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23 Reflections to Recap Zendy's 2023 Journey

Dec 15, 2023 |

17 Mins Read

Welcome to Zendy’s annual recap, where we reflect on another year of milestones. The ever-evolving landscape of scholarly communication this year was anything but stagnant, dominated by themes of openness, integrity, inclusion, and innovation. As we reflect on 2023, we're proud to have welcomed new publishers, attended events, celebrated milestones with our users, and released some really great features to continue to support our users on their research and learning journey.

How we enhanced our user experience

We developed and launched ZAIA

Our most anticipated and exciting feature launch this year was ZAIA - Zendy's AI assistant. Ask any question, and ZAIA will analyse millions of researchers papers to give you credible answers backed by references. If you haven't already, log in to your Zendy account and put ZAIA to the test!

We launched Zendy Plus globally

We launched our global subscription plan at Frankfurt Book Fair 2023! The plan allows students, researchers and professionals globally to access scholarly material from leading publishers for the monthly price of a single research paper. This was a key milestone for us as our previous Zendy Plus plan was limited to several countries. Having an affordable and equitable access model strengthens our mission to remove the barriers to scholarly literature.

Keyphrase Highlighting

We released an AI-powered keyphrase highlighting tool. Instead of having multiple tabs open, looking for definitions and further research on a concept, Zendy highlights keyphrases in just one click to allow readers to grasp key research concepts quickly.

Summarisation

We also released an AI-powered summarisation tool. This tool summarises lengthy research papers into a concise paragraph on demand. This significantly helps readers save time during literature review.

Reading Lists

Earlier this year, we launched a reading list feature. Reading lists can be used to organise and categorise research papers according to projects, subject areas or whichever method the reader finds simplest to navigate through.

New UI coming soon

The team has been working on a brand new UI to transform the user journey on Zendy. Zendy will reveal a new fresh look very soon, with additional personalisation features to further enhance the discovery of scholarly literature.

Milestones we marked with our users

Welcomed over 400,000 readers

We’re proud to support over 400,000 readers from 200 countries and territories on Zendy! We thank our valued community for their consistent support. The trust of our community fuels our mission to keep striving for a world where equal access to research is a reality.

Over a 6 million searches & 2.5 million downloads

We have seen over 6 million keywords searched on the platform. Searches ranging from the neural networks, to enteric bacteria, and social impact - we’re proud to support a diverse community of students, researchers, and professionals. We marked over 2.5 million downloads on Zendy! As we continue to work with new publishers, we look forward to bringing an even better selection of content to our readers.

We exhibited, presented, and attended many events!

Presented at Charleston Hub 2023

Our Partner Relations Manager, Sara Crowley Vigneau presented at Charleston Hub in partnership with IGI Global. The presentation titled ‘On the Open Road: The story of an OA publication through the stakeholder journey’ looked at the journey of a publication through the eyes of each custodian.

Exhibited at STEP 2023

Earlier this year, our team exhibited Zendy at STEP 2023. Showcasing our Zendy alongside various startups inspired the team to learn from other tech products in the Middle Eastern region.

Sponsored and presented at the Forum for Open Research MENA

We were proud to sponsor the Forum of Open Research MENA, which is an event that highlights and advances open access initiatives in the Arab region. Our head of technology, Rodrigo Pinto, presented his insightful research paper titled, "Leveraging Big Data and Machine Learning to Enhance Open Data Quality: Insights for Developing Regions."

Exhibited at Frankfurt Book Fair

It was a pleasure to exhibit and connect with new and existing partners at Frankfurt Book fair 2023. We hosted a launch event at this year's fair, showcasing our Zendy Plus global subscription offering. Thanks to all who attended!

Presented at the MENA Panel

Our co-founder, Kamran Kardan spoke at The MENA panel titled, “AI wrote this abstract: The Impact of AI on higher education and academic research.” The discussion touched on the impact of AI on higher education, dissecting how it affects teaching, learning and ethical guidelines.

Attended London Book Fair

We attended the London Book Fair earlier this year. Our team met with many of our partners and other key leaders in scholarly communication. We look forward to exhibiting at next year’s fair.

Exhibited at UKSG 2023

We also exhibited at our first UKSG conference this year. It was a really great experience connecting with and learning from some of the best minds in our global knowledge community.

Joint Webinar with InTechOpen

We partnered with InTechOpen to host a joint webinar titled, “Emerging Technologies - Partnering for Accessibility, Discoverability and a Sustainable Future.” Zendy’s Head of Marketing, Monica Chinsami, presented on the panel alongside Prof Tatiana Morosuk, Editorial Board Member of IntechOpen's Green Energy and Environmental Technology (GEET) journal, and Dr Jo Havemann, Co-founder of AfricArXiv.

We welcomed new partners

IEEE

In September, we integrated IEEE’s open access research content. This partnership has brought significant technological research across various areas of study, like aerospace, robotics and more on Zendy.

IT Governance

In June, we partnered with IT Governance, which is a leading publisher of books on information technology, cybersecurity and governance.

IGI Global

We partnered with IGI Global, a leading publisher focused on research across different specialisms under the vast umbrella of Science. This partnership saw the addition of leading e-journals as well as book content across subject areas including Business & Management; Scientific, Technical, Medical (STM); and Education.

Bristol University Press

We also signed an agreement with Bristol University Press. BUP is well known for producing scholarship that advances theory, knowledge and learning within and beyond academia.

InTechOpen

We also welcomed IntechOpen to our partner community. InTechOpen specialises in journals and books in the fields of Medicine, Technology and Science.

A couple of things we published

Published SDG Report

This year, we published an SDG report in partnership with Knowledge E. This comprehensive report helps us keep track of our efforts in accelerating the aims of the UN’s publishers compact. With a focus on SDG 4 (Quality Education) and SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities), Zendy progresses to ensure that academic research is accessible to everyone everywhere.

An analysis of OER’s on Research Information

Our co-founder, Kamran Kardan, wrote a piece on the future of Open Educational Resources and how the industry is preparing for them. In summary, with the uncapped potential of responsible AI, the future looks bright and full of innovative opportunities to positively impact societal progress.

We look forward to continuing our journey together in 2024, and we thank you for your unwavering support.

Research Integrity, Partnership, and Societal Impact

Research integrity extends beyond publication to include how scholarship is discovered, accessed, and used, and its societal impact depends on more than editorial practice alone. In practice, integrity and impact are shaped by a web of platforms and partnerships that determine how research actually travels beyond the press. University press scholarship is generally produced with a clear public purpose, speaking to issues such as education, public health, social policy, culture, and environmental change, and often with the explicit aim of informing practice, policy, and public debate. Whether that aim is realised increasingly depends on what happens to research once it leaves the publishing workflow. Discovery platforms, aggregators, library consortia, and technology providers all influence this journey. Choices about metadata, licensing terms, ranking criteria, or the use of AI-driven summarisation affect which research is surfaced, how it is presented, and who encounters it in the first place. These choices can look technical or commercial on the surface, but they have real intellectual and social consequences. They shape how scholarship is understood and whether it can be trusted beyond core academic audiences. For university presses, this changes where responsibility sits. Editorial quality remains critical, but it is no longer the only consideration. Presses also have a stake in how their content is discovered, contextualised, and applied in wider knowledge ecosystems. Long-form and specialist research is particularly exposed here. When material is compressed or broken apart for speed and scale, nuance can easily be lost, even when the intentions behind the system are positive. This is where partnerships start to matter in a very practical way. The conditions under which presses work with discovery services directly affect whether their scholarship remains identifiable, properly attributed, and anchored in its original context. For readers using research in teaching, healthcare, policy, or development settings, these signals are not decorative. They are essential to responsible use. Zendy offers one example of how these partnerships can function differently. As a discovery and access platform serving researchers, clinicians, and policymakers in emerging and underserved markets, Zendy is built around extending reach without undermining trust. University press content is surfaced with clear attribution, structured metadata, and rights-respecting access models that preserve the integrity of the scholarly record. Zendy works directly with publishers to agree how content is indexed, discovered, and, where appropriate, summarised. This gives presses visibility into and control over how their work appears in AI-supported discovery environments, while helping readers approach research with a clearer sense of scope, limitations, and authority. From a societal impact perspective, this matters. Zendy’s strongest usage is concentrated in regions where access to trusted scholarship has long been uneven, including parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In these contexts, university press research is not being read simply for academic interest. It is used in classrooms, clinical settings, policy development, and capacity-building efforts, areas closely connected to the Sustainable Development Goals. Governance really sits at the heart of this kind of model. Clear and shared expectations around metadata quality, content provenance, licensing boundaries, and the use of AI are what make the difference between systems that encourage genuine engagement and those that simply amplify visibility without depth. Metadata is not just a technical layer: it gives readers the cues they need to understand what they are reading, where it comes from, and how it should be interpreted. AI-driven discovery and new access models create real opportunities to broaden the reach of university press publishing and to connect trusted scholarship with communities that would otherwise struggle to access it. But reach on its own does not equate to impact. When context and attribution are lost, the value of the research is diminished. Societal impact depends on whether work is understood and used with care, not simply on how widely it circulates. For presses with a public-interest mission, active participation in partnerships like these is a way to carry their values into a more complex and fast-moving environment. As scholarship is increasingly routed through global, AI-powered discovery systems, questions of integrity, access, and societal relevance converge. Making progress on shared global challenges requires collaboration, shared responsibility, and deliberate choices about the infrastructures that connect research to the wider world. For university presses, this is not a departure from their mission, but a continuation of it, with partnerships playing an essential role. FAQ How do platforms and partnerships affect research integrity?Discovery platforms, aggregators, and technology partners influence which research is surfaced, how it’s presented, and who can access it. Choices around metadata, licensing, and AI summarization directly impact understanding and trust. Why are university press partnerships important?Partnerships allow presses to maintain attribution, context, and control over their content in discovery systems, ensuring that research remains trustworthy and properly interpreted. How does Zendy support presses and researchers?Zendy works with publishers to surface research with clear attribution, structured metadata, and rights-respecting access, preserving integrity while extending reach to underserved regions. For partnership inquiries, please contact: Sara Crowley Vigneau Partnership Relations Manager Email: s.crowleyvigneau@zendy.io .wp-block-image img { max-width: 65% !important; margin-left: auto !important; margin-right: auto !important; }

Dec 18, 20256 Mins ReadDiscover

Beyond Publication. Access as a Research Integrity Issue

If research integrity now extends beyond publication to include how scholarship is discovered and used, then access is not a secondary concern. It is foundational. In practice, this broader understanding of integrity quickly runs into a hard constraint: access. A significant percentage of academic publishing is still behind paywalls, and traditional library sales models fail to serve institutions with limited budgetsor uneven digital infrastructure. Even where university libraries exist, access is often delayed or restricted to narrow segments of the scholarly record. The consequences are structural rather than incidental. When researchers and practitioners cannot access the peer-reviewed scholarship they need, it drops out of local research agendas, teaching materials as well as policy conversations. Decisions are then shaped by whatever information is most easily available, not necessarily by what is most rigorous or relevant. Over time, this weakens citation pathways, limits regional participation in scholarly debate, and reinforces global inequity in how knowledge is visible, trusted, and amplified. The ongoing success of shadow libraries highlights this misalignment: Sci-Hub reportedly served over 14 million monthly users in 2025, indicating sustained and widespread demand for academic research that existing access models continue to leave unmet. This is less about individual behaviour than about a system that consistently fails to deliver essential knowledge where it is needed most. The picture looks different when access barriers are reduced: usage data from open and reduced-barrier initiatives consistently show strong engagement across Asia and Africa, particularly in fields linked to health, education, social policy, and development. These patterns highlight how emerging economies rely on high-quality publishing in contexts where it directly impacts professional practice and public decision-making. From a research integrity perspective, this is important. When authoritative sources are inaccessible, alternative materials step in to fill the gap. The risk is not only exclusion, but distortion. Inconsistent, outdated, or unverified sources become more influential precisely because they are easier to obtain. Misinformation takes hold most easily where trusted knowledge is hardest to reach. Addressing access is about more than widening readership or improving visibility, it is about ensuring that high-quality scholarship can continue to shape understanding and decisions in the contexts it seeks to serve. For university presses committed to the public good, this challenge sits across discovery systems, licensing structures, technology platforms, and the partnerships that increasingly determine how research is distributed, interpreted, and reused. If research integrity now extends across the full lifecycle of scholarship, then sustaining it requires collective responsibility and shared frameworks. How presses engage with partners, infrastructures, and governance mechanisms becomes central to protecting both trust and impact. FAQ: What challenges exist in current access models?Many academic works remain behind paywalls, libraries face budget and infrastructure constraints, and access delays or restrictions can prevent researchers from using peer-reviewed scholarship effectively. What happens when research is inaccessible?When trusted sources are hard to reach, alternative, inconsistent, or outdated materials often fill the gap, increasing the risk of misinformation and weakening citation pathways. How does Zendy help address access challenges?Zendy provides affordable and streamlined access to high-quality research, helping scholars, practitioners, and institutions discover and use knowledge without traditional barriers. For partnership inquiries, please contact:Sara Crowley VigneauPartnership Relations ManagerEmail:s.crowleyvigneau@zendy.io .wp-block-image img { max-width: 65% !important; margin-left: auto !important; margin-right: auto !important; }

Dec 18, 20255 Mins ReadDiscover

Beyond Peer Review. Research Integrity in University Press Publishing

University presses play a distinctive role in advancing research integrity and societal impact. Their publishing programmes are closely aligned with public-interest research in the humanities, social sciences, global health, education, and environmental studies, disciplines that directly inform policy and progress toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This work typically prioritises depth, context, and long-term understanding, often drawing on regional expertise and interdisciplinary approaches rather than metrics-driven outputs. Research integrity is traditionally discussed in terms of editorial rigour, peer review, and ethical standards in the production of scholarship. These remain essential. But in an era shaped by digital platforms and AI-led discovery, they are no longer sufficient on their own. Integrity now also depends on what happens after publication: how research is surfaced, interpreted, reduced, and reused. For university presses, this shift is particularly significant. Long-form scholarship, a core strength of press programmes, is increasingly encountered through abstracts, summaries, extracts, and automated recommendations rather than sustained reading. As AI tools mediate more first encounters with research, meaning can be subtly altered through selection, compression, or loss of context. These processes are rarely neutral. They encode assumptions about relevance, authority, and value. This raises new integrity questions. Who decides which parts of a work are highlighted or omitted? How are disciplinary nuance and authorial intent preserved when scholarship is summarised? What signals remain to help readers understand scope, limitations, or evidentiary weight? This isn’t to say that AI-driven discovery is inherently harmful, but it does require careful oversight. If university press scholarship is to continue informing research, policy, and public debate in meaningful ways, it needs to remain identifiable, properly attributed, and grounded in its original framing as it moves through increasingly automated discovery systems. In this context, research integrity extends beyond how scholarship is produced to include how it is processed, surfaced and understood. For presses with a public-interest mission, research integrity now extends across the full journey of a work, from how it is published to how it is discovered, interpreted and used. FAQ Can Zendy help with AI-mediated research discovery?Yes. Zendy’s tools help surface, summarise, and interpret research accurately, preserving context and authorial intent even when AI recommendations are used. Does AI discovery harm research, or can it be beneficial?AI discovery isn’t inherently harmful—it can increase visibility and accessibility. However, responsible use is essential to prevent misinterpretation or loss of nuance, ensuring research continues to inform policy and public debate accurately. How does Zendy make research more accessible?Researchers can explore work from multiple disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, global health, and environmental studies, all in one platform with easy search and AI-powered insights. For partnership inquiries, please contact:Sara Crowley Vigneau Partnership Relations Manager Email: s.crowleyvigneau@zendy.io .wp-block-image img { max-width: 65% !important; margin-left: auto !important; margin-right: auto !important; }

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