News: Academic Publishing Weekly

Sage sells Lean Library, the NIH polices grant proposals, and PEN America reveals most banned books of the last four years

Posted on December 19, 2025 in News

New Deals, New Partners, New Leaders

Sage has sold Lean Library, a suite of content access tools, in a management buyout. The deal comes two months after the company sold Talis to Kortext. Both divestments are an about-face for Sage, which acquired the two tech platforms about seven years ago to form the Technology from Sage division and expand beyond its publishing activities into providing technology solutions. However, the series of content-focused acquisitions Sage made last year in Cambridge Business Partners, Good Docs, and Mary Ann Leibert “…prompted a reappraisal of its tech-first division…”, said the company. “As Sage now refocuses on its core publishing mission, I’m excited to continue that journey as a standalone business,” Daniel Horvath, Lean Library’s Director, said in the announcement. Horvath, along with Jan Thij Bakker, co-founder of Lean Library, and Nenad Vidic, CEO of ThinkIT, form the new management group.

Research workflow, data, and analytics company Digital Science announced a strategic partnership with Kharon, a compliance technology and data provider. Together, the companies aim to help universities, funders, and government agencies manage the risk associated with protecting highly sensitive research. “Now more than ever, we recognize that research integrity and security are critical issues for researchers, their institutions, governments, and industry alike,” Digital Science’s Executive Vice President of Academic, Jonathan Breeze, said in a statement.

Ithaka S+R announced a change in leadership this month. Starting in the new year, Catharine “Cappy” Bond Hill will step down after nine years as Managing Director to become a senior advisor. Martin Kurzweil, currently Vice President at Ithaka S+R, will become the new Managing Director. “During [Bond Hill’s] tenure, Ithaka S+R grew from a small team with 13 staff members into a multi-disciplinary team of 50+ people working across every part of postsecondary education—from access and student learning to research and knowledge sharing,” said ITHAKA President Kevin M. Guthrie in a post about the transition.

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NSF Expedites Grant Review Process, NIH Unleashes Word Police

Inside Higher Ed is reporting that the NSF is speeding up its grant review process by lowering the number of reviews to award or decline a grant. The expedited process is a result of this fall’s government shutdown, which caused a backlog of proposals. The usual three-review rule was rolled back to at least two, with an internal review qualifying for one of those. Meanwhile, IHE points to a report from NOTUS that says NIH staffers have been told to use a text analysis tool to seek out phrases in grant proposals such as “health equity” and “structural racism.” If found, the NIH will pause reviews for those proposals that are deemed “misaligned.”

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The Court Declines to Hear Library Case and Top Banned Books 2021-2025

The Supreme Court declined to hear Leila Green Little et al. v. Llano County, a lawsuit from 2022 that disputed the “removal of 17 books featuring content on sexuality, gender, and racism” from the Llano County Library System in Texas. While eight of the books were returned thanks to a preliminary injunction in 2023—and later upheld in a Court of Appeals panel in 2024—Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan reversed the decision in May, “[ruling] that library collection decisions are ‘government speech’ and therefore not protected by the First Amendment.” The American Library Association Freedom to Read Foundation and Texas Library Association made an amicus brief to the Court in October, which they rejected to hear. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Many library censorship cases are currently in play and letting the lower courts decide may work in library advocates’ favor. Speaking of the freedom to read, PEN America released the top 52 banned books in US schools since 2021. While the concept of banning books is already ludicrous, some of these picks are just laughable. Let teens read John Green’s manic pixie dream girl characters!

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Increasing Trust in STM Research and Reviewers Using AI—Confirmed!

Following last week’s story of reviewers using LLMs on conference papers, Research Information summarizes a new report from Frontiers on AI use in research, finding that more than 50 percent of peer reviewers use AI tools. “Unlocking AI’s untapped potential: responsible innovation in research and publishing” is based on responses from over 1,600 global researchers and overall reflects a group “eager to use AI confidently and responsibly.” The report also highlights unclear AI guidance from government leaders and methods for AI use by researchers, ending with AI policy recommendations from Frontiers. Next, Phill Jones, co-founder of MoreBrains Consulting Cooperative, discusses decreasing trust in STM publishing following the STM Innovation and Integrity Days event. Jones argues that to tackle increasing ethics violations in research, research integrity action steps need to be taken before reaching the publisher, as “the scholarly supply chain begins a long way upstream of any event a publisher is involved with.” The process of “hardening the supply chain” would require enforced integrity checks and stronger collaboration between researchers, publishers, institutions, and funders “to protect the integrity of the scholarly record, before it’s too late.”

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Grant for Early Career Scholars and Library Innovation Awards

This week Clarivate announced a new award to celebrate library innovation around the world. Celebrating academic, national, and public libraries, the Clarivate Library Innovation Awards “will celebrate inspiring projects, innovations, or transformational initiatives that have made a tangible impact on librarians, patrons, students, or communities.” In other news, Cambridge University Press shared the Cambridge Amplify Grant, designed to “support under-represented early career scholars from diverse backgrounds and geographic locations, including first generation scholars.” Contributing £1000/$1300 and editorial support for a year, the grant will help recipients put together their first book manuscripts. The inaugural grant will focus on History and Areas Studies and applications are now open.

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