News: Academic Publishing Weekly

Anthropic and Meta win in court, Springer Nature receives funding cuts, and the Royal Society of Chemistry moves away from full OA

Posted on June 27, 2025 in News

Anthropic and Meta Prevail in Copyright Lawsuits

Both Anthropic and Meta received positive news pertaining to their respective AI copyright court cases. Starting with Anthropic, Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California determined that “digitizing a legally purchased physical book was fair use, and that using those digital copies to train an LLM was sufficiently transformative to also be fair use.” However, Anthropic’s alleged use of pirated titles will be the topic of an additional trial. As for Meta, US district judge Vince Chhabria ruled that there was not substantial evidence from the plaintiffs—authors arguing that Meta’s AI training of their writing violated copyright law—that proved Meta’s “AI would cause ‘market dilution’ by flooding the market with work similar to theirs.” Nonetheless, Judge Chhabria differed from Judge Alsup in his opinion over AI training constituting fair use. Judge Chhabria stressed that, “This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful.”

---

---

Research Funding Cuts: Springer Nature and the NIH

After receiving a letter from the Justice Department in April concerning its journal CHEST, Springer Nature has had roughly “$20 million in grants covering subscriptions” cut by the Trump administration. Following reports from Axios, a spokesperson for the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) further commented, “All contracts with Springer Nature are terminated or no longer active. Precious taxpayer dollars should not be used on unused subscriptions to junk science.” Also looking at research grants, DeltaThink analyzed the influence of funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on scholarly publishing output. DeltaThink found that monetary cuts have a larger influence than reductions in grant numbers. DeltaThink’s analysis further revealed that “a 15% – 20% drop in submissions from the US is not beyond the bounds of possibility.”

---

Good and Bad News for the NSF

It has been an interesting week for the National Science Foundation (NSF). First up was a decision in a lawsuit filed by 13 universities and several higher education organizations against the NSF’s “attempt to limit the reimbursement of indirect costs associated with research grants funded by the agency.” U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani granted summary judgement in the case, finding the indirect cost cap to be “invalid, arbitrary and capricious, and contrary to law.” Later this week, news broke that the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) will be taking over the NSF office in Alexandria, Virginia. Jesus Soriano, president of NSF’s union, underscored, “There is no planning for NSF, no identified future location, appropriation for a new building or a move” for the more than 1,833 employees who work in the NSF office.

---

---

AI’s Impact on Digital Collections

In an interview with The Scholarly Kitchen, Michael Weinberg, Executive Director, Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy, NYU Law, and Co-Director of the GLAM-E Lab, discusses accounts of AI bots swarming digital collections. In particular, Weinberg details a recent report by the GLAM-E Lab on the influx of bot activity. Weinberg shares that open access content is not more at risk than paywalled collections, as “there is no evidence that moving away from open access licensing will help mitigate bot damage.” Further, although there is no one-size-fits-all fix for AI bots, Weinburg encourages stakeholders to “develop a set of norms and signals that everyone can operate under.” [The Scholarly Kitchen]

---

Wiley Hires New Executive Vice President and the Royal Society of Chemistry Backtracks on OA

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is backtracking on its plan to become fully OA by 2028. The RSC now plans to “tailor models by region based on local needs, funding and infrastructure.” According to Chemistry World, the impact of AI, library budgets, and varying degrees of institutional willingness to adopt OA were all considerations for RSC’s new strategic direction. Nonetheless, computational biophysicist Lynn Kamerlin underscored that the new policy will be complicated to implement and take “substantively more effort” than a blanket model. In other news, Wiley hired Craig Albright as its new executive vice president and chief financial officer. Albright is the former CFO, Americas and Global Cash Center Lead at Xerox. Albright succeeds Chris Caridi, who will remain at Wiley as senior vice president, chief accounting officer, and finance transformation leader. Matthew Kissner, president and CEO of Wiley, underlined, “Craig’s exceptional track record of driving high-quality growth globally through disciplined investment and innovation, cost synergies, and operating efficiency lines up perfectly with our strategic objectives.”

---

More AI Tools, Partnerships, and Courses

First up, Digital Science rolled out optional AI enhancements for its scientific and technical writing platform, Overleaf. Through AI Assist, over 20 million Overleaf users can draw on AI for help with writing, editing, and LaTeX coding. Next, JSTOR and the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC) are partnering to provide more than 100 SCELC libraries with access to JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services. SCELC libraries will gain “next-generation digital asset management (DAM) tools, long-term preservation, and AI-powered collections processing support.” Turning to Elsevier, this week marked the launch of Embase AI. An AI-enhanced edition of Elsevier’s biomedical literature database Embase, Embase AI “transforms access to biomedical research with natural language search and summarization of millions of biomedical literature records, clinical trials and conference proceedings.” Lastly, registration is open for a free micro course offered by Choice’s content vertical, LibTech Insights, and Clarivate. The eight-week newsletter-based course “will provide self-paced, pragmatic instruction via core concept descriptions, case studies, interviews, and specially curated resource lists” for librarians looking to enhance their AI literacy.

---

Related Posts