News: Academic Publishing Weekly

OpenAI makes latest models free to researchers, open book publishing wins, and celebrating award longlists

Posted on July 31, 2026 in News

Reading Tea Leaves for the White House’s Research Funding Plans

Recent reporting on the Trump administration’s efforts to redirect scientific research funding away from higher education may be overly dramatic. Crazy, I know. Inside Higher Ed examines a recent report from Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, that simultaneously praises R1 institutions as centers of important research and recommends funding be shared with the private sector to help advance it. Kratsios’s report, notes IHE, at the very least offers a glimpse into current administration thinking, and it’s either no big deal or a very big deal. Even so, it succeeds at stirring the pot in an already chaotic funding environment where it’s increasingly looking as if academia will be getting a smaller piece of the grant pie.

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Sage Licenses Scientific Journal Content to AI Research Platform Causaly

Sage has struck another AI-based licensing deal, this time with Causaly, a London-based agentic AI research platform in the life sciences. The deal resembles one the publisher made with Consensus earlier in the year. In this new partnership, Sage has given Causaly AI agents full-text access to about 400 journals.

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Frontier AI Stakes Claim in the Research Lifecycle

OpenAI announced it is aiming to make its frontier models—the latest and greatest versions of ChatGPT, including GPT-5.6 Sol Pro—freely available to 100,000 researchers by the end of 2027. Ten thousand researchers will gain access this summer, including those at the Institute for Advanced Study and École normale supérieure. OpenAI assures us that workspaces will include “business-grade” privacy and security and data, by default, will not be used to train the models. Tools will range “from genomic analysis and protein modeling to literature reviews, grant writing, and publishing.”

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EBSCOhost Gets Two New AI Features

EBSCO has supplemented its EBSCOhost platform with two AI-assisted features called AI Conversational Search and Ask This Document (AI Ask). The two features perform exactly as they sound: the former allows users to search using natural language questions with results formatted as answers with supporting citations pulled from EBSCO sources. The latter lets users ask questions about the content of a full-text document. Responses are generated from the content itself.

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How Students and Publishers Are Adapting to GenAI

Clarivate published a new survey asking more than 500 students how they’re using AI tools in academic work. According to the results, 95 percent of those surveyed are “using AI for school projects or assignments, up from 45% in a similar survey conducted in 2024.” The report digs into how students use these tools, whether for brainstorming, summarizing research, or finding articles. The survey also found that students want AI to act as a “mentor” rather than a “shortcut.” They’re growing increasingly more vigilant toward AI, with around 60 percent of students fact-checking AI-generated content “most of the time” or “always.” Moving along, Wendy Queen, Chief Transformation Officer at Johns Hopkins University Press, and Jonathan Woahn, co-founder of Cashmere, a platform to help publishers navigate and monetize AI, discuss building an AI framework for the scholarly community. Queen and Woahn chart how AI has influenced scholarship practices, why stakeholders across the research ecosystem need to collaborate, and the urgency of this task. As they note, “[the scholarly community] succeeds by building the infrastructure that lets many organizations participate within a common framework.”

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Clarivate Shares Finances and New CFO

Following sales and shake-ups earlier this summer, Clarivate shared its Q2 2026 results amidst a “strategic transformation.” The results show a net loss of $268.6 million in the quarter, compared with a $72 million net loss in the second quarter of 2025. In addition, organic annual contract value (ACV) rose 1.5 percent compared to last year, reflecting a shift towards subscription-based content. Total revenues fell from $621 million in 2025’s Q2 to $587 million this year; Clarivate attributes the fall to “divestitures and disposals.” Speaking of Clarivate’s finances, the company appointed Michael Easton as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, starting August 8th. Easton recently acted as Clarivate’s Senior Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer. In the new role he will “focus on advancing Clarivate’s strategic priorities, including accelerating growth, improving profitability, strengthening free cash flow generation and maintaining disciplined capital allocation.”

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Open Access Book Publishing Successes

The De Gruyter eBound Foundation announced its 2025 Annual Report, sharing advancements in OA book publishing. Among the news, the foundation reported that it raised over $1.5 million for its University Press Library Open (UPLOpen) program, allowing “more than 170 libraries to publish open access monographs throughout 2025 and 2026.” The organization predicts that it will reach more than 240 openly licensed titles through the program. The report also includes updates on the UPLOpen Climate Action Fund, platform investments, and strategies to support bibliodiversity. In other OA news, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) provided an update on the Path to Open Community Advisory Committee (CAC) in support of JSTOR’s open ebook model, Path to Open. ACLS summarizes the work done by the CAC to develop Path to Open—especially as the model transitioned from a pilot to an ongoing program in the spring of this year—and its investment in the humanities and sustainable open publishing.

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Longlists Are Out: Booker Prize and the Cundill History Prize

The longlists for two awards were announced this week. Let’s start with the Booker Prize. The “leading literary award in the English speaking world” (according to its website), the Booker Prize celebrates fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland. This year’s longlist includes 13 titles “representing seven countries and three continents.” The shortlist will arrive in late September, and the winner will be announced in November. The winner will receive £50,000. Next, the Cundill History Prize shared its 15-title longlist. Celebrating the best of the best in history writing in English, the Prize awards the winner $75,000 and the three runners-up $10,000 each. The list includes several university press titles and will be whittled down to the shortlist on September 2nd.

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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 Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss by Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris (W. W. Norton & Company)
3. The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John U. Bacon (Liveright)
4. This Is The Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy by Ben Wikler (W. W. Norton & Company)
5. Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane (W. W. Norton & Company)

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