News: Academic Publishing Weekly

Clarivate flirts with cutting loose Life Sciences & Healthcare, Ingram aims to fill B&T gap, and Nature launches AI Award

Posted on February 27, 2026 in News

During Q4 2025 Earnings Call, Clarivate Says It Plans to Sell Life Sciences & Healthcare Biz

Couched in Clarivate’s fourth quarter and full-year 2025 earnings call was an announcement that the company is exploring a sale of its Life Sciences & Healthcare business. The potential sale follows a previous announcement that Clarivate was undergoing a “strategic review of its business portfolio”—this is often code for “we’re looking for something to sell off.” Of its divisions, which include Academia & Government and Intellectual Property, Life Sciences & Healthcare is the smallest. It also had the biggest drop in 2025 revenues, falling 7% to $390 million from $419 million in 2024. Comparatively in 2025, Academia & Government fell to $1.2 billion (-4.6%) and Intellectual Property ended the year at $799 million, down 1.5% from the previous year. While a sale of the division is not guaranteed, the company says it has retained Morgan & Stanley to advise on the deal and is currently “engaged in active discussions with interested parties.” A sale, says Clarivate, will allow it to focus more on the other two divisions and pay off some of its debt, currently at $4.5 billion. Full-year 2025 revenues were about $2.5 billion, down about 4% from 2024. Following the sale announcement, notes Research Information, Clarivate share prices jumped almost 40% to $2.35.

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Lagardère Publishing Reports Solid Yearn-End Earnings

Continuing with earnings news, Hachette reported a solid 2025. Lagardère’s Publishing division ended the year with €3.0 billion in revenues, up 4.5% from the previous year. Growth came from strong book sales across France, the UK, and the U.S., including bestselling fiction titles, continued demand for backlist hits, and the success of a new Asterix release. In the U.S., Publishing managed to grow revenue by 3% in a trade market that declined overall by 0.5% (per the Association of American Publishers). Publishing Perspectives reports that Hachette’s performance allowed it to bump Simon & Schuster out of its spot as the third largest U.S. publisher.

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Ingram Is Launching a New Digital Galley, Catalog, and Ordering Platform

Ingram is taking aim at Edelweiss and NetGalley with an upcoming launch of a digital catalog and ordering service called Covered. According to Publishers Weekly, the platform will allow publishers to share digital galleys and catalogs and will also facilitate sales. A beta version is expected to launch this fall with a full rollout sometime in 2027. There’s a special focus on libraries, especially since the closure of Baker & Taylor. Per PW, features will “include publisher catalog creation, reviews, and tags, along with buying tools such as markups, buy suggestions, comps, order export, and select point-of-sale integrations.”

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Open Access in Europe Makes Headlines

Elsevier and Jisc will continue their partnership, announcing a three-year read and publish agreement. The deal grants UK universities access to Elsevier’s journals and allows eligible researchers to publish OA in the publisher’s journals. Jisc’s Head of Research Licensing Anna Vernon stated, “Our partnership with Elsevier is another step towards meeting the evolving needs of institutions and strengthening the UK’s open research landscape.” Next, Research Information covers a recent report commissioned by Knowledge Exchange on how small European publishers are handling the shift to open access. In short, the outlook is fraught. The report finds that small publishers, while in support of open policies, lack the infrastructure and staffing to enact these changes, in addition to facing “disproportionate pressure from funding systems, administrative requirements, library negotiations and prestige dynamics that tend to benefit larger players.” Foretelling the loss of vital bibliodiversity, the report calls for systemic reform, particularly to protect non-English, regional, and Humanities and Social Sciences research.

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Addressing Gender Disparity in Journal Submissions

Speaking of fraught news, a new study from eLife finds that women researchers are less likely than their male counterparts to submit to high impact journals. Underscoring “persistent gendered patterns” in scholarly publishing, the report observed that women researchers sent fewer manuscripts than men overall and “were more likely to say they had been advised not to submit their work to high-impact journals.” Female researchers also reported concerns that their work was “not ground-breaking or sufficiently novel” for prestigious journals. The article, “Gender differences in submission behavior exacerbate publication disparities in elite journals,” unpacks the implications of this trend on underrepresentation in research and how to address this issue earlier in the publishing process.

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Launching an AI Award, Highly Cited Researchers Trends, and PROSE Awards Finalists

Nature Awards and the BCG X AI Science Institute will launch AI for Discovery, “a new award celebrating research teams using AI and machine learning to accelerate solutions to major global challenges.” The move aims to reflect the changing scientific landscape due to AI and will focus on research in “health, sustainability and manufacturing.” Applications are open and four finalists will each receive a $10,000 development grant. Next, when analyzing Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) awards, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) observed that a small number of research institutions made up a “disproportionately large share” of the awards. More specifically, the top 70 institutions—just over 3 percent of all institutions represented—won more than 40 percent of the awards. ISI listed those with the highest concentration of awards; Chinese Academy of Sciences, Harvard University, and Stanford University took the top three spots. Last, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) shared the finalists and category winners for the PROSE Awards, marking its 50th year. Celebrating scholarly works in Biological and Life Sciences, Humanities, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, and Social Sciences, the finalists and winners can be found here.

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. On Democracy by Walt Whitman (Library of America)
4. Mutual Aid by Dean Spade (Verso)
5. Guinness World Records 2026 by Guinness World Records (Guinness World Records)

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