Announcing PurePub.ai — An Online Conference on AI and Publishing

I want to tell you about something I’ve been quietly building for the last few months, and why I think it matters.

This autumn, we’re running PurePub.ai — a free online conference on AI in scholarly and academic publishing. No ticket fees. No paywalls. Open to anyone who cares about where this industry is heading.

PurePub is about real practitioners, real problems, real talk.

There are quite a few pretty amazing practitioners lined up, with more to come.

I’ve spent twenty-odd years in scholarly publishing infrastructure. I built Paged.js, PubSweet, and Wax. I founded Coko. I know this space well enough to know that the moment we’re in right now is genuinely different — not hype-cycle different, but structurally different. The tooling has crossed a threshold. The questions have changed.

PurePub is where I want those new questions asked out loud, by people who have skin in the game.

If you work in publishing — as an editor, a technologist, a researcher, a standards person, a platform builder — this is for you. If you’ve been watching AI reshape adjacent industries and wondering what it means for scholarly communication specifically, this is for you.

It’s free ($149 if you want the pro bonus package and want to support the project). It’s online. May 2026. Signup here:

PurePub.ai — An Online Conference on AI and Publishing

If you know someone who should be speaking — reach out. We’re still putting the programme together, and I’d rather have the right voices in the room than a polished lineup of the usual suspects.

More soon.

— Adam