News: Academic Publishing Weekly

Annual Reviews buys Underline Science, MIT Press debuts journal NeuroNexus, and a survey on how the “zero-click search” is impacting research

Posted on July 17, 2026 in News

Deals and Launches in the News

Annual Reviews, the nonprofit journal publisher and event producer in the sciences, is back in the news with another strategic acquisition. This time, the organization bought Underline Science, a scholarly event platform that provides live, virtual, and hybrid conference services in the scientific, medical, and academic markets, as well as a digital library of video produced from these events. In a Q&A about the acquisition, Richard Gallagher, president and editor-in-chief of Annual Reviews, cites AI as one motivating factor: “We believe that the easier and more automated access to information becomes, the greater the demand for human interaction. Researchers will place even greater value on in-person and online communities where ideas are exchanged, assumptions challenged, and collaborations formed. AI can commoditise information, but not community.” Further, Gallagher notes that live events allow a variety of ways to convene broader audience segments that intersect with the scientific and medical markets that Annual Reviews and Underline already serve. “Underline also creates new opportunities to engage practitioners, policymakers, and other leaders with the potential of research to address real-world challenges,” he says. “Drawing on our relationships with experts across the 51 fields covered by Annual Reviews, we see considerable scope to bring researchers together with policymakers, civic leaders, healthcare organisations, philanthropies, and others who can apply research insights.”

Springer Nature announced a new books imprint called Nature Books. The imprint will leverage the editorial talent of the Nature Portfolio of publications with the company’s broader book publishing expertise supporting the Springer and Palgrave Macmillan brands, which currently publish about 14,500 titles per year.

In other launch news, there’s a new journal on the block. MIT Press announced the debut of NeuroNexus, an interdisciplinary title covering the science of human and machine intelligence. MIT Press notes that while interdisciplinary research on intelligence has been expanding lately, there hasn’t been a journal for the work to appear in, until now. “…[T]he most important advances now come from where psychology, neuroscience, and engineering meet,” says Aron Barbey, the journal’s newly named editor-in-chief. “NeuroNexus is the home for that work, where these fields study intelligence together and apply what they learn responsibly.”

Meanwhile, JSTOR has secured funding from the Mellon Foundation to help expand offerings from its cloud-hosted Digital Stewardship platform. JSTOR is making the funding available to institutions to digitize their special collections. Libraries can use JSTOR’s Seeklight to process their materials and the JSTOR front end to provide access to students and researchers.  

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AI Partnership, Study, and Standards

Taylor & Francis announced that it will renew its partnership with Integra to expand its manuscript screening options. The expansion of EditorialPilot, Integra’s AI-powered manuscript assessment platform, centers on “improving manuscript quality and streamlining editorial workflows,” with particular focus on language quality. Next, Research Information covers a recent study by Kudos on how the “zero-click search” is impacting research. Surveying 11,500 researchers and 200 librarians, the study found that “a third of scholarly information discovery is now being mediated by artificial intelligence,” with one in 10 researchers starting their search for scholarship “directly in AI tools.” The report also finds that many scholars are “unaware of the extent to which AI is shaping their view of the scientific literature,” with significant unawareness in who (or should I say “what”) creates AI-generated summaries in search engines (yikes!). Last, eight researchers and librarians underscore the necessity of building a shared standard for AI disclosure in an article for Scholarly Kitchen. The authors share the initial insights from The World Conferences on Research Integrity (WCRI) Focus Track on this issue and future plans for engagement.

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Updates on the State of Research

Last week, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) received 90,000 public comments from the scholarly community in response to its proposed changes to Federal Financial Assistance. On Monday, the last open day for public comment, the number was up to 300,000. Inside Higher Ed summarizes the response from researchers, lawmakers, and COGR, an organization that supports researchers and universities on the federal level, to the changes that would essentially “give political appointees sweeping control over federal grant making.” Opponents of the proposal are calling for an extended comment period and future litigation. Next, the Coalition Publica (the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and Érudit), the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL), and the University of Toronto Libraries, as the service provider for Scholars Portal, have joined forces in a new agreement. Under this memorandum of understanding, the organizations will work “to advance the long-term preservation of open research in Canada.” The partnership will focus on interoperability across their platforms, metadata improvements, and advancing storage services.

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Yet Another Copyright Lawsuit and Publisher Awards

One author and three publishers—Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, and Elsevier—have filed a lawsuit against Google for “illegally using millions of copyrighted books to help build its Gemini artificial intelligence models.” In what the suit calls “one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history,” the group accuses Google of making copies of copyrighted books previewed in Google Books, Google Play Books, and Google Scholar and using them to train commercial AI products. The juiciest part of the suit alleges that Google was (very) aware of the risks of using copyrighted materials but did it anyway. Will their chickens come home to roost? The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) shared the winners of its Rising Star Award, which “celebrates promising early career professionals working in scholarly publishing.” In addition, Elsevier and The Lancet announced the three winners of The Lancet–Elsevier Foundation Evidence to Impact Awards. The inaugural awards highlight research groups who see their work into implementation “to change how health care is actually delivered.” Congratulations to the winners!

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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. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed Editions)
2. The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John U. Bacon (Liveright)
3. The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss by Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris (W. W. Norton & Company)
4. A Resistance History of the United States by Tad Stoermer (Steerforth)
5. Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian (Spiegel & Grau)

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