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Kudos has announced a significant expansion of its fast-track research initiative, Taming the Crocodile, with seven additional sponsors joining the study to examine the growing impact of zero-click search and AI-generated overview panels on scholarly communications.
The new sponsors are Elsevier, Wiley, Atypon, BMJ Group, the American Physical Society and Oxford University Press. They join the founding cohort of De Gruyter Brill, Emerald Publishing, IOP Publishing, Silverchair and Springer Nature.
Together, the organisations represent a broad cross-section of publishers, societies and platform providers collaborating to investigate how AI-mediated search environments are reshaping research discovery and usage.
The initiative takes its name from “the Crocodile Effect,” a term coined by SaaS marketing expert Tim Soulo to describe the widening gap between search impressions and click-throughs. In the scholarly publishing context, this phenomenon is raising concerns about declining website traffic as search engines increasingly deliver answers directly within results pages through AI-generated summaries.
According to the project organisers, the shift has implications beyond traffic and subscription revenues. It may also affect attribution, version control, research integrity and trust in the scholarly record if users rely on AI-generated answers without consulting the original sources.
“Our responsibility is to the research community and the scholarly record,” said Rachel Burley, Chief Publications Officer, American Physical Society. “As zero-click search becomes more common, researchers may get answers without seeing sources, context, or caveats. We’re sponsoring this project because we need to understand how that shift affects trust, attribution, and the availability of rigorous research.”
The study is led by Kudos co-founder Charlie Rapple and aims to develop evidence-based insights into how AI-mediated discovery is altering the relationship between publishers, platforms and audiences.
She said: “The level of engagement from across the sector underlines the scale and urgency of the challenge. AI-mediated discovery is already reshaping how research is surfaced, interpreted and cited. By bringing together publishers, societies and technology providers, we can develop evidence-based, practical responses that protect usage, revenues and research integrity, while ensuring that high-quality research remains visible and trusted.”
Further information about the study is available from charlie@growkudos.com.