Beyond RFPs: breaking the procurement cycle in academia.

Innovation theatre: the illusion of rigour

Academic publishers, societies and institutions must often buy technology innovations using processes designed for buying photocopiers.

Standard procurement rituals—requests for proposals, tenders, quotations—promise fairness and rigour. In practice, they deliver predictability, delay, and stagnation.

Exhaustive specifications are demanded before product managers, designers, and key stakeholders can have meaningful conversations and problems and solutions. This unintentionally rewards the largest vendors, who can navigate months of paperwork, while smaller firms with innovative solutions are shut out.

What appears rigorous ends up protecting the status quo.

Moving beyond tenders could free non-profit publishers from vendor lock-in and outdated systems, opening the door to genuine innovation and transformation.

History repeating itself

For decades, academic organisations have invested heavily in monolithic platforms for manuscript submission, peer review, and publishing workflows, often through these rigid tender processes.

This results in costly, broken, slow, and fragmented systems that dominate the industry and frustrate authors, reviewers and editors alike.

The real beneficiaries are commercial vendors. Dominance by companies like Elsevier and Clarivate illustrates how consolidation entrenches lock-in.

The larger incumbents have little incentive to innovate beyond raising fees, while smaller budget vendors using cheap offshore labour tend to deliver only what is asked for, rarely challenging assumptions or proposing better solutions.

Publishers, societies, and institutions sign multi-year contracts, only to find themselves stuck in inflexible broken systems, with little room for customisation or improvement. Projects take years not months, with many failing on cost, timelines, functionality, and user experience.

The outcome is high costs, poor performance, low adaptability, and persistent dissatisfaction.

The false assumption

A customer's job is not to know the right solution, but only to communicate the pains they feel.

Procurement processes fail because they assume customers can understand and specify every feature upfront.

Administrators define these processes, prioritising detailed specifications, cost breakdowns and deadlines over addressing real user needs. Publishers are experts in publishing, not technology and software design. By forcing them to prescribe every feature upfront, the process closes the door on the very expertise and innovation they are seeking.

The result is detail over dialogue, paperwork over partnership – and systems that serve contracts rather than communities. Contrast this with the Agile manifesto which prioritises individuals and interactions over processes and tools, collaboration over contract negotiation, responding to change over rigid plans.

Procurement cycles stretch for months and years; by the time contracts are signed, user needs have shifted and technologies have moved on. Compliance dominates flexibility. Risk aversion replaces creativity and problem solving.

Software ends up optimised not for users, but for ticked boxes—a situation incumbents exploit to maintain market control.

There is a better way: prioritising meaningful outcomes over paperwork.

Shifting focus from features to outcomes

Agile-inspired methods provide a blueprint that allow requirements to evolve through collaboration and experimentation. Progressive development and iterative scoping enable solutions to grow organically, shaped by real customer and user needs.

Deals focused on success metrics that matter to publishers, societies, and institutions keep software providers accountable for results, not just feature delivery.

Proof-of-concept projects let institutions see technologies in action, assess cultural fit with vendors, and mitigate risk before committing to long-term contracts. Short, low-cost trials allow solutions to emerge naturally, rather than being dictated by long tender cycles started long ago.

This approach rewards innovation over compliance, adaptability over prescription, and opens the door to smaller, more creative vendors. Startups like CurveNote and DeSci , along with open-source platforms like PKP’s Open Journal Systems , demonstrate how iterative, collaborative approaches deliver tools that genuinely meet user needs.

Outcome-driven systems of change

The issue is not whether procurement processes are flawed—they clearly are. It’s whether the sector has the courage and will to move beyond them.

By embracing outcome-driven methods—pilots, proofs of concept, and genuine collaboration—publishers, societies, and institutions could stop spending vast sums on slow-moving systems that deliver little to no real value.

Instead, they could invest in teams and processes that seek to meet real user needs, adapt to the evolving research landscape, and finally break free from decades of vendor lock-in.

The opportunity is clear: smarter procurement, better tools, and stronger partnerships—driven by innovation, not inertia.