Last week,it was our second time at the Frankfurt Bookfair. This time, it wasn’t just Paul, but Tijmen joined as well. And what an experience it was again!

It was kind of a jigsaw puzzle to combine all the meetings. And, in the end, there wasn’t enough time to meet everyone, unfortunately. But that will just provide us with the opportunity to book meetings with those of you that we missed this time.

It amazed me again how massive the bookfair is, and what a good opportunity it therefore is to catch up with so many in the scholarly publishing industry. We were lucky enough to be able to catch up with existing partners, and to continue the chat with potential new partners. Hopefully more news from that front in a few weeks!

The same is true for our existing customers. The usual online meetings could for once be swapped with an in person meeting and that is refreshing. Not only for existing relations, but also for new ones. Next to the back to back meetings from early morning until late afternoon, there is also plenty of room to spontaneously meet people at one of the many drinks hosted by publishers and the dinner parties.

A few observations from spending almost 3 days in Frankfurt.

• More people are aware of Global Campus and more people recognize the value of being better able to find relevant reviewers. In the last years, it seems that even more publishers are struggling with finding reviewers and are therefore actively looking for new and better solutions, which is good news for us!
• AI is the talk of the town. Everyone seems to be speculating what AI can do in the future, or the issues AI raises today already. As we highlighted during the Peer Review Week this year, not many people seem to focus on the way we can start making use of AI today! So feel free to reach out to us if you want to learn more on how we at Global Campus make use of AI.
• It was of course only our second year, so maybe this has always been the case, but collaborations seem to be become more common. So many vendors are collaborating in one way or another, and also publishers are joining forces like the Purpose-Led Publishing coalition and of course through mergers like De Gruyter Brill.

Apart from all these positive notes, there is still a lot of work to do. As a technology provider, we notice that there is so much ‘old technology’ still being used that often hinders fast implementation of new tools and platforms like Global Campus. And then we are not even talking about one of the biggest threats yet, papermills. This rightfully sparks interest in the integrity tools that are available and in conversations we had, we notice that these integrity checks are not only of interest on the submission side, but also later in the workflow when reviewers are selected.

In short, we had a very productive bookfair this year, and also a very long list of things we need to get working on to enable more integrations, onboard more customers and to further develop new features in Global Campus. See you next year!