News: Academic Publishing Weekly

CNI hires new executive director, publishers issue progress reports, and the winner of the VU Literary Prize

Posted on July 25, 2025 in News

CNI Hires New Executive Director and EBSCO Releases Africa Studies Source

Kate Zwaard, associate librarian for Discovery & Preservation Services at the Library of Congress, has been named the executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). Zwaard commences her role this September, taking over from Clifford Lynch, who passed in April. Zwaard commented, “I look forward to collaborating with ARL, EDUCAUSE, the CNI team, and our community to build on CNI’s legacy of fostering meaningful connections, embracing emerging digital opportunities, and supporting research and innovation for the common good.” Next up, EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) launched a new research database, Africa Studies Source. EBSCO explained that the database provides “researchers [with] access to more than 656 magazines and journals, including 614 peer-reviewed journals.” Topics include African “history, culture, politics, education, and ongoing medical and scientific research.”

---

---

T&F and OUP Progress Reports

Oxford University Press (OUP) has published its 2024/25 Annual Report. The report includes insights on OUP’s “publishing milestones, sustainability and community initiatives, and the continuing adoption of new technology.” For instance, OUP highlighted its goal of becoming Net Zero by 2050 and adoption of “AI-enabled tools on the Oxford Academic Platform and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).” Taylor & Francis’s (T&F) parent company Informa also released its half-year results. Informa underlined the impact of “subscription renewals, further expansion in Open Research and continuing demand for specialist data and content archives.” Informa also drew attention to T&F’s AI licensing agreements, sharing that the unit has demonstrated “strong growth.”

---

Unveiling Emerald Insight and CompassAI

Emerald Publishing has released Emerald Insight, a new content platform created alongside Silverchair. Emerald Insight will host over “400 journals, 7,000 books, 3,000 case studies, and a growing collection of open access content,” also providing “a more intuitive and inclusive user experience.” Next up, Cabells announced CompassAI. The tool seeks to help researchers determine which journals to publish in and “takes AI technology and overlays it onto Cabells’ Journalytics and Predatory Reports databases.” CompassAI is currently open to Cabells’ entire customer base, but following this beta phase will “only be available to customers with access to both Journalytics Academic and Predatory Reports databases, as well as Journalytics Medicine.”

---

---

Tenure’s Impact on Publication Output

A recent analysis reveals discrepancies between researchers’ publication output pre- and post-tenure. Looking at over 12,000 researchers, the study found that publications spike the year before tenure, likely due to an increased pressure to publish. Co-author Dashun Wang, a computational social scientist at Northwestern University, also underlined that research following tenure is riskier and researchers receive fewer citations. Post-tenure, publications level for lab-related work and fall for disciplines without lab work. Nature further shared that “in the fifth year before receiving tenure, researchers published 2 papers, compared with nearly 3.5 in the year before tenure and in the years after tenure.” In response to the analysis one Bluesky user, health economist Shooshan Danagoulian, expressed concern about comparing publications across disparate disciplines and how the study will affect those seeking to eliminate tenure. [Nature]

---

VU Literary Prize Winner and Getting to Know the Finalists of the ACLS Open Access Book Prize

Melissa Range has been awarded the Vanderbilt University (VU) Literary Prize for Printer’s Fist. Centered on the abolitionist movement, Printer’s Fist will be published in March 2026 by Vanderbilt University Press. Along with publication of her work “in print, electronic and audio formats,” Range also received a “$10,000 honorarium, an invitation to read in the esteemed Gertrude C. and Harold S. Vanderbilt Reading Series at Vanderbilt University, and a one-week residency on campus.” Turning to the ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards, the history and multimodal finalists detailed their publication experiences and decision to publish OA. For instance, Samhita Sunya, author of Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay, underscored, “I pursued open access publication to close the gap between my US-based institutional and geographic location, on the one hand, and the institutional and geographic locations of my research areas, on the other.”

---

Related Posts