(2 Mar 2026) SSP’s polling initiative, Pulse Check, is a series of short, focused polls designed to track trends and challenges in real time. The second poll in the series, “Economic Outlook for Scholarly Communications in 2026,” set out to understand how professionals across the scholarly communications ecosystem are assessing the industry’s economic resilience in the year ahead, including sentiment on financial outlooks, key economic pressures, and where institutions expect to prioritize investment amid shifting funding, policy, and technology dynamics.
The poll was distributed to members of the Society for Scholarly Publishing, readers of The Scholarly Kitchen, and other professionals in the scholarly communications community. There were 286 respondents from a variety of organization types, sizes, and job levels.
This post provides the high-level aggregate results. The full report, available at no cost on SSP’s website (log-in or account creation required), provides additional detail and the ability to filter the data by organization size, type, and job level of respondents.
Key Findings
- Economic sentiment is cautious and slightly negative, with concern about resilience in 2026 narrowly outweighing confidence and most organizations expecting flat or modest financial performance rather than growth.
- Institutional budget constraints and research funding volatility are the dominant economic pressures, reinforcing that financial sustainability challenges are structural and closely tied to public and institutional funding environments.
- Research integrity, public trust, and protection against predatory and fraudulent practices are viewed as existential priorities, consistently ranking as the most critical near-term challenges to long-term economic viability.
- AI is seen more as a governance and risk-management issue than a pure efficiency opportunity, with strong concern around intellectual property, ethical use, and disintermediation alongside continued investment in automation and infrastructure.
- Organizations are prioritizing defensive strategies such as cost containment and operational efficiency, while selectively investing in core publishing and technology, signaling a focus on durability and stability over expansion in a politically and economically volatile environment.
Read the article from Scholarly Kitchen here.
