13th June 2025


Company spotlight


STM chief executive Caroline Sutton: ‘Don’t let a crisis go to waste’


The trade body’s boss discusses the impact of AI and working to make the public trust science again. Tom Tivnan reports


T 50


here is a point in my video call with Caroline Sutton in which I say a name – Robert F Kennedy, Jr – that causes her briefly to put her head in her hands.


Sutton – who has been CEO of STM, the


international trade body for Science, Technical and Medical publishers, for three and a half years – and I have been using her upcoming trip to the Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF) to talk about the academic market in China, but also to address some of STM’s broader campaigns around AI, research integ- rity, open science and the “quite frankly chaotic and unstable” research funding and political climate in the US. Kennedy’s name comes up as the US health


secretary has just released his flagship Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) report, a


document that has been of much concern for scholars in its mischaracterising of some research and use of citations from studies that do not even exist, all to support a view of public health that you might find alarming coming from your drunk, QAnon-addled uncle over Christmas dinner, but frightening in a Health and Human Services Department’s policy paper. Sutton says counteracting things like the


MAHA report is part of STM’s core: “Our mission is to advance trusted research. What is becoming evident is a distrust of the institu- tions that folks previously trusted. What does this mean for science in a world in which we have a new generation that’s grown up with social media and AI? And if there is that distrust of science, what does that mean for how we, say, manage the next pandemic?


Beijing International Book Fair Preview Company spotlight


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