News: Academic Publishing Weekly

Anthropic AI copyright settlement, Cambridge reaches 75 percent OA, and the latest publishing revenues report

Posted on July 24, 2026 in News

Bloomsbury Wins Big in Landmark Anthropic AI Copyright Settlement

Authors and publishers scored a major win in Bartz v. Anthropic, a copyright class action lawsuit brought against the AI company accusing it of infringement when it downloaded half a million books from pirate websites. This week, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California approved a $1.5 billion settlement—reportedly the largest class action copyright settlement in history. Bloomsbury, with a reported 14,087 titles listed in the settlement, stands to do particularly well. After subtracting various fees, the company is expecting a payout of about $19 million. In a statement regarding the settlement, Maria A. Pallante, CEO of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), said, “In this case, the court recognized that downloading from pirate sites is not a choice we should simply accept as an efficiency for the infringer; on the contrary, it’s abhorrent conduct that should never be normalized.” Stay tuned, because there are “dozens” more AI copyright lawsuits making their way through the courts. The order granting the settlement approval can be found here (PDF).

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University Press News

Cambridge University Press announced that 75 percent of its research articles will be published open access in 2026 and 50 percent of its journals are now open. This is a significant milestone considering its proportion of OA articles was 10 percent just eight years ago. According to the publisher, it “developed its transformative agreement model in partnership with libraries and consortia to prevent double dipping. Publishing costs are agreed up front, and where a hybrid situation exists, subscription fees are reduced in proportion to the cost of author publishing fees.”

The University of Texas Press is getting a distribution boost from Ingram. The Press has decided to expand its wholesaling relationship with the company to include distribution services in the U.S., Canada, and the Latin American/Caribbean region. The Press publishes about 90 titles each year, with a back catalog of more than 4,000 works.  

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Wiley Joins the Genesis Mission and Higher Ed’s Value in the AI Age

Wiley will take part in the US Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission Consortium, “a public-private partnership supporting the U.S. government’s Genesis Mission” in support of “AI‑accelerated innovation and discovery.” The publisher joins Nvidia, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM, and Advanced Micro Devices in the consortium, making it the only scientific publisher in the group. As part of the consortium, Wiley will provide DOE national laboratories access to its research intelligence tools and participate in the Mission’s working groups. Next, Martin Kurzweil, Managing Director of Ithaka S+R, published an issue brief on Postsecondary Value in the Age of AI, digging into how higher education community members are responding to generative AI. Kurzweil looks at effects on students, university administrators, faculty, librarians, and researchers, demonstrating that the value of postsecondary education and scholarship relies on how stakeholders choose to invest in AI and what “human” skills are preserved and cultivated. As Kurzweil notes, as AI agents become more engrained in the publishing process, “research outputs may increasingly become dynamic, executable, and machine-mediated” raising “serious questions about trust.”

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Looking at Research: Submissions and Preprints

Does a prestigious degree actually help you get published? According to a study of more than 100,000 manuscripts submitted to the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Science and Science Advances journals between 2015-2020, that may be the case. The study finds that manuscripts from authors at the most prestigious universities—in accordance with a university ranking-based algorithm created by the researchers—had an almost 12 percent acceptance rate, “compared to 3.4 percent for those from the least prestigious institutions.” The authors also looked at manuscript topic, team size, gender, and national origin as factors that influence acceptance, finding, broadly, that larger team sizes, men, and North American-based researchers have an advantage. While the team underscores the old adage “correlation doesn’t equate to causation,” they also emphasize that studies like these are essential to counteract biases, particularly as paper submissions increase due to genAI. Speaking of the research ecosystem, neuroscientists Shaun Khoo and Mahesh Miikael Karnani weigh the impact of commercial investments in preprint servers. Khoo and Karnani argue that the introduction of commercial players hasn’t negatively impacted preprint production, indicating that “open access principles can survive adoption and co-option by commercial publishers.”

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The Latest Publishing Report

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) released its StatShot report for May 2026, showing positive trends for publishing overall. Compared to May 2025, total revenue across all categories was up almost 7 percent in May 2026, and year-to-date revenues increased close to 3 percent, coming in at $4.7 billion. Looking at professional and scholarly publishing, the outlook is a little less sunny. Revenue declined a little over 3 percent in May 2026 compared to last May, reversing an upward trend for the first five months of 2026. However, looking at education materials overall (including PreK-12 materials), revenues increased 3.2 percent year-to-date compared to the same period in 2025 to $672.7 million.

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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. Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane (W. W. Norton & Company)
5. A Resistance History of the United States by Tad Stoermer (Steerforth)

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