News: Academic Publishing Weekly

New academic AI tools, ALA's State of American Libraries report, and the 2025 PROSE Award winners

Posted on April 11, 2025 in News

The Latest AI Tools in Academia

First up, Springer Nature unveiled an AI tool that reviews reference relevance. Created in-house, the tool “will be used by Springer Nature’s Research Integrity Group (RIG) to assess submissions to almost all journals and books published by Springer Nature.” Next up, Clarivate announced forthcoming developments to its Academic AI Platform. The expansion includes new AI Agents, which Clarivate describes as “advanced software programs capable of reasoning, planning, and taking actions to achieve specific goals.” Clarivate also plans to roll out an Agent Builder and Development Partner Program to encourage collaboration on AI between libraries. Turning to JSTOR, last week marked the launch of Digital Stewardship Services. The solution aims to “help libraries and archives describe, preserve, manage, and share their unique collections at scale” and incorporates an “AI-assisted metadata generation tool.” Last, arXiv and ScienceCast are collaborating on a pilot program that provides “60-second AI-generated audio summaries” for arXiv preprints. The summaries are currently offered for high energy astrophysics preprints, and arXiv aims to expand the program to additional disciplines in the future.

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Stanford HAI Publishes New AI Index Report and Northeastern Partners with Anthropic

The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) has rolled out the 2025 AI Index. Looking at AI trends and impact, the Index reveals that AI usage and affordability is trending upward. For instance, HAI reports that “a growing body of research confirms that AI boosts productivity and, in most cases, helps narrow skill gaps across the workforce.” Nonetheless, geographical gaps persist, and HAI finds that “Complex reasoning remains a challenge” for AI. Sticking on the topic of artificial intelligence, Anthropic announced a partnership with Northeastern University. Daniela Amodei, president and co-founder of Anthropic, shared that, “By working collaboratively with Northeastern, we aim to enhance the learning experience and contribute to the development of AI-powered educational tools that are safe, transparent and impactful.” Under the partnership, Northeastern students and faculty will also receive “free access to a premier version of [Anthropic’s AI platform] Claude.”

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Assessing the State of Peer Review and Editors Depart Wiley Journal

Scholarly Kitchen chef Haseeb Irfanullah reflected on the current state of peer review and offered several recommendations going forward. In particular, Irfanullah addressed issues of reviewer fatigue, managing researchers’ “author-life and peer-reviewer life,” and reviewers’ responsibilities when it comes to problematic research. Advocating for “disruptions in peer review,” Irfanullah suggested either leveraging AI or removing “review responsibility from publishers and [giving] it to the host institutions and research funders.” The comment section includes further thoughts from academics on Irfanullah’s proposal. In other news, the managing editors and editorial board left the Wiley journal Mathematical Logic Quarterly. The editors stated, “We do not believe that Wiley is currently providing an environment that allows the editors to do their editorial work according to the standards of the academic community and free from the negative influence of commercial and profit-oriented interests.” Following the move, the editors have launched a diamond open access journal that will be hosted and indexed by Cambridge University Library.

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Commemorating National Library Week with the State of America’s Libraries Report

It’s National Library Week! In commemoration of the event, the American Library Association (ALA) published its annual State of America’s Libraries report. Analyzing several library trends, the report found that book bans and challenges in 2024 targeted 2,452 titles. Affected books often featured LGBTQIA+ and race-related themes. ALA also revealed that organized groups “and decision makers who have been swayed by them” instigated “nearly 72% of censorship attempts” in 2024, a dramatic increase when compared to 2023. Looking ahead to Banned Books Week, ALA revealed that this year’s theme will be “Censorship is So 1984.” [American Libraries]

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The 2025 PROSE Award Winners and the International Booker Prize Shortlist

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has named the 2025 winners of the PROSE Awards and the R.R. Hawkins Award. The R.R. Hawkins Award went to the University of California Press for Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence across the Border by Ieva Jusionyte, the recipient of the PROSE Award for Excellence in Social Sciences. The University of California Press also took home the PROSE Award for Excellence in Humanities. Elsevier was recognized for the PROSE Award for Excellence in Biological & Life Sciences, while Princeton University Press won the Physical Sciences & Mathematics category. In addition, the International Booker Prize announced its 2025 shortlist this week. Literary Hub provided a look at the five shortlisted titles, all published by independent presses and focused on the theme of survival.  

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