Announcing our Partnership with De Gruyter Brill

Our Partnership

We're thrilled to announce a partnership with De Gruyter Brill, one of the world's leading publishers in the humanities and social sciences. Formed from two storied houses, De Gruyter (Berlin, 1749) and Brill (Leiden, 1683), its catalog spans history, philosophy, theology, classics, linguistics, law, and the social sciences, with more than 800 journals published per year.

Through this partnership, De Gruyter Brill is enabling Consensus to index and run AI analysis across the full text of its paywalled journals to power discovery on our platform. Importantly, this content won’t be used to train AI models, instead it powers search and our analysis features. Every result in Consensus is built to send readers back to the original work, driving more traffic and more eyeballs to De Gruyter Brill and their authors, not around it.

The Humanities and Social Sciences Deserve Better Discovery

Most AI research tools were built around STEM disciplines. They reward the clinical trial, the structured abstract, the tidy result. They can leave the humanities and social sciences in the dark. The most important arguments in these fields often live in monographs, long-form articles, and decades of accumulated debate that today's tools simply can't see. The result is a discovery gap that gets wider every year.

By indexing De Gruyter Brill journal content, Consensus is helping to close it. As one of the foremost names in HSS its depth is precisely the kind of scholarship so many modern AI tools overlook.

Consensus is committed to bringing AI-powered discovery researchers in every HSS discipline: historians tracing an idea across centuries, philosophers and theologians working through dense primary arguments, classicists and linguists, legal scholars and social scientists, and the graduate students entering every one of these fields. For the first time, this body of work becomes searchable and analyzable for the next generation of AI-native research at the level it deserves.

The Future of AI-Enabled Research Is a Partnership

Researchers are moving to AI tools – fast. That shift is already reshaping how scholarship gets found and it puts publishers and AI platforms at a crossroads. The scholarly communication community’s stakeholders can work at cross purposes, or we can build the future of discovery together and help push science forward. We think the choice is obvious.

The single most important thing a researcher needs from a discovery tool is comprehensiveness. Great work is built by standing on the shoulders of giants, and if a scholar can't see the whole field, nothing downstream works. The migration of researchers to AI tools is not going to stop, and it’s why publishers and AI tools have to work together. Only together can we give researchers a complete view of the scholarship their world-changing work depends on. Disseminating that scholarship as widely as possible is, in a real sense, the duty publishers owe the authors they publish and the mission of companies like Consensus

But comprehensiveness can't come at the expense of the people who create and publish the work. AI tools have to be built for discovery, not extraction. Tools that are designed to respect copyright and to build on-ramps to the content researchers need, not to absorb it and answer around it. Get this right and everyone wins.

That's the world this partnership with De Gruyter Brill is built for: one where research moves faster and every part of the ecosystem benefits. Authors gain on both ends. They discover the work they're building on more quickly, and their own work reaches further, with proper attribution. De Gruyter Brill extends its reach to a new generation of scholars.

Just the Beginning

We're thrilled to partner with a forward-thinking publisher like De Gruyter Brill to bring its robust catalog to our users. It's a partnership that takes a real bet on the future — that publishers and AI tools, working together, can serve researchers better than either can alone.

And it's a win on every side. Researchers gain faster, more comprehensive discovery across one of the world's great bodies of HSS scholarship. Authors reach more of the readers their work deserves, with full attribution. De Gruyter Brill connects with a new generation of engaged scholars. And the humanities and social sciences finally get the AI-powered discovery they've been missing. Everyone moves forward, and so does the science and scholarship the world is built on.

This is just the beginning.