The journal article has never been the job. It has always been one mechanism through which a larger purpose is accomplished. That purpose is to ensure that knowledge becomes trusted, discoverable, understandable, connected, and capable of contributing to meaningful outcomes. This is not a new idea. The role of journals as systems for validating, connecting, and enabling the use of knowledge has long been understood. What is changing is not the function, but how that value is articulated, perceived, and increasingly tested.

At the same time, the industry is facing a growing value challenge. There is increasing skepticism toward the role of publishers, a steady commoditization of publishing services, and fragmentation across the research ecosystem. Functions that once differentiated publishers are now treated as baseline expectations. The question is no longer what publishers do, but how that value is understood and extended.

A Simple Framework: Funding, Research, Impact

The challenge is not to redefine the purpose of publishing, but to articulate it more clearly and align more deliberately around it. A useful way to do this is to step back and view the research ecosystem through three interconnected elements: funding, research, and impact.

Funding enables research. Research generates knowledge. Impact determines whether that knowledge ultimately shapes understanding, policy, innovation, and society.

Impact is not limited to citation counts, journal prestige, or short-term attention. It is the broader process through which research contributes to scientific progress and societal understanding. This can include conceptual advances, new ways of framing problems, and insights that influence future work over time.

Funders are the closest proxy for society’s expectations of research. They support research with the expectation that it will lead to meaningful outcomes. This makes impact not just an abstract goal, but a central organizing principle for the entire system.

Where Publishers Sit in the Knowledge Ecosystem

Publishers have traditionally framed their role around curation and dissemination.  While these remain important, they do not fully capture the value that publishing creates.

The enduring contribution of scholarly publishing lies in the systems that validate, connect, and safeguard knowledge. These include managing peer review, ensuring research integrity, providing editorial guidance, building metadata infrastructure, and enabling effective discovery across an expanding body of literature. However, these functions are increasingly treated as baseline expectations rather than distinctive sources of value. Peer review is assumed. Open access is expected.  Discovery is taken for granted. These are necessary for legitimacy, but they no longer define the full value proposition.

Seen through a funder’s lens, the role of publishing extends beyond supporting researchers. It is about ensuring that knowledge can be relied upon, found, understood, and ultimately used. The opportunity is not in redefining these functions, but in extending them further along the pathway to impact.

Why a Narrow Focus on Dissemination Is Strategically Fragile

The risks of defining publishing value primarily through dissemination are already becoming visible. In reality, the dissemination function has long ceased to be central to the value of scholarly publishing. Preprint servers have demonstrated that distributing research findings no longer requires a publisher. AI-driven discovery tools are transforming how researchers find and synthesize literature. At the same time, open infrastructure initiatives are building shared alternatives to proprietary publishing systems.

Several major funders have begun to move away from article processing charge-based models. Cancer Research UK has announced that it will stop funding open access publishing costs, citing concerns that the current system is economically unsustainable. The Gates Foundation has taken a similar position, discontinuing support for individual publishing fees in order to address inequities in the system and redirect resources toward research.

Funders and scholarly communities are also investing in alternative models. Initiatives such as Open Research Europe and community-led approaches like the European Mathematical Society’s Launch to Open model reflect a different direction of travel. These models emphasize collective funding, cost transparency, and alignment with the public purpose of research, while reducing reliance on APCs and large commercial agreements.

Funders are no longer only supporting research outputs. They are beginning to reshape the infrastructure through which research is evaluated, shared, and used. This reflects a deeper shift in how value is defined. Publishing is no longer being assessed primarily in terms of access or distribution, but in terms of how effectively it contributes to trustworthy knowledge and meaningful outcomes.

At the same time, it is important to recognize the disparity in scale and investment across the system. Large commercial publishers such as Elsevier invest heavily in infrastructure, platforms, and workflow systems at a level that is difficult for fragmented community-led initiatives to replicate in the short term. As a result, these emerging models are better understood as signals of changing expectations and priorities, rather than immediate substitutes for existing systems.

Moving downstream in the impact value chain changes the basis of competition. The underlying value of scholarly publishing remains the same, but the emphasis is shifting toward how effectively that value supports the movement of knowledge toward impact.

Advances in AI are automating parts of the writing and publishing process, increasing the volume of available knowledge. As this happens, scarcity shifts. The constraint is no longer access to content, but the ability to ensure reliability, establish relevance, provide context, and enable meaningful use. In this environment, validation, curation, and synthesis become more visible and more consequential. The opportunity for publishers is to strengthen these capabilities and extend them further along the pathway to application.

The strategic question is no longer how efficiently content can be produced and distributed, but how effectively knowledge can be filtered, understood, connected, and translated into impact. How these roles are strengthened and extended will shape the future of scholarly communication.

Confusing the Product with the Job

Industries often mistake the products they produce for the underlying job those products are meant to accomplish. This distinction sits at the heart of the Jobs to Be Done theory developed by Clayton Christensen, which argues that customers do not buy products for their own sake, but “hire” them to make progress on a specific job.

The classic illustration is simple: customers who buy a drill do not want a drill; they want a hole. Industries that confuse product with purpose struggle when better solutions emerge, while those that orient around the underlying job are better positioned to adapt.

In scholarly publishing, the product has long been the journal article, and systems have evolved around producing and distributing articles efficiently. But the job of the research ecosystem is not to produce articles. It is to ensure that scientific knowledge becomes reliable, discoverable, integrated, and capable of generating impact. The journal article is not the job; it is one mechanism for accomplishing it.

This raises a fundamental question: for whom is this job being done? Ultimately, it is done for society. In practice, funders represent this interest, enabling research with the expectation that it will lead to meaningful outcomes.

From a funder’s perspective, the job is not the production of articles, but ensuring that research investment results in knowledge that can be trusted, found, understood, connected, and used. Each stage presents a potential point of failure: research that cannot be trusted undermines confidence; research that cannot be found remains unused; research that cannot be understood fails to travel; research that is not integrated remains fragmented; and research that cannot inform action falls short of its purpose.

The most compelling value publishers can offer lies in aligning directly with these outcomes: strengthening research integrity, improving discovery, enabling synthesis across disciplines, and supporting the translation of findings into forms that can be understood and applied beyond academia.

Publishers are not a homogeneous group. The strategic choices available to large commercial publishers differ from those facing learned societies, university presses, and smaller independents. The paths may vary, but the direction of travel is shared.

Understanding the Impact Cycle

If the purpose of publishing is to enable knowledge to move toward impact, then publication cannot be seen as the endpoint. It must be understood as an entry point into a broader cycle.

For research to matter beyond the journal page, it must first be visible: indexed, searchable, and accessible across databases and scholarly platforms. Without strong metadata and discovery infrastructure, even important findings remain largely invisible. It must then be interpreted. Research findings are often complex and written for specialist audiences, and accessible commentary, graphical or video summaries, and media coverage help translate them for policymakers and practitioners who cannot engage directly with the primary literature. From there, research must achieve scholarly integration, shaping the scientific conversation through citations, replication, and inclusion in systematic reviews and meta-analyses that consolidate evidence across many studies. Beyond academia, knowledge translation becomes critical: research must be synthesized into policy briefs, guidelines, and educational resources that make scientific consensus actionable. Finally, at the stage of application, knowledge leads to new technologies, treatments, regulatory changes, or social interventions.

Publishers sit at a critical juncture in this cycle, helping ensure that knowledge enters the system in a credible and discoverable form. The question is whether they are willing to take responsibility for how that knowledge travels beyond publication.

What Supporting the Job Could Look Like

If publishers have long contributed to these outcomes, the question is not whether they should do so, but whether they are willing to take more explicit responsibility and align their systems, incentives, and investments accordingly.

If the job is to ensure that knowledge becomes trusted, discoverable, understandable, integrated, and usable, then the role of publishers is to strengthen each of these outcomes in practice.

Trust and reliability. Paper mills, reproducibility challenges, and AI-generated submissions are placing increasing strain on the credibility of the scholarly record. Supporting this part of the job requires moving beyond isolated editorial checks toward more coordinated systems: shared detection tools across publishers, stronger verification at submission, and transparent audit trails that make the provenance of research visible. Trust must be built into the system, not assumed at the point of publication.

Discovery and access. For knowledge to be used, it must first be found. Richer metadata, semantic tagging, and AI-assisted discovery tools can help research move across disciplinary boundaries and surface in new contexts. The critical shift is toward interoperability. When discovery systems are fragmented, knowledge remains siloed. When they are connected, research becomes more visible to the communities that can use it.

Understanding and interpretation. Research that cannot be understood cannot travel. The gap between specialist outputs and broader audiences remains one of the most persistent barriers to impact. Supporting this part of the job requires deliberate translation: plain-language summaries, graphical abstracts, policy briefs, and other formats designed for non-specialist use.

Integration and synthesis. Individual studies rarely drive change on their own. Knowledge creates value when it is connected, compared, and synthesized into a broader evidence base. Publishers can support this by enabling stronger linking between articles, data, methods, and reviews, and by investing in tools and formats that facilitate synthesis across disciplines. This helps move research from isolated findings toward cumulative understanding.

Use and application. Ultimately, the job is not complete until knowledge informs decisions, policy, or practice. Publishers are not the sole actors at this stage, but they are well positioned to enable it. Convening researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and industry stakeholders, curating thematic collections, and facilitating dialogue across communities can help bridge the gap between publication and application.

A Collective Responsibility

Much of the infrastructure that supports impact cannot be built by individual publishers alone. Metadata standards, research integrity frameworks, and shared discovery systems require collective action across the publishing ecosystem. Addressing this will require industry-wide coordination, most likely supported by funders and institutions that have strong interests of their own in a healthier knowledge ecosystem. But the collective action problem must not become an excuse for inaction. Waiting for consensus is, in effect, a choice to defend the existing model by default.

Reframing the Mission

Funders invest on behalf of society, and that investment is justified only when knowledge leads to meaningful understanding, better decisions, and real-world outcomes.

Publishers that define themselves primarily through the production and distribution of journal articles will see their value increasingly questioned. In contrast, those that understand their role as stewards of how knowledge circulates, connects, and contributes to impact will have a clearer and more defensible position. The opportunity is not to produce more content, but to increase the likelihood that knowledge has impact.

The purpose of publishing has remained consistent, but the environment around it has changed. As research output grows, technology reduces the cost of production, and funders and institutions demand clearer outcomes, the system is being forced to confront a fundamental question: what is the role of publishing in ensuring that knowledge does not simply exist, but is trusted, understood, connected, and ultimately used?

The choice is not between the old model and an uncertain future. It is between defending a narrowing position and building a broader one. Publishers that orient around the job the research ecosystem is trying to accomplish will find that their role is not diminishing, but expanding.