News: Academic Publishing Weekly

NIH proposes to minimize peer review, Elsevier shares new guidance for GenAI, and Japan adds research to OpenAlex

Posted on August 21, 2026 in News

Another Week, Another NIH Proposal

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has proposed making peer review scores on grant applications “more opaque.” The proposal would replace the peer review score with broad categories of “most competitive,” “competitive,” and “not discussed.” Inside Higher Ed reports that this action is another in a string of strategic moves intended to “minimize the role of peer review in scientific grant making and assume more government oversight of the process.” The proposal is open for public comment until October 13th. Speaking of the NIH, Inside Higher Ed highlighted a recent study on how AI is affecting grant applications and public funding. Analyzing proposal submissions to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the NIH from two large US research universities from 2021 to 2025, the study captured the rise of GenAI use in proposals and utilized word-distribution modeling to find significant use of LLMs. The major takeaway reveals that grant applications that “rely heavily on artificial intelligence” are more likely to get funding from the NIH—but, those accepted “were more similar to projects that had already received federal funding,” indicating investment in less novel ideas. Find the full study here.

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Elsevier Updates GenAI Policies and Another AI Lawsuit

Elsevier announced updates to the generative AI policies for its journals, outlining dos and don’ts for authors, reviewers, and editors. The guidance allows authors to use GenAI tools for writing and editing, though they remain “fully responsible for the accuracy and originality of their work.” The policies also underscore transparency, requiring authors to disclose AI use for “substantive structural changes.” You can find the full policy here. A group of textbook authors filed a class action lawsuit in New York against OpenAI, alleging that the company’s “unauthorized” training of its LLMs on copyrighted textbooks will “erode” the textbook market. The suit claims that OpenAI, with support from Microsoft, “removed the identifying copyright information to ‘conceal’ their actions” instead of taking steps to license the textbooks to ensure “fair compensation” for the authors. In addition, the suit underscores the dilution of the textbook market, arguing that the market’s unique traits, dissimilar from the trade landscape, leads to greater threats from AI.

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Jisc Supports Research Commercialization and JSTOR Announces Tools for Alt-Text

Jisc will collaborate with Digital Science on a new initiative “to help universities identify, develop, and manage industry partnerships.” Supporting Jisc’s goal to aid research commercialization, the deal will grant access to Digital Science’s Dimensions Industry Partnerships, an analytics platform to help organizations understand relationships between research and industry partners. The move reflects the growing demand for wider research impact, industry partnerships, and research translation. In other news, JSTOR announced new tools and workflows to help make alt-text for images in digital collections. Tier 2 and 3 JSTOR Stewardship participants “can author, edit, export, and publish alt text on JSTOR,” while Tier 3 charter participants can use JSTOR Seeklight, a platform for “AI-assisted collections processing,” to create alt-text “for individual items or in bulk.”

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Let’s Talk Research Integrity

Jason Hu, Director of Research Integrity Engagement at Taylor & Francis, digs into self-correction in science—or, more accurately, the declining rate of self-correction—its impact, and what industry professionals can do about it. Hu argues that we’re living in an age of synthetic consensus, “where the infrastructure itself produces the appearance of agreement” due to the persistence, supply, and recursion of flawed science. As Hu explains, paper mills and generative AI tools have only exacerbated the problem, pointing to several initiatives designed to combat this issue. Next, Springer Nature, the African Academy of Sciences (AAS), and the Academy of Science of South Africa have teamed up on the “first continent-wide survey” on research integrity training. Focusing on researchers’ experiences with research integrity training, the survey intends to “ensure African researchers’ perspectives inform global understanding of how research integrity is taught, supported and embedded across research systems.”

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Japan Adds to OpenAlex and ACLS Celebrates OA

Close to four million research outputs have become freely available in the open scholarly database OpenAlex due to an integration of metadata from Japan’s Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB). Research Information reports that the IRDB, managed by Japan’s National Institute of Informatics (NII), “aggregates research from universities and specialist research bodies throughout Japan”; over 5 million of IRDB’s raw records were sorted and cleaned up before joining OpenAlex. The initiative buttresses the country’s mission to promote open science and the NII’s goal to support “advanced scientific analysis in the era of artificial intelligence.” Speaking of open scholarship, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) collected responses from the finalist authors of the 2026 ACLS Open Access Book Prizes on why they publish open access. From the practical to the personal, the scholars explain why open publishing supports their research.

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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. Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane (W. W. Norton & Company)
4. The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss by Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris (W. W. Norton & Company)
5. A Resistance History of the United States by Tad Stoermer (Steerforth)

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