Editors’ note: Today’s post is by Samantha Green, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Silverchair.

Scholarly publishing has a brand-behavior gap — where our operational choices, from infrastructure decisions and business models to who we write for and who we don’t, have drifted from our stated missions.

For most of its history, scholarly publishing’s legitimacy and brand identity were structural: built into peer review, institutional affiliation, and the simple fact of publication. But structural legitimacy still must be earned, and it erodes when the structures stop serving the people they claim to serve.

Scholarly publishing sits on the only infrastructure that systematically produces evidence with documented methodology, peer scrutiny, and correction mechanisms. That infrastructure has real value, especially as public trust in knowledge fractures and misinformation creeps in to fill the gaps. However, the industry consistently sidelines those questions on a structural level.

A structural rebrand means closing the gap between what a community claims to stand for and what its operational choices signal. Not a new logo. Not a better social media strategy. Scholarly publishing has an implicit brand promise: we produce and protect reliable knowledge. Every decision about language, access, and public presence is either keeping that promise or quietly breaking it.

Under Pressure

In 2025 and 2026, as federal funding cuts and policy restrictions on researcher communication accelerate, several organizations were able to speak credibly in public because they had already aligned their brand with their mission. The American Medical Association wrote directly to Congress stating that the cuts would harm patient outcomes and medical progress. The American Physical Society published a public statement warning that cutting federal R&D spending could rival the economic damage of the 2008 financial crisis. The American Psychological Association built a dedicated response center to track policy changes and call on members to document the impact on their work.

Elsewhere, the silence from much of the publishing industry was notable enough to draw direct criticism. A commentary in Science called out multiple major societies by name for staying “very, very quiet” during the funding crisis, asking pointedly: “If you don’t make your voices known now, what exactly are you waiting for?”

That question has a structural answer. What separated the organizations that spoke from those that didn’t was brand-behavior alignment. Each of those organizations had already closed the gap between stated mission and operational reality. When the mission was threatened, they had something credible to say. The ones that stayed silent lacked the structural foundation that would have given them a framework for action.

Right Infrastructure, Wrong Audience

Scholarly publishing has never treated communication infrastructure for outside readers as a core function. This is not an ethics failure. It is a product strategy failure. The scholar or author journey has been mapped meticulously, but the public reader journey was rarely — if ever — mapped at all. That omission is a brand decision, made by default rather than intention.

Retractions offer a perfect example. In one study of popular retracted papers, post-retraction tweets increased attention to invalidated results rather than countering them. The way correction is communicated affects what the public takes away from it. Publishers handle these moments as internal process problems, with language designed to limit liability rather than inform the public, treating retractions as administrative events rather than evidence of science’s self-correction working as designed.

Retraction notices are written for the scholarly record, not for the reader. Public engagement is someone else’s job, whether that’s a librarian, a science journalist, or a university PR department. Publishers have outsourced the last mile of their own mission and called it a division of labor. In any other industry, an entity that outsourced delivery of its core promises to third parties and called it a division of labor would be recognized immediately as a brand in trouble.

Brand Beyond the Cosmetic

Brand is more than what you say about yourself. It’s a signal underlying every choice you make about who you serve and what you stand for: the ultimate case of show-don’t-tell.

Defining your primary audience is a brand decision, and scholarly publishing needs to make it explicit. Authors and editors are the users of the system, but they are not the only invested parties. Readers, researchers without institutional affiliation, funders, policymakers, and the broader public all have claims on it.  The most honest statement of brand priority is not the mission statement. It is the budget. What gets resourced, what gets measured, and what gets treated as core function versus optional extra are the signals that reveal who an organization serves. By that measure, scholarly publishing’s primary audience has never been the public.

Closing that brand-behavior gap requires treating accountability, language, equity, and public presence as brand infrastructure.

Correction practices that center the reader — public-facing pages, explanation notes, consistent metadata — are brand decisions. It is also where the gap between brand promise and brand delivery is most visible: an industry that promises to protect the integrity of the scholarly record but writes correction notices to minimize legal exposure is not keeping its promise.

Plain language is a genuine editorial value, not a summary appended to satisfy a funder requirement. Science communication sits at the edges of publishing systems because it was never given a home inside them. Without a budget line, or an equal seat at the editorial table, solutions like systematic glossary support or reader testing are treated as optional extras rather than infrastructure investments.

Who is published is also a brand signal. Business models that require institutional wealth as a precondition for authorship communicate something about how underfunded communities and underrepresented fields are valued, regardless of what the mission statement says.

Sustained participation in public debate about science and knowledge is not a communications add-on. Organizations that have never built this capacity find, at the moment of crisis, that there is nothing to draw on.

Where Silence Costs a Brand

The existential questions facing scholarly publishing are complicated by real financial pressure, as more than 90% of scholarly societies report publishing revenue not keeping pace with inflation, with the steepest declines in medicine and life sciences. The societies most positioned to speak credibly about public health are also the ones most financially exposed. Sometimes silence is financial vulnerability dressed up as neutrality.

The political environment is tightening that tension further. Federal policy proposals in the US in 2026 have moved to restrict how researchers can communicate findings on politically sensitive subjects, and the infrastructure scholarly publishing relies on — peer review, open access mandates, and public science communication — is under active political pressure. Silence is becoming less of a choice and more of a condition being imposed from outside.

The silence is structural, made visible under pressure. The default is silence because silence feels neutral and neutrality feels safe. The brand-behavior gap doesn’t close by itself — it compounds. Every year an organization defers the work of aligning its operations with its stated mission, the gap between promise and delivery widens, and the credibility cost of speaking grows. Structural brand alignment is what creates the option to speak. Without it, silence is not a choice. It is the only available move.

The Window to Act

Scholarly publishing solved the wrong problem. Open access removed barriers to access — the form — but never committed to the function: making research matter to the people who funded it. Today, even though more research is openly available than ever before, public trust in science is not at an all-time high. That should be instructive. Access was the form, but making research matter to the people who funded it was a function to which publishing was never fully committed.

That means publishers should treat public-facing correction, plain-language explanation, and policy communication as core editorial functions, not optional extras.

When the mechanisms of scientific communication become subjects of political contestation, the question of who speaks for the integrity of the scholarly record is no longer abstract. Publishers who have never claimed that role will find they have no standing to reclaim it when it matters most.

A structural rebrand is that commitment. Not to a new look or a better LinkedIn strategy, but to an honest answer about who this industry is for, made visible through every decision about language, access, and public presence. The brand promise is already made. Every time a publisher invokes peer review, research integrity, or the advancement of knowledge, they are making a claim about what they stand for. The only question is whether the operations behind that claim are honest enough to back it up. The publishers who do that work will have something worth communicating. The ones who don’t will find that their institutional credibility, already under pressure, continues to erode quietly until there is nothing left.

Author’s note: Claude was used to research my ideas, providing sources which I then validated independently. Claude was also used to evaluate my early drafts and suggest changes to structure, areas of focus, and general proofreading, after which I made revisions.