- Wednesday 18 February 2026
- 09:00 - 10:15 EST
- 14:00 - 15:15 BST
Headless Scholarly Infrastructure: The Hard Questions about Access, Identity, and Standards Nobody's Answering Yet
Session Description
We've talked about escaping the PDF for more than twenty years. What we didn't predict: the entire concept of a 'content platform' potentially dissolving beneath our feet.
Scholarly content of the future may well be headless—consumed through AI systems that query it directly, embedded in contexts publishers and researchers haven't yet designed for, and delivered through tooling that treats AI traditional platforms as just another API endpoint. This isn't theoretical: emerging technologies like Model Context Protocol (MCP) are already enabling AI agents to treat informational repositories as queryable knowledge sources. Publishers, platform providers, and libraries are all facing the same question: what do we actually control when content delivery becomes completely decoupled from content management?
Through live polling and small-group discussions, this session will explore what 'headless' really means for scholarly communications by tackling the uncomfortable infrastructure questions nobody's asking out loud. How do librarians evaluate 'usage' when users never visit a platform? What metadata becomes mission-critical when AI systems are your primary discovery interface? How do we reconcile traditional 'version of record' models with emerging expectations for real-time updates? How do publishers maintain brand identity when researchers may no longer see your brand? And what standards, metadata requirements, and shared ways of working would actually enable this future to work?
Bring your hardest questions about what breaks when (not if) content goes truly headless. We'll crowdsource answers and identify where the industry needs to move collectively.
