Integrate best-of-class AI tools with confidence: a guide for editorial teams
17 Jun 2025
Right now, publishers in multiple sectors are asking the same thing: how do we make the best use of the best AI tools while staying in control of data quality and security?
What’s needed is a secure, flexible, and transparent solution for integrating the latest AI tools directly into your workflows. All without compromising editorial values or the security of proprietary content.
That’s exactly what the partnership between the academic publishing experts at BAO Systems, and PublishOne, the friendly publishing platform, can deliver. Read on to find out how.
By Ron Ragsdale, Senior Director, Operations, BAO Systems
Add the AI tools your editorial team actually needs
As a trusted provider of digital solutions, BAO Systems is the ideal implementation partner for building secure and AI-friendly workflows on the PublishOne platform.
The risks associated with integrating AI-powered tools into content production are a common cause for concern, so it is good to know that PublishOne doesn’t include, by design, any built-in or proprietary AI features. Instead, it uses a modular integration layer that allows us to embed third-party AI services, such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or domain-specific LLMs, seamlessly into your content pipelines.
Whether you are translating academic abstracts, reporting on data visualizations, summarizing peer reviews, or automating metadata tagging, these tools can be plugged in via PublishOne’s ‘Event Grid’ and open APIs. The result? Enhanced productivity without rebuilding your entire IT infrastructure.
The first and last non-negotiable: data security
When your core business relies on the proprietary knowledge of authors, peer reviewers, and editors, data security is top priority, because you need to protect their IP. That’s why we ensure your data never leaves your control – unless you want it to.
Our AI integrations follow strict protocols:
- Data encryption – at rest and in transit
- GDPR compliance – together with other regional requirements
- No retention of customer data – or used for model training
Public, private, or custom AI? You decide
Another strength of this approach is flexibility. PublishOne allows you to choose from publicly available AI models or integrate your own custom solutions. If you need something tailored, the team at BAO Systems can help develop proprietary models, fine-tuned with your specific content in mind.
Plus, we support Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to ensure outputs are grounded in trusted source material. This is especially important for academic publishing, where credibility is paramount.
Transparency, accuracy, and editorial oversight
We understand the need for accuracy, fairness, and transparency, so you are always in charge of your content. So we support a human-in-the-loop (HITL) model, where editorial staff can review, accept, or reject AI outputs. We also offer:
- Pre- and post-processing layers to detect anomalies
- Feedback loops to improve accuracy
- Optional bias audits and benchmarking to document and validate AI performance
In short, we give you tools to manage risk, not just adopt the latest trend in AI technology.
A publishing solution that scales with you
Whether you are managing thousands of journal articles, experimenting with a handful of monographs, or generating monthly reports, the PublishOne architecture scales with you. You can test and deploy AI features incrementally, adjusting as your needs evolve.
Thanks to its open integration layer, PublishOne enables rapid experimentation without destabilizing your core systems. Want to add a new translation engine, data summarization tool, or metadata tagger? You can. Need to scale back? No problem.
Test before you trust
No AI feature goes live without rigorous User Acceptance Testing (UAT). All updates are trialed in a staging environment first. We gather feedback from real users, fine-tune features, and secure full stakeholder approval before anything touches production. This staged approach gives you time to explore, adapt, and train your teams, without disrupting live workflows.
Integration and opt-out? Yes and yes!
Without getting too technical, you should know our solutions support RESTful APIs, webhooks, and custom connectors, which makes it easy to connect with internal tools, repositories, or third-party services.
The great thing is you can also configure AI functionality controls. Whether it’s by user role, document type, or workflow stage, PublishOne keeps the control in your hands.
PublishOne supports rapid implementation of emerging and validated AI tools, to provide a comprehensive AI-enabled publishing platform that encourages working with sensitive data within the PublishOne platform instead of moving sensitive content to unsupported and insecure third-party AI tools.
Future-proof publishing workflows
AI isn’t a magic wand, but when integrated thoughtfully, it can be a powerful ally in complex content publishing workflows. What BAO Systems and PublishOne offer is a secure, scalable, and responsible framework for bringing AI into your editorial world.
Whether you are in health, law, education, or STEM publishing, the same principles apply: control your data, validate your tools, and stay transparent with your audience. If you do that, AI can truly help you publish better, faster, and more efficiently.
Feel free to reach out if you want to explore how these tools could work for your publishing operations.
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