will trust and transparency become sources of competitive advantage? The organisations that lead will not simply be those that adopt AI fastest, but those that can define, govern, and stand behind how it is used.

Conference Program Committee:

Graham Anderson, Head of Sales & Marketing, Royal Society

Amber Russell, Principal Product Manager, EBSCO

Adam Sewell, Chief Technology Officer / Executive Director, IOP

Adrian Stanley, Chief Business Development Officer, KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd

Andrea White, Global Research Communications Director, Elsevier

Yu Sun, Associate  Editor-In-Chief, Tsinghua University Press

Melody Zhuxin Zhang, Publisher, Wiley

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