Scholarly publishing

Advances in Psychology has paid $100/review since 2022; NIH may reward journals that pay reviewers ~$50/hr and publish their comments.

DORA, FORCE11, CoARA and ALLEA convened funders, publishers and universities in Singapore to compare Asia-Pacific approaches to research-assessment reform.

Chile’s ANID is extending its 2022 Open Access Policy across every instrument it funds in 2026, backed by a new EspacioCiencia repository service and renewed InES Ciencia Abierta capacity funding. Here’s what the mandate actually requires.

A BMJ study used a BERT classifier to screen 2.6 million cancer papers, flagging 9.9% as suspected paper-mill output — a scale manual review cannot match.

The European Commission’s June 2026 study analysed 263 ARRA action plans, finding reform engagement broad and growing but uneven across Europe.

Clarivate paused Web of Science indexing for six IJS Publishing Group journals after mandatory reporting-guideline citations inflated their impact factor.

Nature reports China’s multiple-corresponding-author rate hit ~30% by 2020, up from 21.6% in 2016 — tied to evaluation incentives, not byline convention.

New Zealand has cancelled PBRF quality evaluation for good; Australia’s ERA replacement remains undesigned three years after ERA ended in 2023.

RoRI’s PEER REVIEW project wraps up with a June 2026 report: peer review has hit a breaking point, and needs a layered, funder-led reform blueprint.

As of Feb. 2026, OpenAlex requires an API key for all production API use and bills most calls on usage, with a daily free allowance per key.

DORA published a Practical Guide to Responsible Research Assessment for funders, with GRC and Science Europe, launched via regional events 13-14 May 2026.

As of January 2026, Quebec’s FRQ requires the narrative CV-FRQ for all its competitions, replacing the Canadian Common CV across all FRQ-funded programs.

Clarivate’s 2026 Journal Citation Reports gave 521 journals a Journal Impact Factor for the first time, from 47 countries/regions, with 58% based outside the US and Western Europe — part of a multi-year geographic-diversification trend research offices should track.

Korean universities lead on paper counts but lag on citation impact and R&D return. NRF data, a Springer Nature forum, and researcher surveys are fueling a live debate over moving past publication-count evaluation.

Crossref’s 2026 public data file shows ROR IDs up 250% and grant-identifier links reaching 50,000 records, alongside its first Latin America Metadata Sprint.

AGU’s 2024 authorship update asks researchers to name local collaborators as co-authors, not just acknowledgments. Here is what changed and why it matters.

CAPES and Springer Nature have signed a three-year transformative agreement (Jan 2026-Dec 2028) giving authors at 400+ Brazilian institutions APC-free open-access publishing in 1,730+ hybrid journals and reading access to 1,770+ titles.

MALMAD, Israel’s national open-access consortium renewed its deal with The Company of Biologists through 2028, part of a staggered publisher portfolio.

Wolters Kluwer retracted nine transplant papers in July 2026 over unresolved organ-sourcing ethics tied to a 2019 scoping review.

ASTM’s Journal of Testing and Evaluation retracted ~166 papers after a vendor found compromised peer review in guest-edited special issues.

In May 2026, arXiv began enforcing a one-year submission ban for authors whose papers show unchecked AI-generated content — hallucinated references or leftover chatbot text. Here’s what triggers it, how it’s enforced, and what it means for author accountability.

Poland is overhauling how universities are scored, replacing rigid publication-point quotas with a two-pillar model adding qualitative criteria.

HHMI (2026) and Gates Foundation (2025) both push preprints, but neither strictly requires posting before submission — what each policy actually says.

In April 2026 the OECD published a policy brief, Reforming Research Assessment for Better Science, finding that assessment still relies on narrow metrics that undervalue collaboration, openness, and societal impact, and recommending governments treat reform as a national science-policy priority.

CAUL reached in-principle 2026 open-access deals with Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, Wiley, and, after stalled November talks, Elsevier.

CRKN, Canada’s national library consortium, is negotiating 2026 licenses with Elsevier, Sage, Springer Nature, T&F, and Wiley on cost and transparency.

A 2026 bibliometric analysis of roughly 480,000 PubMed and PMC records (2010-2024) finds equal-contribution tags climbing from a median of about 19% of articles in 2015 to over 30% in 2024, with China driving most of the growth.

Sweden’s Bibsam Consortium, coordinated by the National Library of Sweden, has adopted an action plan to stop signing hybrid read-and-publish agreements from 2026 onward, negotiating only with fully open-access publishers instead — following a 2023 SUHF recommendation on moving beyond transformative agreements.

A Walsh Medical Media journal published a commentary under a University at Buffalo researcher’s name without his knowledge, then demanded EUR400, later EUR499, before it would remove the false byline — and ultimately just swapped in a different, unverifiable author name instead. Retraction Watch’s March 2026 report ties the publisher to OMICS International, fined over $50 million by the FTC in 2019.

Switzerland had no national Springer Nature contract from Jan-June 2026. A new 2026-2029 Read & Publish deal, signed 10 June 2026, adds Gold OA.

CERN will operate the next phase of Open Research Europe from autumn 2026, backed by roughly €17 million in funding from 16 agencies across 11 European countries. Authorship eligibility expands beyond EC-funded researchers, but the diamond OA model — free to publish, open post-publication peer review — stays the same.

CRediT taxonomy translations now cover 35+ languages via a community project, not an official NISO release — what it means for non-English journals.

Between late 2025 and early 2026, arXiv tightened endorsement (no more institutional-email-only qualification), required full English-language versions of every submission, and began requiring documented prior peer review for CS literature surveys and position papers after a flood of AI-generated submissions.

Frontiers retracted 122 articles after uncovering a ~35-author peer-review collusion network with undisclosed COI and citation manipulation.

Peer Review Week 2026 runs Sept 14–18 under the theme “Peer Review Capacity: Volume, Speed, and Quality.” What it means for reviewers and publishers.

Bibliometric data show single-author systematic reviews climbing steadily since 2000 — including inside Cochrane’s own database — despite guidance calling for independent dual-reviewer screening.

2025 bibliometric studies show women’s senior- and corresponding-authorship share still lags first-authorship gains, with implications for research policy.

Elsevier expanded Check Integrity to nearly 2,000 journals in March 2026, flagging unauthorized authorship changes and editorial conflicts of interest.

Sheffield, Lancaster, Surrey, Essex, Kent, Sussex, and York declined Elsevier’s 2026 deal after Jisc’s national negotiation cycle, citing unsustainable costs.

A second 2026 wave: editors left journals at Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis over volume quotas, publisher control, and open-access disputes.

The 3rd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access (Bengaluru, Feb 2026) produced a six-pillar global roadmap for OA policy, funding, and evaluation reform.

Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Taylor & Francis journals saw mass editor resignations in 2026 over governance, an APC mandate, and referee load.

A new dataset, BuyTheBy, quantifies for the first time what paper mills actually charge for authorship: 18,710 ads, prices from roughly $56 to $5,631 for first-author slots, and just 5 of 53 matched published papers retracted so far.

COPE’s new Code of Conduct for members is live, replacing the retired 2024 Core Practices, with a 12-month transition before adherence is mandatory.

ICML 2026 study: AI peer-review scores can be gamed by cosmetic ‘paper laundering’ rewrites, a risk authors warn could disadvantage novel work.

Wiley is investigating a peer reviewer accused of demanding payment to approve a manuscript at journal Security and Privacy.

Five researchers, including Harvard geneticist George Church, were moved off a Nature Methods byline into acknowledgements amid U.S. scrutiny of China ties.

Springer Nature reports nearly 40% of citations to China’s 2022 gold OA articles now come from outside China, while a separate June 2026 announcement puts its EU open-access agreement coverage at 74% of member states, including renewed Czechia, Greece, and Finland deals.

Sage retracted 8 papers by ex-editor Yannick Griep for self-reviewed peer review; Radboud separately confirmed data fabrication.

A new Learned Publishing study finds 83% of high-impact journals have explicit AI peer-review policies, versus 75% of mid-tier titles.

On 16 July 2026, Springer Nature launched Nature Books, a new imprint that lets authors publish long-form work under the Nature brand for the first time. It sits alongside Springer and Palgrave Macmillan within Springer Nature’s roughly 14,500-title-a-year book business, with proposals guided by an editorial board of in-house Nature Portfolio editors before commissioning, peer review, and production move to Springer Nature’s existing books teams.

A 2.7-million-preprint IEEE S&P 2026 study found 88% of arXiv submissions leak hidden source-file data: passwords, API keys, GPS coordinates.

Nobel laureate Thomas Südhof told Lindau 2026 that publishing is unregulated, dismissed COPE as self-serving, and urged a government “FDA for journals.”

In 2026, the University of Alberta, University of Delaware, and University of British Columbia each ended a major bundled journal subscription — with Springer Nature, Wiley, and Sage respectively — citing publisher price increases that have outpaced flat collections budgets. Here’s what each library actually announced, and what changed for researchers.

On July 1, 2026, arXiv left Cornell University’s umbrella to become arXiv, Inc., an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Cornell and the Simons Foundation are founding Members with board seats on a 12-member board; a $10M Simons/Schmidt Sciences gift funds cloud migration. The arxiv.org URL, free access, staff, and moderation process are unchanged.

GAO-26-107738 (May 2026) found 2 of 9 agencies lacked a public-access policy, reuse-rights gaps at NSF/USDA, and costs it warns could reach $1B/year.

MA3 (Modernizing Academic Appointment & Advancement) is a US-specific research-assessment reform initiative, distinct from DORA and CoARA: it funds a defined cohort of universities to actually rebuild hiring, review, promotion, and tenure processes rather than sign a statement of principle. Here is what it is, who runs it, and where it stands.

ARC’s updated Open Access Policy took effect 1 July 2026: immediate OA for articles, a 12-month window for books, and new Indigenous research provisions.

Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, and Scott Turow sued Google in SDNY, alleging Gemini trained on Google Books, Play Books, and Scholar without authorization.

COPE relaunched its paper mills working group in June 2026, citing AI-exploited coordinated misconduct as the driver, with a companion toolkit to its systematic-manipulation guidelines as the group’s first stated deliverable.

Wiley will launch eight new journals under its “Advanced” brand by the end of 2026, expanding beyond materials science into oncology, AI, robotics, and chemical engineering. For researchers and research administrators, the practical questions are the ones the launch announcement doesn’t answer: none of the new titles will have a Journal Impact Factor for at least two years, and Wiley has not disclosed open-access status or APCs for any of them.

A new analysis of the Retraction Watch Database (1997-2026) finds Elsevier has the lowest normalized retraction rate and by far the highest reinstatement rate among ten major publishers — with a caveat from the study’s own author about what that actually measures.

STAT’s April 2026 investigation traces BMJ’s retraction of 7 of 8 papers in a guest-edited Journal of Medical Genetics issue, and the pattern behind it.

REF 2029 criteria-setting paused 4 Sept 2025, resumed 10 Dec 2025: CKU/E&I/SPRE weightings, a 5-output cap, and lighter impact rules are now confirmed.

cOAlition S’s Strategy 2026-2030 widens accepted open-access routes beyond Plan S’s original three, deferring rule changes to a 2026-2027 review.

MDPI’s multi-year Proofig AI deal and ASM’s Imagetwin pilot data show AI image-forensics screening becoming standard in publisher editorial workflows.

The 2022 Nelson Memo required every federal funder, not just NIH, to adopt zero-embargo public access by Dec. 2025 — here’s where agencies stand in 2026.

Wiley disclosed $49M in FY2026 AI licensing revenue ($110M lifetime). Taylor & Francis and Springer Nature show similar deals; small publishers see little.

A Feb. 2026 C&EN investigation found citation cartels inventing fake author identities and misusing APC waivers to sell undetectable citation boosts.

A PNAS study of 5.2M papers found 70% of journals have AI policies, but only ~0.1% of papers actually disclosed AI use.

ICMJE updated its Recommendations in January 2026, adding a new standalone Section V on AI use and a new Section III.L.2 on authors’ access to trial data, plus revisions to sponsor-agreement, misconduct, trial-registration, and funding-disclosure guidance.

UKRI’s 22 June 2026 FAQ update clarifies Horizon Europe Guarantee compliance and block grants, part of a 2026-2030 Open Access Monitor plan.