Why trust in publishing matters more than ever
Sophie Goldsworthy
“Our focus is on publishing the most authoritative, carefully reviewed scholarship we can find in support of our mission, on topics that matter to how people understand and navigate the world.”
Something is shifting how people relate to information. Not just what they believe, but who they trust to tell them anything at all.
The latest Edelman Trust Barometer makes for sobering reading. Seven in 10 people globally are now unwilling or hesitant to engage with someone who holds different values or draws on different sources of knowledge. We are retreating into our own information worlds – and the walls are getting higher.
This is a cultural problem that raises a fundamental question for publishers: what is our role when trust itself is under strain?
London Book Fair comes at a moment when the publishing industry has every reason to reflect on what it stands for.
At OUP we think about this a lot. We are not driven by fleeting market trends, nor do we have an agenda. Our focus is on publishing the most authoritative, carefully reviewed scholarship we can find in support of our mission, on topics that matter to how people understand and navigate the world.
This sounds simple. In the current climate, it is anything but.
Expertise still counts, but it needs a champion
The Ipsos Veracity Index consistently shows that people retain confidence in professions they associate with training, evidence, and public service: scientists, doctors, teachers. There is still a broad cultural appetite for expert-led information. People want to understand complex issues. They want reliable guides through a noisy world.
But that appetite is going unmet. Too much of the information environment rewards speed over substance, heat over light. Algorithms surface what provokes, not what illuminates – as we know from selecting rage bait as Oxford Word of the Year 2025. And in that environment, evidence-based publishing can struggle to compete for attention, even when it is exactly what people need.
This is where university presses have a distinctive role to play. We are active participants in the information ecosystem, and we have a responsibility to show up in it.
Publishing ideas that challenge and connect
One of the things I believe most strongly is that serious publishing is not just about providing answers. It is about building the intellectual infrastructure that helps people think better.
That means publishing works that deliberately sit across disciplines; content that brings together different fields of knowledge to shed new light on urgent problems. Our Oxford Intersections series does exactly this, commissioning research that bridges the humanities, sciences, and social sciences to take the questions that don’t fit neatly into any single box.
It also means actively seeking out the books that help people make sense of a turbulent moment. Richard Susskind’s How to Think About AI does not tell readers what to conclude about artificial intelligence. It gives them the tools to think the question through themselves. Tim Lenton’s Positive Tipping Points reframes the climate crisis not as an intractable catastrophe but as a system capable of rapid, positive change – if we understand its dynamics. These are not comfortable reads. They are demanding, rigorous, genuinely useful.
The case for rigour
If there is one thing I would want to say clearly to anyone who cares about the state of public knowledge, it is this: peer review is not a bureaucratic formality. It is a safeguard.
In an age of AI-generated content, where hallucination is an industry term rather than a metaphor, the ability to say “this has been checked, challenged, and verified by leading experts” is more valuable than it has been. The processes that are second nature to academic publishers – rigorous editorial standards, independent review, careful fact-checking – are exactly what the information environment is currently short of.
And it’s part of our commitment to upholding standards that make our publishing trustworthy by design, not just by reputation.
A moment for mission
All publishers are operating within a complex and ever-changing environment. The AI disruption is not abstract. It is reshaping how research is conducted, how content is discovered, and how readers engage with ideas. None of that is going away.
But none of it changes the underlying need that serious publishers exist to meet. People want to understand the world. They want information they can rely on. They want to engage with ideas that reward the effort of sustained attention.
I am proud to work for an organization that is going out of its way to address that need. Because in a world pulling apart into competing information silos, rigorous, mission-led publishing matters more than ever before.
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