Hall 4.1 will bring together academic publishers, libraries, education providers and publishing-service companies. Its Innovation Stage and Knowledge Hub will address issues ranging from licensing and research infrastructure to digital production and artificial intelligence.

On 8 October, The Scholarly Kitchen Live: Trust, Licensing, and Infrastructure in Scholarly Publishing will examine the systems on which scholarly communication depends. The programme turns to a question particularly relevant to Ukraine on 9 October, when the Innovation Stage hosts Academic Publishing in Times of War: Supporting Science Community, involving the European Association of Science Editors and Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and Science.

Technology is also part of the discussion. A Knowledge Hub workshop on 9 October will explore how publishers can design custom AI assistants for practical workflows. Such tools may help with repetitive tasks, but they do not remove the need to verify sources, protect research integrity or make clear editorial decisions.

For smaller university publishers, these questions are immediate rather than theoretical. The Ukrainian Free University in Munich is modernising the digital infrastructure of its Scientific Collection. A production Open Journal Systems platform is in use, alongside author ORCID verification, DOI registration and structured publication metadata. As further material is prepared for publication, the aim is to make UFU scholarship more visible and accessible while strengthening the editorial and metadata workflows on which reliable open-access publishing depends.

The fair offers an opportunity to compare how other publishers and service providers handle those responsibilities. It also brings the international university-press community together at the International Convention of University Presses on 9 October. Participation in that convention requires separate registration.

For Ukrainian scholarly publishing, the useful question in Frankfurt is not simply which technology is newest. It is which standards, partnerships and workflows can make research more visible without compromising the editorial care on which readers and researchers rely.

Vitalii Andreichuk