Hello fellow journalologists,
On July 1 the new NIH open access policy will kick in, mandating the deposition of the author-accepted manuscript with no embargo. It’s not clear at this point how the major publishers will respond; there haven’t been any formal announcements, as far as I can tell. Perhaps they’re waiting until July 1 to update their policy pages. The best resource on publishers’ policies regarding green OA that I’ve found is hosted by the PennState library.
Will publishers allow NIH authors to deposit the AAM in repositories or will they tell NIH authors that they either need to pay an APC (i.e. Gold OA) or publish elsewhere? Crucially, when will they tell them this? At submission or after acceptance?
Every week I trawl through a myriad of press releases announcing, with gusto, new partnerships or initiatives. The silence on this important issue is deafening. It’s important because the zero embargo roll out comes at a time when influential figures within the NIH have set up their own journal, which only members can publish in. Do we want political, partisan publications to be given a helping hand by attracting papers turned away because of a strict green OA policy? I’m hopeful that AAMs will be deposited, perhaps without fanfare, by the authors’ journals of choice. Am I naive? Possibly.
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News
The Trump administration has terminated millions worth of funding for Springer Nature, a German-owned scientific publishing giant that has long received payments for subscriptions from National Institutes of Health and other agencies, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: President Trump and MAGA have made a push to target academic institutions as well as research organizations perceived to be the source of so-called "woke" ideology, including DEI and gender-affirming care policies, by withholding federal funding and in some cases initiating legal action.
Axios (Adriel Bettelheim and Tina Reed)
JB: When I first read this story, which is light on detail, I put it in the “let’s wait and see” box. On Friday morning, Susie Winter, the external communications lead at Springer Nature, told the Open Cafe listserv:
We don’t comment on individual contracts, but across our U.S. business there is no material change to our customers or their spend and we remain confident about the strength of the service we provide.
The inference in the article that federal agencies have cancelled $20m of spend with Springer Nature is not true.
However, on Friday afternoon Science ran a story Trump cuts subscriptions to Springer Nature journals, which included this:
Yesterday, Inside Higher Ed reported that NIH first said its Springer Nature subscriptions had not been canceled, but later the agency’s parent department, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), told the outlet they had; today, HHS provided the same statement to Science, saying “all contracts … are terminated or no longer active.” (The White House press office did not respond to Science’s request for comment.) A Science review of the USASpending.gov database shows that earlier this month the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Department of Energy canceled Springer Nature subscriptions for which they had committed $3 million in funding this year.
It’s worth remembering that Nature publicly backed the Democrats and the former editor of Scientific American had to resign after a tirade against Trump supporters. Punishing a large European publisher, perceived to be left leaning, seems more plausible now than it would have been six months ago.
If a cancellation like this did happen, it could have implications for editorial freedom in the future. Will journal owners allow editors to endorse political candidates in the future, if there’s a chance that millions of dollars of revenue could be lost if the other candidate wins? Editorial freedom is the cornerstone of everything we do, but could there be a point where the financial cost is simply too high to allow editors to say what they want?
Having said that, I worked for two commercial publishers (Elsevier and Springer Nature) for over 20 years and this picture, painted by Glyn Moody, is not one I recognise:
All these moves to restrict access to knowledge make re-inventing academic publishing even more urgent. The big publishers will doubtless implement any demands that Trump makes in an effort to preserve their healthy profits. Those could include refusing to publish scientists that have fallen foul of the Trump administration by daring to raise objections to the new approach, or by pointing out the harm it will cause.
The author goes on to suggest:
This underlines once more the importance of diamond open access, where no charge is made either to the researchers writing the papers, or to readers. Because of the underlying business model, diamond open access journals tend to be run on a shoestring, supported by grants from independent foundations. That makes them largely immune to even Donald Trump at his most vindictive.
Organisations that depend on funders for support have their own weaknesses, as the next story makes clear.
Last summer, we reported positive results in expectation of receiving the second half of funding that was promised. Instead, after five months of negotiation, the funder gave us a small amount of bridge funding and imposed a new set of milestones, which included just months to transition an affiliate to PubPub Platform ahead of everyone else and meet aggressive revenue targets. We worked tirelessly to meet those new milestones, which we did in the first quarter of this year. But after another 2 months of internal deliberation — nearly a full year beyond the original timeline — the funder decided not to provide the second half of the grant or any further bridge funding.
Knowledge Futures (announcement)
JB: This announcement relates to PubPub, a publishing platform, which is being wound down after the major funder pulled the grant; staff have been let go.
Not-for-profits often reject extractive profit seeking as their end goal, but they still need to run viable businesses and make ends meet. Diversified revenue streams are very important. Relying on the generosity of one funder is a risky strategy.
Of course, this goes for government-funded projects too. Diamond OA sounds great until the funder (or government) pulls the plug.
We may not like corporates extracting wealth from the academic system, but they have some advantages that need to be acknowledged, one of which is their ability to attract capital from a wide range of sources (often pension funds) to provide infrastructure investment and long term stability.
When authors publish papers behind a paywall, reuse is generally limited. In contrast, paid open access typically comes with a Creative Commons (CC) license that delineates how others can use the content of the paper. The most common, dubbed CC-BY (referring to “by attribution”), allows wide reuse, provided users credit the author. Other variants can restrict commercial use, or any adaptations of the work.
But only about half of the 224 scientists who responded to a AAAS survey released today—two-thirds of whom work in the United States—consider themselves familiar with the terms of these licenses. “There’s not a deep understanding,” agrees lawyer and former university librarian Dave Hansen, who was not involved in the survey. “Most authors don’t want to be copyright lawyers.”
Science (Jeffrey Brainard)
JB: You can download the survey here. Meagan Phelan wrote a thoughtful assessment of what the results mean here.
I wrote the following in issue 76 of this newsletter. The anecdote is worth repeating, perhaps, because it’s relevant to this discussion.
Many years ago Nature Communications offered all three licenses (it now only offers CC BY). In around 2006 we did an experiment, proposed by my boss Jason Wilde. We changed the order that the licenses were presented to authors and found that they tended to choose the middle option.
We concluded two things: (1) Our explanations about the licenses weren’t very good; (2) Authors didn’t have a clue what the different licenses offered—the middle one felt like the safest option.
Offering choices is a good thing, but only if the customer understands what they’re buying. Furthermore, publishers need to ensure that the metadata includes the licence that’s been used (see NISO’s
Access & License Indicators Revision).
This was in 2006, remember. So, two decades on and researchers are still confused.
A review on the use of the preservative thimerosal in vaccines slated to be presented on Thursday to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) outside vaccine committee cites a study that does not exist, the scientist listed as the study’s author said.
The report, called Thimerosal as a Vaccine Preservative published on the CDC website on Tuesday, is to be presented by Lyn Redwood, a former leader of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense.
It makes reference to a study called Low-level neonatal thimerosal exposure: Long-term consequences in the brain, published in the journal Neurotoxicology in 2008, and co-authored by UC Davis professor emeritus Robert Berman.
The Guardian (Reuters)
JB: Holden Thorp, the Editor-in-Chief of Science, said it better than I could (on LinkedIn):
It’s disgraceful, it’s hypocritical in light of their supposed Gold Standard Science principle, and they would not be able to pass my class that I teach for first-year undergraduates with this kind of behavior. But it’s unlikely to stop because it just doesn’t register with the intended audience; it’s only news in outlets that are read by people who already agree that it’s dishonest. So calling it out is important for documenting all of this for posterity, but it’s not a political strategy that will stop this charade.
The best-case scenarios in our analysis may seem mild, but we caution against false hope. The larger ones, based on funding cuts, are likely a more realistic dynamic. Our estimates only focus on biomedical research. We have not analyzed cuts to the other large US federal research agencies. (At the time of writing, cuts to NSF funding had made headlines. We will produce further analysis into this in due course.) And, government cuts may undermine other philanthropic efforts.
DeltaThink (Dan Pollock and Heather Staines)
JB: Dan and Heather have done a good job of trying to predict what may be coming down the track. As they acknowledge repeatedly, there are a lot of assumptions in the analysis, but there’s not much they could have done about that.
Other news stories
Different Methods Of Identifying Preprint Matches Yield Diverging Estimates Of Rates Of Preprinting. Taking all of these factors into account, our current best guess is that somewhere around 13-14% of life science journal articles in 2024 are preprinted – a number we’re working to increase substantially. JB: It’s good to see this considered analysis from an advocacy organisation.
NIH-funded science must now be free to read instantly: what you should know. Several publishers, including Elsevier and Springer Nature, require that papers published in closed-access journals remain available only to subscribers for an embargo period — 6 or 12 months, for instance — before they can be placed in repositories such as PubMed Central (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature). “It’s very likely that not all publisher agreements will be compatible with the new policy, and that creates a difficult situation — both for the publisher and for the author,” Suber says.
What incentives do companies need to publish research? Companies often try to protect their patents on inventions by pursuing related patenting claims, he says, to prevent competitors from attempting to claim their own patents on incremental changes or improvements. But that can be an expensive strategy. It’s much cheaper to make their additional research publicly available through publications.
Announcements
Arcadia joins the IOI Fund for Network Adoption as a Founding Contributor. With Arcadia's contribution, the Fund has now reached US$4.55 million in total commitments — 75% of our initial target. Arcadia joins other organizations like Wellcome, Digital Science, the Kahle Austin Foundation, and the Karger Publishers Foundation in the shared vision of strengthening the global open research ecosystem through the IOI Fund for Network Adoption. JB: Arcadia is not the same as Arcadia Science, which is backed by Astera, the funder that (so I hear) pulled the plug on PubPub (see above). Confused by the names? Me too.
A Scientific Elite: HCRs with Staying Power. We recently analyzed the individuals who have been named to the Highly Cited Researchers list every year from 2014 – when the current methodology for identifying top-performing papers was introduced – through 2024. The analysis identified 405 researchers who clearly represent both a scientific and statistical elite. JB: Harvard University was home to 266 of the 405 researchers at some point over that decade. Will that number drop in the decade to come? The interactive dashboards may be of interest. Editors may want to search the 2024 database for highly cited researchers in their specialty.
Digital Science launches new cutting-edge AI writing tools for 20+ million Overleaf users. More than 20 million research writers worldwide now have immediate access to powerful new AI features from Digital Science through an optional add-on for Overleaf. The add-on, called AI Assist, helps researchers write in LaTeX faster and smarter by combining the power of advanced language feedback with cutting-edge LaTeX AI tools.
Light microscopy reporting for reproducibility. As part of a pilot starting 1 June 2025, editors at Nature Communications, Nature Cell Biology, Nature Methods and Nature Structural & Molecular Biology have developed a reporting table summarizing key aspects of light microscopy experiments that are often under-reported.
How we’re diversifying our editorial boards in China. Since the start of 2024, we [Springer Nature] have appointed over 3,000 new EBMs from China. By diversifying our editors, we offer better regional knowledge to support submitting authors, widen the pool of reviewers that our journals work with, and, in turn, increase our effectiveness, speed, and overall satisfaction.
Elsevier introduces Embase AI to transform how users draw critical insights from biomedical research. Embase AI addresses the need to simplify and enhance biomedical literature searches while increasing confidence in the results. The advanced solution expands access to biomedical data by giving users the ability to ask research questions in natural language. This helps make biomedical insight accessible to all users, regardless of their technical background. Users instantly receive summarized information - also in natural language - including a list of fully referenced top sources, saving time and reducing the risk of missing vital insights.
AGU and IPCC partner to expand access to publications for work on Seventh Assessment Report. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the American Geophysical Union announce access to the full library of AGU Publications for IPCC authors working on the Panel’s Seventh Assessment Report.
Frontiers extends ZBMed partnership as first publisher to sign up to the Open Life Science Database (OLSPub). Frontiers has expanded its publishing partnership with ZBMed, the Germany-based life sciences centre, and signed an agreement to deposit article metadata in its new Open Life Science Publication Database (OLSPub), being the first publisher to agree to supply this information to the new database.
Knowledge Unlatched Finds a New Home with Annual Reviews. Annual Reviews today announced that it has signed an agreement with Wiley that enables Knowledge Unlatched (KU) – most recently owned and operated by Wiley – to move to a new home within the Annual Reviews organization. The move supports one of the most recognized initiatives in open access publishing and marks KU's return to nonprofit stewardship.
De Gruyter Brill enters new open access agreements and partnerships. De Gruyter Brill is expanding its diamond open access program through 2025 and 2026 with 5 new journals signed this year and more on the horizon. These journals are free to read and free to publish in, thanks to collaborations with libraries, funders, authors, and scholarly societies. The diamond open access model is particularly valuable for journals in the humanities and social sciences, where traditional open access funding mechanisms are less common.
IOP Publishing and Couperin sign unlimited open access agreement to boost European research visibility. IOP Publishing (IOPP) has signed an unlimited open access (OA) agreement with Couperin, the French national consortium of higher education and research institutions, marking a step in the transition to open science in Europe. This three-year ‘read and publish’ agreement gives member institutions the option to participate and enables affiliated researchers to publish an unlimited number of articles open access in IOPP journals.
Research Solutions & Third Iron Partner To Streamline Content Access For Academic Libraries. The integration simplifies the multi-step process researchers face when seeking articles not available through their library's direct holdings. By incorporating AGS into LibKey's established "waterfall" linking structure, the partnership provides users with immediate, clearly marked access to over 34,000 journals through auto-mediated document delivery – reducing the complexity and delays of traditional interlibrary loan processes.
Opinion
Researchers could voluntarily indicate whether GenAI was used in the writing process, and for this purpose, a taxonomy similar to the CRediT taxonomy of contributions can be developed to highlight specific uses of GenAI in writing assistance. Examples could include Grammar Check, Style Enhancement, Content Summarization, and Finding Examples to Improve Comprehension. However, to prevent any bias during the peer review and editorial process, this information should only become available once the article is accepted and published. Upon publication, such details could be disclosed as part of declarations and registered as metadata, to provide the desired transparency without influencing the initial assessment of the work. This approach would not only help maintain the integrity of the peer-review process but also ensure that, in cases where disclosures are desirable by authors, the presence and role of GenAI in academic writing are clearly documented.
Research Ethics (Mohammad Hosseini)
JB: This essay is interesting because the authors explain why they changed their position on this thorny issue. Editors would enjoy reading this article, I think.
The use of English as the common language of science has boosted international scholarly communication, including publishing, but has also posed unignorable barriers to the progress and application of science. For example, reading, writing, and publishing papers requires much more time and effort for scientists whose first language is not English compared to native English speakers, which can lead to higher levels of anxiety and dissatisfaction. Centralizing the publication of research around English also undermines the ability of people with limited English proficiency to read and use the research and drives international research to ignore science published in other languages. The scientific community urgently needs to move beyond the use of English as the singular default language to ensure that all scientists (and other actors and stakeholders) have an equal opportunity to access, contribute to, and benefit from science, regardless of their backgrounds
PLOS Biology (Tatsuya Amano, Lynne Bowker, and Andrew Burton-Jones)
JB: Another paper, this time published in PLOS One (Scholarly publishing’s hidden diversity: How exclusive databases sustain the oligopoly of academic publishers), highlights a different, but related, problem:
The oligopoly of corporate publishers persists at a global level, but its dominance is partial and has been declining for decades. It appears strong according to the selective database WoS and it prevails in western Europe, North America and China, and especially in the Natural Sciences and Engineering and the Health Sciences. In parallel, however, the major publishers are much less dominant for many countries in the Global South, such as Brazil, Indonesia and Russia. These important differences between countries may have multiple causes. In some cases, countries have strongly centralized scientific policies and well-established support for domestic, mainly not-for-profit journals, which is the case in both Indonesia and Brazil.
Regrettably, some publishers have begun to apply a fee to authors who want to make their AAM open access challenging a long-established practice of authors sharing manuscripts through open repositories. As noted by Coalition S, these publishers are audaciously seeking to monetize funder mandates making it more difficult and expensive for authors to share their articles through repositories. This practice first came to COAR’s attention when the American Chemical Society (ACS) implemented an article development charge for AAM deposit in 2023, and more recently, with another publisher, the IEEE.
COAR (unsigned)
JB: Publishers generally have no problem with authors depositing preprints (i.e. before peer review). However, publishers incur costs for creating author-accepted manuscripts, a fact that is conveniently overlooked by the likes of Plan S.
These two publishers (N.B. society publishers) presumably are concerned that subscription revenues will drop if AAMs are freely available. Of course, if revenues stay the same then the publishers are effectively “double dipping”: they will generate cash from the AAM and from the subscription. If Elsevier, Wiley or Springer Nature introduced a policy like this, there would be uproar.
Other opinion articles
Making access work in scholarly publishing. To coincide with GetFTR’s fifth anniversary we interviewed representatives from each of GetFTR’s five founding publishers to find out how they feel about the GetFTR journey so far, and their hopes and predictions for the future. JB: If you don’t know much about GetFTR, this article is a useful primer.
Sluggishness and defensiveness helped enable an executive order on research integrity. The sluggishness of journals and institutions to respond to problems in research integrity is also fodder for criticism. But more important, the defensiveness of investigators and institutions in responding to problems severely heightens the suspicion. Rather than filing lawsuits and hiding behind carefully crafted statements, the scientific community should be engaging in a conversation about problems and potential solutions.
AI, peer review and the human activity of science. But in our view, writing a good peer review is not rote work. Like any kind of critical analysis, it requires that we triage, rank and organize our unstructured thoughts. We perhaps start with praise, then raise a few of the most pressing issues that need to be addressed. From there, we enumerate quick fixes, minor concerns and points of confusion. The whole process constitutes a negotiation with ourselves over what is important enough to mention, so that we can negotiate with the editors and authors over what should be changed. JB: This was my favourite article of the week.
Moving from Ideas to Implementation: Highlights of the 2025 Researcher to Reader Workshop on Peer Review Innovation. The aim this time around was to move beyond identifying challenges to instead focus on actionable solutions that could be started by the attendees. With peer review under increasing strain due to rising submission volumes, reviewer shortages, and concerns about integrity, the discussion centered on practical strategies to improve efficiency, fairness, and transparency.
Debate: Journal Editors Do Not Need To Worry About Preventing Misinformation From Being Spread. Therefore; if there is one group that should excel in recognizing misinformation in science, it is science editors. Misinformation is one of the major threats to modern society. For the sake of our common future, every citizen has an obligation to fight it. In my opinion, the most highly skilled among us have the strongest obligation. We, the science editors, are not only advocates of science; we are also among the most highly skilled in recognizing when science is misused. Therefore, we need to worry the most about misinformation being spread.
How are US institutions putting public access into practice? Insights from our ‘Reasonable Costs’ institutional research. Since 2023, IOI has been working on a project with financial support from the National Science Foundation (US) titled “Investigating 'reasonable costs' to achieve public access to federally funded research and scientific data.” Our aim is to investigate how stakeholders, including researchers, research institutions, publishers, societies, libraries, and offices of sponsored research, are responding to guidance and forthcoming policies regarding free, immediate, and equitable access to US federally funded research and scientific data.
Emilie Gunn: Community is Key. Putting together an issue literally meant making a stack of file folders. We had one file folder for each manuscript, and then you would walk it down the hall to production and say, here’s the issue. I’d say we’ve come a long way just in terms of efficiency and the online tools that we can use for authors and reviewers. Think of the money we spent FedExing manuscripts out to editors or the time we spent sending faxes: The whole of manuscript submission and peer review has changed. JB: Ah, happy days. I used to edit with a pencil. Life was so much simpler then.
Are AI Bots Knocking Digital Collections Offline? An Interview with Michael Weinberg. Many people compare the swarms to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, in the sense that they quickly overwhelm the site with volume. However, unlike a traditional DDoS attack, they are not intended to knock the site offline. Instead, the site being knocked offline is a side effect of harvesting the data at scale. These incidents tend to last for relatively short periods of time (measured in minutes, maybe an hour or two). Then the swarm moves on.
Journal club
In this cross-sectional study of life sciences systematic reviews, we identified instances in which retracted articles from paper mills were incorporated into the evidence synthesis. Although the overall number of contaminated reviews was low, their frequency increased over time. The inclusion of fabricated studies in evidence syntheses may compromise the integrity and validity of systematic reviews and introduce bias into downstream research and clinical practice. These findings highlight the need for rigorous screening of included studies to ensure the integrity of systematic review evidence.
JAMA Network Open (Gengyan Tang and Hao Cai)
This study extracted five categories of peer review criteria. We counted the frequency of each category in the included documents. The criteria of value to journal, rigorousness and clarity are mentioned around 150 times and compliance and effective use of literature are mentioned over 120 times. In terms of reviewer guidelines, the frequency of each category, except effective use of literature, is close to 84, the total number of included journal guidelines. Thus, we concluded that the academic community has reached a consensus on the major categories of peer review criteria in scholarly publishing.
Learned Publishing (Yifei Li et al)
JB: We have? Excellent!
And finally...
Sometimes the best way to cope with the oh-so-depressing news cycle is to laugh at it. The weekly Ivory Tower parody column in Research Professional News often makes me smile. My week, by Donald Trump may provide some much needed relief (if you like dark humour like me).
Until next time,
James
P.S. “Brain rot” and “slop” (of the internet kind) have recently been added to two dictionaries. Hopefully this human-written email has helped to get your neurones firing, not atrophying. If you enjoyed it, hit reply and let me know.