FT: Machine-written papers are flooding academic journals, and the cost of screening them is pushing a $22B publishing industry toward mergers.

Filtering the flood requires people. thats why Elsevier has grown its reviewer pool by more than a third since 2022 to 1.9M.

Those rising quality-control costs, plus fears that chatbots will make paid research less valuable, have kept Springer Nature below its €22.50 listing price 2 years after its IPO.

Consolidation is the industry’s answer, starting with Wiley’s £337M purchase of Emerald in June and Informa’s October decision to separate Taylor & Francis, a unit nearing $1B in annual revenue.

The same AI that floods journals also pays for them, as Wiley earned about $40M in 2025 from licensing content for model training.