News: Academic Publishing Weekly

The latest NIH and NEH funding news, Johns Hopkins University Press AI licensing, and the Cundill History Prize longlist

Posted on August 1, 2025 in News

Grant Funding Round-Up: Researcher Perspectives and Updates from the NIH and NEH

The Trump administration filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court following a district court’s ruling requiring the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to restore “hundreds of [research] grants.” CBS News‘s Melissa Quinn reported that, “In the emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, [solicitor general D. John] Sauer said [the administration’s] request for relief gives it a chance to ‘stop errant district courts from continuing to disregard’ its decisions.” Next up, Judge Colleen McMahon of the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York halted the government’s “cancellation of $175 million in National Endowment for the Humanities [NEH] grants allegedly related to diversity, equity and inclusion; gender ideology; or ‘environmental justice.’” Specifically, Judge McMahon argued that the NEH’s actions breached the First Amendment. Last, Delta Think and several professional societies and associations surveyed over “13,000 researchers across every major discipline and 135 countries” on their experiences with funding cuts. Of note, US researchers raised concerns regarding “reductions across publishing output, participation in peer review, and conference attendance.” International authors also hinted towards moving away from US-based publications.

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JHUP Enters AI-Licensing Agreement and JSTOR Seeklight Takes Home the C.F.W. Coker Award

Johns Hopkins University Press (JHUP) is moving to license its titles to train AI. Writing to Inside Higher Ed, executive director Barbara Kline Pope explained that JHUP is “currently exploring partnerships with both general AI companies and those focused on specialized content and inference models like Retrieval-Augmented Generation.” Authors can “sign an addendum to their contracts” to opt out of the deals. The push to license content comes amid budget restraints and aims to “create some guardrails around content use.” In other news, JSTOR Seeklight was awarded the Society of American Archivists’ C.F.W. Coker Award. JSTOR Seeklight, an “AI-powered collections processing technology,” is a part of JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services. The technology “integrates advanced AI models, JSTOR’s infrastructure and engineering, and archivist expertise to support a human-in-the-loop approach that keeps the generated metadata contextually grounded and ethically sound.”

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New Study Finds Widespread Peer Review Manipulation and Revenue Concerns Mount for Society Publishing

An investigation conducted by Frontiers’ Research Integrity Auditing team reveals widespread peer review misconduct across several of its journals—and in articles from other publishers. The team found that “a broad and sophisticated network of about 35 authors were potentially colluding over a very large number of journals and published papers, a fraction of which were published by Frontiers.” Frontiers is currently working to retract said papers but underscored that “more than 4,000 articles [were] published across seven other publishers.” Shifting to society publishing, a global survey and longitudinal study of UK learned societies reveals troubling revenue results. In particular, Research Consulting’s Rob Johnson and independent consultant Sarah Greaves write that, “Since 2019, 56% of society publishers in our global survey have seen their journal revenues decline in absolute terms.” Society publishers with smaller portfolios fared worse. The UK study further unveiled a drop in the number of self-published societies. In response, survey respondents encouraged collaboration, recommending “joint publishing ventures, shared technology platforms, and collaborative licensing arrangements.”

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Different Takes on Addressing Research Misconduct and eLife Introduces “Uncapped” OA Agreements

A recent preprint study explores how scientific integrity sleuths and institution integrity officers differ in their approaches to research misconduct. For instance, 77 percent of integrity officers “agreed that current reporting channels for misconduct are effective.” Sleuths, however, raised issues with the speed and reliability of present directives. Instead, the majority of sleuths see the benefit of involving an external regulatory body and believe that “papers with serious issues that undermine confidence in the findings” should immediately be retracted. Additionally, over 80 percent of integrity officers recommend “retraining,” but some sleuths favor stricter measures including “restricting such people’s responsibilities.” Next up, eLife announced new open access agreements it refers to as “uncapped schemes.” Through the partnerships, “corresponding authors affiliated with a partner organisation can publish an unlimited number of articles in eLife during a two-year term, with their organisation agreeing to cover a preset fee for that period.” The MIT Libraries are the first to enter an agreement, which will last through April 2027.

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Cundill History Prize Longlist and New Books to Close out July

The Cundill History Prize has revealed its 15-title longlist. The list features books from Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Yale University Press, Princeton University Press, and University of Chicago Press. The shortlist will be released in September and finalists will be announced in October. The winner will be named on October 30th. Turning to new releases, Literary Hub shared 16 new works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Samsun Knight’s Likeness from University of Iowa Press made the cut and received high praise from writer Eskor David Johnson, who called the title “Tender, infuriating, redeeming, and graceful.”

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