News: Academic Publishing Weekly

Publisher partnership expansions, new AI working group, and how to sustain diamond open access

Posted on February 20, 2026 in News

Wiley and UC Press Expand Journal Portfolios and Partnerships

Wiley announced it is growing its Advanced Portfolio collection of scientific journals by another eight titles. Currently, the collection stands at 25 titles and the soon-to-be published journals will expand into the life, health, and social sciences disciplines. The publisher says the eight new journals will be launched by the end of the year, with more on the way. First to appear is Advanced Oncology, which will begin accepting submissions in March. The new journals will follow Wiley’s existing editorial model, allowing authors to submit manuscripts once to the portfolio while the editors determine where to place them. “For more than 35 years, the Advanced brand has earned researchers’ trust through rigorous standards and collaborative partnerships,” said Allyn Molina, Wiley’s group vice president of publishing development, in a statement. “Researchers have been telling us they need more prestigious yet accessible venues for their breakthrough work, and we listened; this expansion is our answer—launching premium options across every field of science.”

In other portfolio expansion news, the University of California Press (UC Press) has boosted its Journal Home presence in ResearchGate by another 15 titles after what it says was a successful five-journal pilot program. The program now includes the majority of UC Press’s journal catalog and enhances brand visibility, content engagement, and author experience. “Our Journal Homes—including syndicated content and entitlement data—have enabled more meaningful interactions with our content, and have provided our journals with an expanded international reach. We look forward to growing our ResearchGate Journal Home partnership in 2026,” said David Famiano, Journals Director, University of California Press, in a statement.

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New AI Working Groups and Standardizing Agent Development

Clarivate announced it is forming a second group of academic professionals to advise the company on its development of AI tools for research. Called the Academic AI Working Group, it will supplement Clarivate’s existing Academia AI Advisory Council, which was formed in 2024. While the Council was created to offer higher-level conceptual guidance on academic AI trends, the Working Group will focus more on design and user experience issues, setting up complementary strategic and tactical insights straight from the field. Invitations to the new group are open until March 4, so sign up while you still can! Meanwhile, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced the launch of the AI Agent Standards Initiative, which aims to apply a framework of standards around the development of agentic AI. Since we can’t have AI agents just running around like crazy little robots autonomously planning and coding things, the NIST, along with other federal agencies, will focus the Standards Initiative on three main areas: agent standards, open source protocol development and maintenance, and continued research around security and identity.

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Diamond OA “Heroes” Need (Financial) Backing

Curt Rice, Executive Director of Fulbright Norway and Founder of Publishing Unlocked, reflects on the infrastructure of diamond open access for Scholarly Kitchen. Rice begins by comparing the early days of diamond OA—a tightknit community of researchers emailing or even (gasp!) physically mailing papers—to today’s massive, amorphous, and extremely prolific publishing world to demonstrate that the desire to spread knowledge hasn’t disappeared, but the scale has become too overwhelming to handle. In response, Rice urges stakeholders to invest in diamond OA as a viable infrastructure instead of a “collection of heroic individual efforts.” Outlining what funders and institutions can do to support this venture, Rice notes that “the issue is not that diamond publishing depends on commitment; it is that the commitment is too often unsupported, unrecognized, and structurally fragile.”

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STEM News: Reaching Sustainability and New Database

It’s STEM’s week to shine. First, BioOne, a distribution platform for journals in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences, has achieved its sustainability threshold for 2026. Due to support from more than 50 library partners and consortia, “the 2026 volumes of 71 titles within the BioOne Complete aggregation will be published Open Access, immediately and in perpetuity.” BioOne follows the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model, joining organizations like Annual Reviews and Project Muse. Next, following updates to its Predatory Reports database earlier this month, Cabells rolled out Journalytics STEM, a database of journal data points dedicated to the STEM fields. Covering close to 8,000 journals across 26 subject areas, the database features journal information like submission rates, peer review times, Altmetric scores, and more.

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Who Doesn’t Love Book Awards?

The LA Times Book Prizes revealed the 2025 finalists and major category winners. Including genres like Biography, History, Poetry, Science & Technology, and more, the prizes “celebrate the best books of last year.” The finalists include several university presses (Yale! MIT! North Carolina!); winners will be announced in mid-April. Next, Publishing Perspectives covered the shortlists for the Sheikh Zayed Book Award, which highlights “outstanding Arabic literature and transformative contributions to Arabic culture.” Marking the 20th year of the award, this year’s lists spotlight titles from New York University Press, American University of Beirut Press, and University of Pennsylvania Press, to name a few. Winners will be recognized in March.

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. How to Love by Thich Nhat Hanh, Jason DeAntonis (Illus.) (Parallax Press)
5. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats by Ursula K. Le Guin (Library of America)

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