News: Academic Publishing Weekly

Anthropic case roadblock, Bucknell University Press closure, and book awards continue

Posted on September 12, 2025 in News

Judge Stalls Anthropic Copyright Case and the Reality of AI’s Fake Citations

The court case against Anthropic has encountered a roadblock, as Judge Alsup delayed approving a joint settlement from Anthropic and the affected authors. Publishers Weekly shared that Judge Alsup voiced concerns over the handling of books with multiple authors and whether a resolution could realistically be finalized by October 10th. Publishers Weekly also referenced coverage from Bloomberg Law on Judge Alsup’s disconcertment over the involvement of the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild in the lawsuit and their number of attorneys. Plaintiffs are now required to present a complete list of impacted titles by September 15th, and the next hearing is scheduled for September 25th. In other news, OpenAI’s GPT-5 is working to decrease its number of hallucinations despite scientists’ claim that they are “a result of the fundamental way in which LLMs work.” According to Nature, GPT-5 has made progress in reducing its errors yet still struggles when offline. Nature also covered comments from researchers noting that hallucinations can increase based on paper length and the amount of training data an LLM has on a topic. Even OpenAI acknowledged that models can “cheat” during training.

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Bucknell University Press Announces Closure, Cambridge OA Agreement, and a Preview of UP Week

Bucknell University Press is scheduled to close next June. University provost Wendy F. Sternberg underlined that the press’s staff will stay on through the fiscal year and “fulfill all existing author contracts” before ending operations. Publishers Weekly reported that the decision was motivated by an aim to center on “student-focused” activities. In response, the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) commented that “…quality undergraduate education is in fact bolstered by the presence of a healthy, award-winning, and intern-training university press on campus.” AUPresses has also approached officials at Bucknell University to develop “a mutually beneficial reimagination of the press.” In other UP news, Ball State University Libraries announced a partnership with Cambridge University Press. Through the agreement, Ball State affiliated authors can read and freely publish OA in “more than 437 peer-reviewed journals published by Cambridge.” Lastly, the AUPresses highlighted a new reading list and university press initiatives centered on the theme for the upcoming University Press Week, #TeamUP.

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Results from T&F’s Peer Review Pilot and the Potential Effects of NSF Funding Cuts

Taylor & Francis’s European Journal of Higher Education (EJHE) recently concluded a two-year pilot on transparent peer review (TPR), revealing high author and reviewer satisfaction. Under TPR, EJHE published anonymized peer review reports with each article, aiming for a transparent look into the journal’s “rigorous” review process. Survey results reveal that “40% of authors said that EJHE’s peer review was better than other review processes they had experienced,” and a “sizeable proportion [of reviewers]…would actively choose to review for EJHE because of their support for the model.” In other news, Delta Think performed a deep dive into how funding cuts to the US National Science Foundation (NSF) will impact scholarly output. Unsurprisingly, the analysis predicted steep reductions in US and global scholarly output, particularly when combined with cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Delta Think also looked at NSF funding for individual journals and the immediate and long-term forecasts.

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Fraudulent Research Activity Continues

A recent investigation from Dr. Leslie McIntosh, VP of Research Integrity at Digital Science, has exposed that authors formerly part of a fake research group are actively receiving funding. The group in question, Pharmakon Neuroscience Network, was “listed on more than 120 research publications from 2019–2022 until being exposed as fictitious.” The published works came from 331 authors and McIntosh found that “more than 20 currently have funding either as a Principal Investigator or a Co-Principal Investigator from sources where the grant commenced in 2022 or later.” Another investigation from research integrity sleuth Anna Abalkina and research integrity officer Svetlana Kleiner uncovered a large-scale paper mill network in Europe. The paper mill contributed to the publication of over 1,500 articles from 46 countries. Of note, Abalkina and Kleiner found that many of the authors were senior researchers. Last, Retraction Watch identified a Chinese company presenting large sums to journal editors who accept its manuscripts. The supposed paper mill, A-Techo, also uses stock images and fake testimonials.

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Book Awards Galore

Awards season is still in full swing. First up, the National Book Awards rolled out its longlists in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, translated literature, and young people’s literature. Gbenga Adesina’s Death Does Not End at the Sea from the University of Nebraska graces the poetry category. The translated literature longlist features Hamid Ismailov’s We Computers: A Ghazal Novel, translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega and published by Yale University Press. We Computers is the first title translated from the Uzbek to be longlisted for the Awards. Next, the Nebraska Book Awards program named its recipients. The Nonfiction History award went to Journey to Freedom: Uncovering the Grayson Sisters’ Escape from Nebraska Territory by Gail Shaffer from the University of Nebraska Press, and another UP title received an honorable mention in poetry. Speaking of UP publications, books from the University of Chicago Press and the University of California Press were recognized by the Massachusetts Book Awards.

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