Scholastica and Maverick Publishing Specialists announce the launch of a global survey on the “Technology Needs of Small and Medium Journal Publishers,” open now through June 5th, 2025. Read on to learn more. You can take the survey here.

In recent years, the duties and expectations of scholarly journal publishers have grown exponentially — from managing new metadata and indexing standards to research integrity checks and everything in between.

For small and medium-sized publishers, it begs the question: How can we continue doing more with limited human and budgetary resources?

In many ways, the answer will rely on having viable technical solutions to address the unique needs of smaller publishing organizations.

Scholastica and Maverick have teamed up to launch the “Technology Needs of Small and Medium Journal Publishers” survey to gather insights into the digital tools and workflow optimizations that would best serve the smaller publishing community for its members and the infrastructural and service providers who support them.

The survey takes only 10–15 minutes to complete, and the results will be compiled into an openly available report (no download form required).

We encourage members of the small-to-medium-sized publisher community to take the survey here.

Quick survey details

Scholastica and Maverick acknowledge that definitions of “small-to-medium-sized” organizations may differ by industry, country, etc. For the purposes of this survey, a “small-to-medium-sized publisher” is defined as a publishing organization with under 1,000 employees (per the Gartner SmB criteria).

We welcome survey responses from those who work with publishers across academic disciplines that meet the above “small-to-medium-sized” criteria — whether you’re part of a scholarly society, university press, independent press, research institute, library, or faculty/campus-based journal program.

The survey questions span the following core areas:

  • Platform and workflow management: including the technology categories small-to-mid-sized publishers are currently using, their technical pain points, and priorities for peer review and publishing process optimization.
  • Research integrity and the rise of AI: including the research integrity areas participants are most concerned about, research integrity automation priorities, and AI tool usage/sentiments.
  • Vendor collaboration and support: including how publishers would like to engage with technology solution providers and how they anticipate their technology needs will evolve over the next few years.

The survey findings will be published in a free open report in an aggregated and anonymized format. Contact information is optional and will not be shared with outside parties or used for purposes other than those stated in the survey (to receive a copy of the report).

Participating in the survey

We encourage small and medium-sized publishers to take the survey to help develop a collective picture of the technology options and innovations that would best serve them in the future.

If you are not directly involved in the smaller publishing community but have colleagues who are, please help spread the word about the survey to them.

Attending SSP? We’ve launched this survey to complement the 2025 SSP Conference session, “What smaller publishers need from tech vendors to level up,” which was submitted by members of the Scholastica team and will be moderated by Maverick co-founder and CEO Rebecca Rinehart.

Scholastica and Maverick plan to share preliminary survey findings at SSP, and we’ll post updates to social media. You can find Scholastica on Bluesky here and LinkedIn here and Maverick on Bluesky here and LinkedIn here.

Please send any questions or constructive feedback about the survey to support@scholasticahq.com.