News: Academic Publishing Weekly

Congress defends research spending, publishers team up to protect copyright, and contemplating AI ghost authorship

Posted on January 23, 2026 in News

Congress Grabs Its Purse Back and the NEH Announces a Raft of Grants

Congress stiff-armed Trump and Budget Director Russ Vought again. House and Senate appropriations committees are continuing their bipartisan approaches to bills that restore, maintain, and even increase funding for agencies that directly support education. Inside Higher Ed reports that committees are proposing legislation that maintain the Education Department’s funding and increases the National Institutes of Health’s budget by “more than $400 million this fiscal year.” Recall that earlier in January, Congress rejected Trump’s desired cuts to the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Department of Energy—all three of which are key research funders. And bonus points to Congress for adding almost $800 million to fund the Institute of Education Sciences and a gratifying piece of legislation that prevents the federal government from “capping indirect research cost reimbursement rates for NIH grants at 15 percent…”, per Inside Higher Ed. Funding packages need to be passed before the end of the month to avoid another shutdown and Trump will still need to sign them, so keep your fingers crossed.

In more good news for funding, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced it is awarding $75.1 million in grants for 84 humanities projects across the country. The grants include preservation and access training programs, faculty fellowships and awards, public programming, and curricula and course development to strengthen humanities instruction. The list of grants broken down by geographic location is available here (PDF).

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Publishers File to Join AI Class Action to Protect Copyrights

Cengage Group and Hachette Book Group have filed to join a class action suit as publisher representatives. The suit, In Re Google Generative AI Copyright Litigation, was filed in 2023 by a group of illustrators and writers and alleges that millions of books were copied to train Google’s Gemini AI product. According to an announcement by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the two publishers joined to “represent all publishers” and to help support the plaintiffs who wanted to include publishers as a class that also owns copyrights to works in the suit. “Direct participation by publishers would help address these and other issues so that the case can move forward, further underscoring that publishers are united with authors in this litigation,” says the announcement.

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Quantifying the “Zero-Click” Phenomenon

Love them or hate them, those little AI-generated summaries at the top of your web searches have spawned the concept of zero-click searching. In other words, a significant cohort of web searchers receive sufficient answers to their queries without clicking on any links. Understandably, zero-click searching gives publishers and content owners nightmares. Kudos, a platform that helps elevate scientific research to a broader audience, has launched a project to study the impact of zero-click searching, aka Google Zero, and five publishers have signed on to help. Launch partners include De Gruyter Brill, Emerald Publishing, and Springer Nature, according to Research Information. Low-hanging fruit here include impacts on traffic and business models, but other important considerations are research integrity and basic trust in the scholarly record. The resulting study will include insights into search behaviors and guidance for publishers, including recommendations for yet another search strategy: answer-engine optimization.

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AI Ghost Authorship and (Negative) Faculty Perspectives

For Scholarly Kitchen, research consultant and author Ch. Mahmood Anwar contemplates AI ghost authorship. Anwar points to undisclosed AI use in scholarship that goes beyond stylistic help, arguing that it creates transparency and trust issues in research. Recommending unified categories of AI use across publishers, Anwar walks through a flow diagram to help determine research integrity breaches and provides AI ghost authorship guidance moving forward. Continuing on the AI train, Emma Whitford of Inside Higher Ed parses through the results of a national survey on college faculty perspectives on Generative AI. Of the more than 1,000 faculty members surveyed, “95 percent say [GenAI’s] impact will increase students’ overreliance on AI tools over time,” with 83 percent predicting the technology “will decrease students’ attention spans.” Whitford also covers faculty’s lack of preparation for AI and an overall negative outlook on its impact on their subjects.

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Book Awards and MDPI’s “Freemium” Model

MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute) will now offer a “freemium” pricing model that “[allows] journals to publish up to 20 manuscripts per year with full submission-system functionality for free.” MDPI aims for the model to support smaller journals in underserved markets, providing a strong starting point for later expansion. MDPI’s Journal and Article Management System (JAMS) will handle the model. Next, the National Book Critics Circle released its finalist lists for the 2025 book awards. The six categories include Autobiography, Biography, Criticism, Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry, and each has five finalists. Harvard University Press’s To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other by Viet Thanh Nguyen made the cut in Criticism, and University of Wisconsin Press’s Salvage by Hedgie Choi is listed for the John Leonard Prize, which awards the best first book in any genre.

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New AI Tools Released with Academic Rigor! Trust! And Transparency!

Vendors and publishers are keeping the AI products coming, as both Elsevier and Clarivate announced new AI tools this week. First, Elsevier released LeapSpace, a “research-grade, AI-assisted workspace.” LeapSpace aims to build trust in its AI functions, as “every insight is explainable, traceable, and grounded in the highest-quality global science.” LeapSpace includes content from multiple publishers and scholarly societies, including Sage, Emerald Publishing, IOP Publishing, and NEJM Group, in addition to Scopus’s collection of research abstracts and Elsevier’s own articles and books. As for Clarivate, the global analytics and education company has thrown Clarivate Nexus into the ring, “the first academic assistant designed to reconnect students and researchers with library content and services directly in the AI tools they use.” Clarivate underscores the tool’s connection to the “rigor of academic libraries,” connecting users to “trusted sources and services.” Playing up the trustworthiness of AI tools clearly won’t be going away anytime soon!

Independent Press Top 5 Bestsellers: Nonfiction
The American Booksellers Association and the Independent Publishers Caucus recently collaborated on an independent bestsellers list, which includes books from independent presses and sold in indie bookshops. Below are the top five nonfiction titles this week. Find this week’s full list of fiction and nonfiction independent bestsellers.

1. The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John U. Bacon (Liveright)
2. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed Editions)
3. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) by Dean Spade (Verso)
4. We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution by Jill Lepore (Liveright)
5. Guinness World Records 2026 by Guinness World Records (Guinness World Records)

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