News: Academic Publishing Weekly

New EO on research grants, authors' thoughts on AI licensing, and the impact of research "extenders" on readership

Posted on August 15, 2025 in News

US Government Continues to Come for Research Grants

The Trump administration has released a new Executive Order (EO) concerning political oversight of federal research grants. As reported by Science, the EO “would require political appointees to sign off on new grant solicitations, allow them to overrule advice from peer reviewers on award decisions, and let them more easily terminate ongoing grants.” The order drew pushback from researchers and members of the House of Representatives who voiced concerns over the administration’s ability to ignore recent court decisions and the push for research that “demonstrably advance[s] the president’s policy priorities.” Science also covered what the EO would mean for indirect cost rates. [Science]

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Author Perspectives on AI, Plus the Technology’s Impact on Preprints

More than 850 book authors surveyed by the MIT Press underlined drawbacks and opportunities when it comes to AI licensing. In general, the majority of authors were open to licensing partnerships, “but they strongly favor consent, attribution, and compensation as conditions for use of their work.” Authors also urged publishers to create ethical licensing frameworks and emphasized that deals should not “undermin[e] incentives to consume and produce original longform works.” Also on the topic of AI, preprint servers are facing an influx of submissions ingested with the technology. Nature explained that the problem has exacerbated, with Steinn Sigurðsson, scientific director at arXiv, stressing that “we really started thinking there was a crisis sometime in the last three months.” The surge in AI content has led to processing delays and raises concerns about the indexing of problematic submissions. In response, arXiv and the Center for Open Science are exploring stricter publishing guidelines and openRxiv “is pursuing automated tools to spot signatures of AI-generated content.”

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New Academic E-Book Report and De Gruyter eBound Foundation Fund

The De Gruyter eBound Foundation has announced a new fund for climate change-focused monographs. As explained by De Gruyter, the fund will “make publication grants available to the more than 60 publishers affiliated with Paradigm Publishing Service’s University Press Library (UPL) program.” Funded titles will be published on University Press Library Open. The fund aims to offset financial pressures caused by grant cancellations and “has been seeded with an initial USD 100,000.” Next, Ithaka S+R released the findings of its report on library and publisher perspectives on humanities and social sciences (HSS) monograph publishing. Of note, the report revealed that despite successful library-publisher partnerships, the two groups “are facing different challenges and do not necessarily share the same priorities.” In addition, the report covered divergences in approaches to digital distribution, thoughts on “evidence-based acquisition models,” and the value of consortia.

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The Value of Article “Extenders”

A recent analysis from Taylor & Francis makes a case for the importance of extenders, “a term used in medical publishing for digital tools that present the research in an alternative format.” Extenders encapsulate multimedia such as graphics, audio, and video elements and according to the report, have a positive impact on viewership. Examining publications released between January 2023 through January 2025, the analysis found that, “Plain language summaries of publications and clinical trial protocols with extenders attracted 144% more views than those without these supplemental resources.” In the future, the researchers behind the analysis will consider studying extenders’ impact on citation counts. [Research Information]

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PUP to Publish Bollingen Recollections and Wiley Reaches Research Exchange Milestone

Next year Princeton University Press (PUP) will begin rolling out Bollingen Recollections, providing “paperback, accessible e-book and hardcover editions” of books in PUP’s Bollingen Series. PUP shared that the Bollingen Series is comprised of roughly 275 titles, and “the publisher will release 10 to 15 books each year, until all of the titles in the Bollingen Series are republished.” The backlist project will also organize the books by themes including Literature and Literary Criticism, Art and Aesthetics, and more. Next up, Wiley reached a new milestone with 1,000 journals now available on its Research Exchange platform, which makes up “more than 50% of the company’s journal portfolio.” The publisher also highlighted several of the benefits Research Exchange provides users and its plan to create an external Product Advisory Board.  

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