Title

Futures of Academic Publishing

Speaker

Peter Schoppert, Director, National University of Singapore Press

Abstract

Academic publishing is in the grip of four converging crises, and nowhere are they more visible than across Asia. Scholars are required to publish in Western-indexed journals just to graduate — creating a system where predatory outlets and paper mills have become rational choices, not aberrations. University administrators, chasing league-table positions worth billions in government funding, have turned bibliometric scores into a currency of institutional survival. The distortions this creates are particularly painful for humanities research: the enormous bias toward English is not just a question of language but of values and the structure of discourse itself.
Libraries, meanwhile, are caught between an explosion in the volume of published work and subscription prices that have risen faster than inflation, squeezing out the very monographs that humanists depend on.
These are not separate malfunctions in an otherwise healthy system — they are the predictable outcomes of a single underlying logic: that scholarship’s value can be reduced to a number, ranked and optimized. But that logic may now be consuming itself. And into this already strained system, generative AI has arrived — not merely adding pressure, but challenging the assumptions on which the whole edifice rests. What can we do, in Kyoto and Singapore, in area studies and humanities research, to survive and thrive in this situation — and to help nudge it toward something better?

Bio

Peter Schoppert is a publisher and reformed technology entrepreneur. For the last 12 years he has been Director of the NUS Press, the scholarly publishing arm of the National University of Singapore (NUS). He has made his career in Singapore, since completing his masters degree at NUS. He is past President of the Singapore Book Publishers Association and has addressed publishing & copyright forums on the impact of AI including the World Intellectual Property Organisation, the World Expression Forum, the Association of University Presses and the International Publishers Association.
He writes on generative AI at https://aicopyright.substack.com.