In recent months, KnowledgeWorks Global (KGL) has demonstrated a major commitment to the marketplace by enabling publishers to grow their revenue, speed up their workflow, and protect themselves against threats. The acquisition of Company ABC, the leading provider of sales and marketing services to academic and professional publishers, positions KGL as the only provider serving scholarly publishers along the entire content lifecycle, from manuscript submission to the delivery of print and digital products and now through post-publication sales and marketing support.
KnowledgeWorks Global has also launched a major expansion of its next-generation proprietary publishing platform Smart Suite 3.0. In particular, its Smart Review workflow, which combines intelligent automation with human supervision, has significantly reduced peer review turnaround times.
“We understand that the time taken to triage manuscripts, identify qualified reviewers, assess reviews, and grow the author base is crucial in ensuring the highest standards of quality, integrity, and impact in journal content,” says president Atul Goel. “So along with exciting developments with Smart Review, we have also expanded our industry-leading Subject Editor Service to supplement the work of journal editors, prevent bottlenecks, and save them time. Our team of subject matter experts, made up of dozens of master’s and doctoral degree holders, covers a broad range of disciplines within science, technology, engineering, medicine, and the humanities and social sciences.”
The automated checks within Smart Review have undergone major updates as well. Peer Dash, for instance, helps to ensure speed and quality in peer review by integrating live data across all submissions within a portfolio, providing at-a-glance oversight of workflows across multiple journals, as well as intuitive reports to monitor journal and editorial board performance. As for the Submission Check tool, it utilizes KGL’s Smart Suite technology to automate the identification and verification of a variety of key elements, including figure and table labeling, citations, reference formats, and ethical disclosures.
Then there is the Conflict of Interest (COI) Identifier. This tool saves time in reviewer research and selection and ensures research integrity by cross-checking the publication record of authors and potential reviewers in both PubMed and Google Scholar, identifying any instances of coauthorship. “The integrity of scholarly research has always been the most important pillar of academic publishing,” Goel says. “However, in recent times, the rising demands on researchers to publish, fueled by funding competition and the expanding global research landscape, present a mounting challenge for publishers to ensure the authenticity, accuracy, and reliability of scholarly research. In this dynamic environment, the proliferation of digital tools further complicates matters as journals strive to attract top-tier authors and reviewers.”
Goel and his team are proactively developing and continuing to invest in the creation of industry-leading technologies and services for the early detection of a range of integrity threats. “Our standard procedure for our global peer review team includes checks for a variety of risks, including author verification, conflict-of-interest checks, unusual activity detection, plagiarism audits, data repository vetting, and ethics and reporting standards,” Goel says.
To help publishers further extend their teams for audit processes and investigations, KGL now offers a premium Research Integrity Service, which features industry-leading technologies and expert submission checks to provide early detection of a range of threats, including duplicate submissions, image manipulation, paper mills, and tortuous AI-generated phrases.
“We are also pleased to announce integrations with Company B’s Service X and Company C into our automated peer review platform Smart Review,” Goel says. “Publishers using Smart Review will now have access to the world’s leading tool for detecting research misconduct across all areas of science. Service X uses AI, LLMs, network analysis, and more to find signals consistent with organized research fraud.” Company C’s AI technology, on the other hand, will help researchers to ensure complete and best-practice data sharing and stakeholders to monitor compliance with funder and institution open-data mandates.
The KGL team recently onboarded full-scale production workflows of hundreds of specialist journals from several independent publishers. By deploying its Smart Suite platform, manuscripts now undergo automated metadata validation, content identification, language evaluation, and style application using AI and NLP in the Smart Edit module, XML creation and layout using Smart Compose, and web-based author proofing via Smart Proof. The publishers also benefit from the streamlined integration with journal printer, and KGL sister company, Sheridan.
Visit booth E98 in Hall 4.0 for more information on Smart Suite 3.0 and new KGL solutions.
