News: Academic Publishing Weekly

Clarivate responds to feedback on its subscription strategy, OpenAI funds new NextGenAI consortium, and China's approach to paper mills

Posted on March 7, 2025 in News

Clarivate Releases “Letter to the Library Community” Over its Subscription Strategy

Clarivate has published a letter to librarians in response to feedback on its subscription access strategy. In particular, the letter addresses Clarivate’s roll-back of perpetual purchases and lack of consultation from the library community. As a result, Clarivate is prolonging librarians’ “ability to make perpetual purchases of print books and ebooks on all platforms through June 30, 2026.” Clarivate further clarified that, “Our ebook subscriptions are not designed to replace perpetual front-list and textbook purchases and budgets.” The letter also covers Clarivate’s “investment in Rialto as an ebook marketplace” and commitment to leverage librarian feedback going forward. [ProQuest, Part of Clarivate]

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OpenAI Launches NextGenAI Consortium

OpenAI is funding a new consortium, NextGenAI. The consortium is comprised of 15 institutions and OpenAI “is committing $50M in research grants, compute funding, and API access to support students, educators, and researchers advancing the frontiers of knowledge.” OpenAI highlighted several universities’ plans for AI, including using the technology to create large language models and support AI literacy. The University of Bodleian Library will also utilize AI for “digitizing rare texts and using OpenAI’s API to transcribe them.” Anne Trefethen, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Digital at the University of Oxford stressed that, “By working together, we can learn from one another, advancing the frontiers of artificial intelligence, understanding its impact on education and unlocking its vast potential for the benefit of our university community and beyond.” [OpenAI]

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KGL Purchases Origin Editorial and Elsevier Partners with Washington State University

KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. (KGL) has announced the acquisition of Origin Editorial. As reported by KGL, Origin Editorial “offers a full complement of peer review management, copyediting/proofreading, and production services, as well as consultancies” and “workflow and technology optimization.” Origin Editorial’s team will join KGL’s peer review and editorial group through the acquisition. Next, Elsevier and Washington State University (WSU) are entering an open access partnership. Under the five-year deal, WSU researchers can read and publish OA in Elsevier’s journal portfolio. Joel Cummings, Head of Collection Development at WSU Libraries, underscored, “This agreement marks an exciting step forward, enabling more of Washington State University’s research to be published open access and increasing its global accessibility.”

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Project MUSE and D2O Progress Reports

Project MUSE announced that its Subscribe to Open (S2O) program met its 2025 revenue sustainability target. As a result, “more than 100 journals’ 2025 volumes, from 27 publishers, [will be made] openly accessible on the MUSE platform.” Next, the MIT Press’s latest impact report reveals that Direct to Open (D2O) has supported 320 titles thus far. The report highlights downloads by country, an increase in citations, and reveals that D2O funded 455 authors in 31 countries. Further, “In D2O’s first four years, 13 consortia have partnered with the Press on the program and 407 libraries have participated for at least one year.” Several D2O authors and Amy Harris from The MIT Press also join Choice’s The Authority File podcast in a new series on the advantages of open book publishing.

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How is China Combatting Paper Mills?

Following China’s efforts to curtail retractions, the Supreme People’s Court has issued guidance to combat paper mills. Specifically, Nature reports that the Court “called for lower courts to crack down on ‘paper industry chains’, and for research fraud to be severely punished.” The guidance drew mixed reactions from researchers, who underlined that previous government policies have done little to curb paper mills. Aaron Wininger, a lawyer at Schwegman Lundberg & Woessner, commented that the guidance “show[s] that [lower courts] should be paying more attention to this and potentially issuing harsher sentences or harsher punishments against people who commit fraud in science.” University of Calgary researcher Gengyan Tang added, “If this new guiding opinion leads to higher compensation rulings, it may serve as a deterrent to paper mills — but it will take time to assess its impact.” Tang also encouraged courts to partner with other government departments to bolster their impact. [Nature]

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OpenAthens UX Award and PROSE Awards Winners

eLife took home this year’s OpenAthens’ UX Award. The judges highlighted eLife’s “user-driven approach to the design of Reviewed Preprints”, noting the publisher’s continual user testing and surveys. Chris Huggins, Lead UX designer at eLife, underscored, “Our team has put in a significant amount of work to ensure the process is as clear and intuitive as possible for all our stakeholders, including authors, readers and other users of the Reviewed Preprints we publish.” The Association of American Publishers (AAP) also announced the 2025 PROSE Awards category winners. 101 titles from 2024 were shortlisted, spanning 37 categories such as psychology, architecture, and music. Several university presses received multiple awards including Princeton University Press and the University of California Press. Other publishers honored include Vanderbilt University Press and Louisiana State University Press. Publishing Perspectives noted that the category winners “now become eligible for the four big ‘awards for excellence.'” One winner will then receive the RR Hawkins Award.

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