The Brief

Elsevier and Germany strike a transformative agreement, but is it a fair deal for their society journals? ACS has a busy month, buying ChronosHub and introducing a new author charge aimed at the Rights Retention Strategy. Also, happy 5th birthday to Plan S.

Have Frontiers and MDPI slowed their growth? A look at this year’s numbers would suggest so. Plus, seemingly every bibliometric database announces an AI assistant, the USDA’s public access plan, AI continues to ruin everything, and the Vickers Curse is finally solved.

Will the OSTP’s Nelson Memo fall victim to Congress’s war on “woke”? Has cOAlition S changed its mind about APCs? Academic editors continue to revolt against open access. This year’s crop of JIFs is harvested.

Is the Plan S Transformative Journals program a disaster or a great success? How (and in what fields) has China’s research grown in volume and quality? Plus, journal supercontinents continue to evolve.

The EU sets an aspirational new course for diamond OA. Meanwhile, the reality of OA policies begins to impact researchers and editorial boards. A new claim that huge amounts of the literature are bogus turns out to be bogus itself.

Are we in the VUCA era of scholarly communication? China’s Early Warning List. Submission and peer review systems and AX: Optimistic yet dull with a whiff of Apple?

Wiley has a rough day in the market in wake of suspending Hindawi’s special issue program. Clarivate delists 50 journals, including 19 from Hindawi and the world’s second largest journal (from MDPI). We also discuss the role of a flagship journal, AI and content licensing, an attempted coup at eLife, open access regret, and more this month in The Brief.

Springer Nature ends deposit of articles in PubMed Central, NIH’s new public access policy, cOAlition S ends support for Transformative Journals, and the RRS tries to route around prohibitions. Plus, gender diversity on editorial boards and whether ChatGPT can “author” a paper.

Was this month’s issue of The Brief written by ChatGPT? Find out within. Springer Nature ramps up its acquisitions and the first post-Nelson Memo public access policy from a US federal agency is released.

Wiley spins off its services into a stand-alone division, but where will it find customers? MDPI’s relentless optimization for market conditions continues. Publishers are embracing sustainability topics as SDG-related scientific outputs are rapidly increasing. And a look at the numbers from this month’s RELX investor seminar.