News: Academic Publishing Weekly

Springer sells consumer brands, OverDrive announces new leadership, and university presses compile a book list for the US's semiquincentennial

Posted on June 25, 2026 in News

Springer Sells Off Its Consumer Brands

Springer Nature announced it is selling off its consumer-focused magazines, Scientific American in the U.S and Spektrum der Wissenschaft in Germany. Both are science-based media brands targeting general audiences. According to Springer Nature, the deal allows the company to focus on its publishing businesses in research, health, and education. Scientific American is being sold to Ontario, Canada-based LabX Media Group, which owns other general science brands, such as Discover and The Scientist. Spektrum der Wissenschaft is being picked up by Munich-based GeraNova Bruckmann. Terms of the deal were not released but the two titles contributed about $28.4 million in revenue in 2025.

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OverDrive Shuffles Leadership

OverDrive has announced a major leadership transition with long-time CEO and founder Steve Potash shifting to Chairman of the Board. Marc DeBevoise, who was named OverDrive’s president in March, will take over as CEO of the 40-year-old company. Per a report from Library Journal, Potash will fill a more mission-driven role focused on literacy advocacy in public policy and education and he will continue to build on literacy efforts at the OverDrive Foundation. “As Chairman, I look forward to supporting Marc and our team while continuing to champion the libraries, schools, and institutions at the heart of our mission,” said Potash in a statement about DeBevoise’s appointment.

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Fortifying Trust in Digital Scholarly Content

A coalition of librarians, publishers, and researchers, have launched The TrustMarc Initiative. It’s a standards-driven framework that assigns a public, persistent certificate to digital content with the goal of making that content easily identifiable, by either humans or AI, as a trustworthy source. Certificates identify where the content came from, who has verified it, what standards were applied, and other signifiers. Essentially, the TrustMarc unifies in one place the traditional signals of trust that are either easy to fake or too spread out, such as peer review, editorial standards, curation, and institutional reputation. Coherent Digital, the platform of collections of grey literature, provides the technical infrastructure supporting the issuing of the certificates.

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AI Is Ok, I Guess…

A recent survey conducted by De Gruyter Brill, and explained by Chief Strategy Officer Dominique de Roo in a post on The Scholarly Kitchen, reveals that while librarians mostly agree that AI is a “legitimate tool” at their institutions, they’re hardly excited about the situation. For example, 30% of U.S. respondents “indicated active resistance or non-use; in the UK and Ireland, nearly 40% of responses were blank or negative.” Canada, it seems, is particularly skeptical of the technology, too. Other regions are more pragmatic, but only when it comes to specific tasks that AI can do. The major side-eye from librarians, says the study, may result from the way AI is deployed on campuses. “In many cases, the push is infrastructural: campus-wide licenses for AI-enabled tools are increasingly bundled into existing enterprise software, particularly through large technology providers,” says de Roo. “This pattern, visible across the higher education sector more broadly, helps explain why institutional acceptance can advance faster than individual enthusiasm.” 

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Journal Launches and OA Agreements

In support of international data, China created its “first English-language academic journal dedicated to publishing data papers.” The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) will manage the journal, aiming for Data Express to become a site for “global scientific data exchange.” CAS noted that the journal demonstrates China’s shifting approach to research, with the country becoming more collaborative and internationally focused. Next on the launch list, Taylor & Francis and the Indonesian Academy of Sciences announced a new open access journal. The Journal of the Indonesian Academy of Sciences will have an interdisciplinary approach—covering science, technology, mathematics, and social sciences—and will “bridge the gap between academic research and public policy implementation” with opinion articles, commentaries, and a policy forum. Finally, AIP Publishing and Jisc signed a three-year “AIP Fusion” open access agreement, granting reading and publishing privileges to researchers.

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JSTOR Charter Program Reaches 50 Members and Clarivate Releases Sustainability Report

Clarivate released its 2025 Sustainability Report, revealing a decrease of almost 25 percent in total reported greenhouse gas emissions. The report also details the launch of ProQuest One Sustainability, “a collection designed to help educators and researchers integrate sustainability into teaching and scholarship”; the program currently has 400 institutional adoptees. In addition, the report charts the company’s mentorship initiatives, volunteer activities by staff, and projected emissions targets for 2030. In other news, JSTOR announced that its charter program of libraries, archives and cultural institutions has reached 50 members. Now moving into its second development phase, the program began in March 2025 and “aims to ensure that stewardship infrastructure is developed in ways that reflect the needs of the wider community.” The next phase will focus on “developing shared tools, practices and infrastructure” to improve the discoverability and usability of digital collections.

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Books for the US Semiquincentennial and the Weston International Award Winner

In a little over a week the United States will reach its Semiquincentennial (who names these things?!). To commemorate the anniversary, the members of the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) curated a list of works “that offers new insights on the Founding and Revolutionary-era history as well as into the American experiment, 250 years along.” Available on Bookshop.org, the titles investigate topics like incarceration, American exceptionalism, past presidents, and more. Next, the Writers’ Trust of Canada awarded Hanif Abdurraqib with the 2026 Weston International Award for “an outstanding body of work in literary nonfiction” from an international author. Abdurraqib’s titles have won many prestigious awards, and include Go Ahead in the Rain (University of Texas Press!), A Little Devil in America, There’s Always This Year, and They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, among others.

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 Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss by Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris (W. W. Norton & Company)
2. The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John U. Bacon (Liveright)
3. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed Editions)
4. A Resistance History of the United States by Tad Stoermer (Steerforth)
5. The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail by Eric Jay Dolin (Liveright)

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