News: Academic Publishing Weekly

The NIH invests in reproducibility, NSF shares open data for AI models, and the top 50 publishers in the world

Posted on October 2, 2026 in News

The NIH Goes All-In on Replication and Reproducibility

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is planning a $174 million program to raise the profile and practice of testing and reproducing previously published biomedical discoveries. The initiative is led by NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, who has been a major proponent of verifying and reproducing existing research. Publication, he notes in a recent editorial for Science, is not the final, or only, marker of a job well done. “When later studies probe more deeply, they can reveal nuances, showing that a finding may be incomplete or valid only in certain contexts,” he writes. “But a failure to replicate or reproduce does not signal a failure of science or of the scientists who conducted the original work. It reflects the self-correcting nature of the scientific process. The real failure lies in not building that correction more deliberately into the research process.” To make independent verification as prominent as discovery, the NIH, according to an announcement, is planning to direct its funding toward policies and infrastructure that support data sharing and standardization, work directly with institutions and researchers to develop workflows that reinforce replication and reproducibility, and invest in “institutionalizing” replication and reproducibility as a scientific discipline. Along with this, the NIH is launching a recognition and awareness-based program called R3PEATS (Rigor, Replicability, and Reproducibility) as well as a new PubMed tool called Linked Discoveries. Using an “AI-informed approach” (so you know it’s good), the tool allows scientists to find a range of research related to a single article, including replication studies. The agency says more than 29 million PubMed publications are represented in Linked Discoveries so far.  

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AI for Peer Review and Nursing

XSci released a preprint platform with both AI and human review. While posting research, reading others’ papers, and using the site’s AI reviewers is free, the human reviewers are a paid service. In tandem, XSci announced an “open-review competition” “through which up to 100 submitted papers will receive a human expert review paid for by XSci.” At least there’s transparency on whether your research is read by a real person? In other AI news, Elsevier launched ClinicalKey Nursing AI, an AI tool designed for nurses “to support both point of care decision-making and professional growth across the nursing career journey.” The tool arose from a report revealing that doctors were more likely than nurses to use an AI tool for work. Since, of course, every person in the world needs to start using GenAI, Elsevier responded with this tool. Built on “leading evidence-based information from Elsevier’s corpus of content and reputable nursing organizations,” the tool made users “more confident in clinical decision making” and saved time, according to a pilot study. Huzzah.

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Pushing Open Science and Data

In an effort to support open science, the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Public Library of Science (PLOS) signed a Memorandum of Understanding to advance the Open for Science 10 (OS10) Program. Paving the way for greater cooperation between the organizations, the move focuses primarily on “promot[ing] the open sharing and innovative use of scientific knowledge and data, contributing to a more open, inclusive, equitable, and sustainable global open science ecosystem.” The program will involve workshops, working groups, and strengthening the program’s platform. Speaking of open, the US National Science Foundation released the NSF Open Knowledge Network (NSF OKN), an open data website with “43 interconnected knowledge graphs and tens of billions of connected facts across health, the environment, justice, manufacturing, and national security.” Free and available to the public, the site offers a “verifiable knowledge layer to complement contemporary artificial intelligence models.” The release responds to the increasing value and demand for data sets that AI models can gobble up (learn from). OKN brought multiple government entities together to develop these knowledge networks, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

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Community-Based Archives Report and New Journal Home Partnership

Let’s talk archives! The Mellon Foundation released the first national study of community-based archives, revealing trends in how these archives are named, operated, and resourced. The study highlights the challenges the collections face, whether from a lack of funding, persistent harassment, or the precarity of technical infrastructure. The report recommends a path forward, underscoring the value of multi-year funds for operating expenses without restrictive conditions and investment in shared networks and infrastructure. Next, ResearchGate and independent publisher AVES joined forces in a Journal Home partnership, embedding AVES open journals onto the ResearchGate platform. The aim of the collaboration is to increase the visibility of AVES journals and strengthen engagement with authors. İbrahim Kara, Founder of AVES, stated that “… Journal Home strengthens our mission to help the journals we work with reach their full potential and maximize their global impact.”

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The Top 50 Publishers in the World

Publishing Perspectives covered the Global 50 Publishing Ranking, which lists publishing groups according to their annual publishing revenues—as Publishing Perspectives notes, this excludes those without public revenue records, such as McGraw Hill. Bertelsmann, owner of Penguin Random House, held the number one spot, though non-trade publishers had a strong showing. For example, RELX Group, Thomson Reuters, Wolters Kluwer, and Pearson earned spots two through five, indicating an overall trend that “STM publishing continues to outpace trade and education.”

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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. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed Editions)
3. The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore (Liveright)
4. Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made by Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Liveright)
5. The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John U. Bacon (Liveright)

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