News: Academic Publishing Weekly

Elsevier adds to LeapSpace, September brings new CEOs, and Peer Review Week investigates capacity issues

Posted on September 18, 2026 in News

Elsevier’s LeapSpace Grows and Adds Advisory Board

LeapSpace, Elsevier’s AI-driven scientific research platform, now draws on more than 23 million full-text articles and books along with 2.6 billion cited references from Scopus, the company says. The growth in content has come from a significant expansion of licensing deals with publishers and societies. As the platform grows, Elsevier is also focusing on the question of trust: it has formed an advisory board to provide oversight and guidance on algorithms, output transparency, responsible AI use, and publisher-neutral content discovery. The move comes as Elsevier’s own research finds a major gap between researcher’s use of AI and their trust in the technology.

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Peer Review Week Looks at Capacity

Happy Peer Review Week! This year’s theme, “Peer Review Capacity: Volume, Speed, and Quality,” signals the “growing challenge across the research ecosystem” in the face of increasing submission rates and limited reviewer availability, as noted in a PRW press release. Events, blog posts, and recordings are available on the Peer Review Week website. In addition, Scholarly Kitchen published several posts this week on peer review. We’re  highlighting Monday’s post, where the Chefs shared thoughts on “uncomfortable truths” on peer review the scholarly publishing world doesn’t want to address, and aspects of peer review that are often overlooked. Chefs chat about AI, the undervaluing of peer review, and growing workloads and expectations of reviewers.

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Will the Real Author Please Stand Up

Here’s your existential crisis think piece for the day: How do ideas, the act of writing, and the critical and intellectual judgements therein combine to define authorship in the age of AI? The Chronicle examines how generative AI is complicating the concept of academic authorship as researchers and faculty use LLMs for everything from light edits to writing major sections of a manuscript, if not all of it. The report highlights interesting disagreements over acceptable use. Is an article legitimate if the author supplies all of the ideas, experience, oversight, and accountability while the AI tool writes it? More to the point, who actually is the “author”? What happens if the AI introduces an idea or connection that didn’t originate from the researcher’s mind? Is authorship defined solely by accountability? And how do publisher acceptable-use guidelines influence the definition of authorship? So many questions, so little time.

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September Brings New CEOs

The Company of Biologists announced Dan Shanahan as the new Chief Executive Officer, effective this week. Formerly Publishing Director at PLOS, Shanahan’s scholarly publishing experience includes Springer Nature, F1000, and Cochrane and expertise in open science. Shanahan succeeds Claire Moulton, who retired this past summer, and looks forward to helping the publisher “build on its legacy, explore new opportunities and help shape its next chapter in support of the wider scientific community.” In other CEO news, Andrea Eastman-Mullins will succeed Stephen Rhind-Tutt as Chief Executive Officer at Coherent Digital. Eastman-Mullins’s most recent position was at Clarivate, where she led its teaching and learning portfolio “and helped establish the foundation for a new AI-enabled learning business.” With more than 30 years of experience in publishing, higher education, and educational technology, Eastman-Mullins will join Coherent Digital as it “enters a new phase of growth,” focusing on “bring[ing] greater transparency, accountability, and confidence to an increasingly complex information environment.”

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University Press Week Incoming

The Association of University Presses (AUPresses) announced that University Press Week will be held November 9-13, unveiling this year’s events, theme, and reading list. Entitled PowerUP, this year’s theme focuses on how university presses “fuel publications, projects, and initiatives that amplify our authors’ voices to inform our current moment and shape our future.” The thorough 97-title reading list curated by AUPresses members features categories by discipline, such as Indigenous Studies, Science & Medicine, and History. Over the next few weeks, AUPresses will roll out a “one-stop shop” for the featured books on Bookshop.org and a digital gallery of the titles. “These publications lend power to scholars’ intellectual freedom and readers’ wide-ranging curiosity,” said AUPresses executive director Peter Berkery in a statement.

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Open Access Book Prizes, Citation Laureates, and National Book Awards

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) announced the winners of the Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards, spotlighting “authors and publishers of exceptional, innovative, and open access humanities books published from 2019 to 2024.” Broken into six categories—Anthropology, Environmental Humanities, History, Literary/Media Studies, Multimodal, Political Science—the awards grant the winning authors $20,000; the publishers win $30,000 “to support the immediate open access publication of at least two new books.” Next, Clarivate shared 2026’s “Citation Laureates,” honoring 22 researchers whose research is considered of “Nobel class.” Utilizing data from the Web of Science Core Collection, Clarivate’s Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) finds scholars “whose work has had an exceptional influence on their fields.” Finally, the National Book Awards announced the longlists for nonfiction, poetry, fiction, translated literature, and young people’s literature. While the nonfiction list includes zero university press titles (boooo), the poetry list features three! Congratulations to all!

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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. Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature by Emily Wilson (Liveright)
2. The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore (Liveright)
3. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed Editions)
4. The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John U. Bacon (Liveright)
5. Guinness World Records 2027 by Guinness World Records (Guinness World Records)

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