Flooding the Zone

Flooding the Zone

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As a monthly newsletter, The Brief often is challenged by the increasingly fast-moving pace of news about our industry. Just as we’re finishing an issue, there always seems to be an announcement about something important, which puts us into a scramble. But 2025 has been something else entirely. As of this writing, we are less than two months into the second Trump administration, but it already feels like 2 years (decades?) worth of news. Collecting stories that we want to write about in The Brief feels like we’re drinking from a firehose. “Flooding the zone” and moving quickly seems part of the administration’s strategy. Each announced change is almost immediately overtaken by another (or a reversal), often within hours if not minutes. With that in mind, we are collecting ourselves and focusing on the things that stick (and that have a direct impact on scientific and scholarly communication), rather than jumping at each announcement. 

We are also working on a longer-form piece for our blog on strategies for building a robust program that can continue to thrive in volatile, or as things seem now, volcanic times. This piece will be out soon. Future newsletters will likely have more policy coverage as some of the stories we are tracking mature further. One item we are watching closely is the case before the Federal District Court in Massachusetts regarding substantial cuts to university overheads from NIH grants. The implications of such cuts on university budgets (including library and university press budgets) could be profound, with implications for publishers and professional associations.
 

Transition Toward eBook Subscriptions

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Clarivate has announced that it will no longer offer one-time purchase options for books by 2026. Framed as a transition toward subscriptions, the move will eliminate its ebook perpetual access sales (including demand-driven acquisition models) and print book sales by June 2026. 
 
This move affects two different channels for book publishers. Clarivate’s ProQuest offerings include OASIS, which is an important library sales channel for print books, particularly outside the US. ProQuest’s shuttering of OASIS creates even greater consolidation in print book distribution to libraries, and fewer choices for libraries requiring shelf-ready print books and related metadata/cataloging services. With a high barrier to entry for print distribution, it’s hard to see this trajectory toward consolidation reversing anytime soon (especially in the US, where EBSCO’s GOBI is the dominant player for library print acquisition, followed by Amazon in a distant second). ProQuest emphasized its continued investment in Rialto, its ecommerce site designed to be a successor to OASIS, but Rialto’s offerings will no longer include print or ProQuest perpetual access ebooks – a disappointment to the libraries using Rialto that hoped for better integration between their ordering site and preferred ebook platform.
 
The second channel this move eliminates is ProQuest’s ebook platform, which held a much stronger share of its respective market. ProQuest spent much of the 2000s and 2010s in growth mode, through acquisitions of ebrary and Ebook Library, and the development of several flavors of demand-driven acquisition. The initial timeline for its wind down of perpetual access models was deemed to be too rapid and many libraries expressed dismay about the impact on their acquisition workflows, as the change would have taken effect at the start of the upcoming semester. The deadline has subsequently been extended to June 30, 2026 in the face of significant pushback from the library community.
 
So that leaves the question of why Clarivate is making this change? Their reasoning appears to be a move toward reducing one-time transactional costs and an accompanying shift to recurring subscription dollars. (The whole world seems to be moving to the subscriptionization of everything with the exception of journal publishers, who effectively invented the subscription model over 350 years ago, then started moving away from it, before turning around and moving straight back toward it!) Clarivate’s ebook subscription offering will include 700,000 titles, which is (at least as measured by the number of titles) good value for money when compared with title-by-title purchasing – assuming one purchases a sufficient number, of course. 
 
Ebook subscriptions are nothing new, but the structure of the market is such that they have not dominated purchasing in the way subscriptions have for periodicals. Most libraries allocate separate budgets for perpetual access and recurring purchases, so money can’t easily be swapped from one to the other. Recurring purchases are indeed the vast majority of most library budgets, but these are largely consumed by journal packages and “Big Deals” (and increasingly, transformative agreements) and, as any journal publisher knows, clawing your way into this budget is a tall order. (Clarivate’s press release announcing the new ebook subscription model mentioned some artificial intelligence [AI] capabilities. However, at this point it is unclear how researchers will use AI in their workflows and whether AI limited to a relatively small corpus of books will hold any appeal.)
 
The greatest impact of this shift is likely to fall on those publishers reliant on aggregators as their primary ebook channel, which is basically anyone who has not developed their own proprietary platform. It is typical for a book publisher to withhold frontlist titles from subscriptions for at least the first few years after publication, when books are most likely to sell and make back their publisher’s investment. The elimination of an important channel for print and perpetual access sales will make life a little harder in this regard. But before you think this will lead to a rise of open access (OA) among monograph publishers, bear in mind that many OA models rely on print sales or selective paid-access channels to offset expenses. 
 
Clarivate competitors rushed to reassure the market with affirmations that they remain committed to perpetual access models. We hope so – the continued bibliodiversity of the monograph market requires a careful balance between increasing access and providing financially viable business models for independent and university presses.

Editorial Services Consolidation

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Editorial services have rapidly grown and professionalized over the last decade. By “editorial services,” we mean support for journal peer review and other functions performed by journal managing editors and editorial assistants. In times past, such roles were typically performed by staff at universities co-located with a journal’s editor-in-chief. This was not an optimal situation, as staff (not to mention policies and practices) tended to turn over when the editor-in-chief’s term ended. Journals lost institutional knowledge and often had to start over in recruiting and training new staff. This construct also imposed limits on training and professionalization. There is only so much training on systems, processes, and protocols that publishers could afford to invest in, given relatively frequent turnover. 

This state of affairs began to change with the advent of web-based manuscript submission and review systems. Adoption of these systems enabled managing editors and peer review coordinators to be located apart from editor offices. Many publishers began to in-source these roles, locating staff at the publisher’s offices. 

At the same time, editorial services vendors emerged. If peer review coordinators and managing editors could be located apart from editors’ offices, they could also be located apart from publishers’ offices. Editorial services vendors provided even more opportunities for training and the propagation of best practices across a larger team. They also offered benefits related to business continuity and fractionalization. A small publisher or a professional society might only have a handful of peer review support staff and perhaps a single managing editor. This created challenges in the advent of an unplanned departure or extended absence. Editorial services vendors provided the ability to backfill positions more readily. They also enabled fractional staffing for new or smaller titles that do not yet require a full-time role—providing an on-ramp for new OA journals with modest initial submissions but big growth plans.

For larger publishers, editorial services firms provided greater flexibility and often better economics. Publishers tend to be located in expensive cities like New York, London, and Amsterdam. While they may hire some editorial staff in these locations, the use of vendors for some titles allows publishers to better manage costs and portfolio growth. 

In recent years, we have seen consolidation in this area. In 2021, Kaufman Wills Fusting & Company (KWF) (including KWF Editorial) was acquired by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd (KGL). That same year, J&J Editorial was acquired by Wiley. In the last month, we have seen two additional consolidation announcements: Molecular Connections acquired Editorial Office Ltd and KGL acquired Origin Editorial. 

While we can only speculate at the rationales for these acquisitions (and they may be different in each case), we note that “editorial services” is a recurring revenue business model that positions an organization well to sell other services to clients. It is also a business that benefits from cost-of-living arbitrage. 

Briefly Noted

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Silverchair has been on a roll! Emerald Publishing is moving to Silverchair’s platform this year, where it will be joined by the American Chemical Society Publications and the Royal Society. 

In an interesting strategy to reward (and likely to attract and retain) peer reviewers, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) announced a new program for members – if they peer review three manuscripts for AACR journals in a given year, they are guaranteed to have their own paper submitted to an AACR journal go out for peer review rather than possibly being desk-rejected. There are some caveats, with qualifying reviews tied to a calendar year rather than a 365-day period (and the resulting reward only offered for the following calendar year). The reviews all have to be for the same journal as one’s own future submission, or one can do six peer reviews across the AACR portfolio to gain the reward for the journal of one’s choice. The portfolio’s flagship journal, Cancer Discovery, is seemingly excluded from the offer. Regardless of these wrinkles, the program offers some novel thinking in recognizing and rewarding peer reviewers.

Canada’s Tri-Agency has released a draft, revised OA policy on publications. The policy is short – less than one-third the length of the Nelson Memo. While brevity is welcome, here the missing details are problematic. Funded authors are required to employ a Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) and to deposit a copy of the paper’s Version of Record or Author’s Accepted Manuscript in a Canadian institutional repository under a Creative Commons license at the time of publication, with zero embargo on access. A preprint version will apparently suffice as long as those conditions are met. However, the policy lacks any mention of funding, neither for tracking compliance and the repositories themselves (as noted by a disgruntled librarian on Bluesky), nor for paying the article processing charges (APCs) most authors will face when they submit papers that include an RRS demand and require a CC license.

While we’re not sure how we feel about being fed into a large language model (LLM) – stripped of all our charm and reduced to “information” (sigh), The Brief seems to have served as a useful source for tracking mergers and acquisitions in scholarly publishing (for the record, we did cover the acquisition of PeerJ). 

Wiley offers some data via an infographic on their transformative agreements, which resulted in the OA publication of some 82,000 articles in 2024. According to Dimensions (an inter-linked research information system provided by Digital Science, https://www.dimensions.ai), that makes up around 31% of all articles published by Wiley for the year, and 73% of its OA articles.

Nature put together a study looking at the institutions and regions with the highest article retraction rates. Small Chinese hospitals and medical schools topped the charts, followed closely (depending on how one parses the data) by universities in Saudi Arabia and India. Speaking of retractions, Springer Nature has a new Research Integrity page on which it states that, in 2024, it retracted 2,923 articles. In context, that’s around 0.6% of the 482,000 articles Springer Nature published last year.

In other research integrity news, the credibility of scholarly journals continued taking hits over the last month. El País detailed a company that has purchased 36 long-standing publications and rapidly increased both the author charges and their publication volume. 

A foundation connected to RealClearPolitics has announced the launch of a new journal, the Journal of the Academy of Public Health, with a noteworthy editorial model. The journal is designed to be the publication outlet for members of the newly formed Academy of Public Health, a membership group formed by, among others, authors of the vaccine and pandemic skeptical “Great Barrington Declaration.” One can only become a member by being recommended by an existing member. The new journal takes the eLife publish/review/curate model one step further, moving the selection step even earlier in the chain of events. Rather than editorial review offering the point at which articles are accepted, the Journal of the Academy of Public Health suggests that screening is complete before the article is actually written – having occurred upon a member’s admission to the Academy. The journal will only publish papers by members and cannot, under any circumstances, reject member submissions. “This seems like more of a club newsletter than a scientific journal,” says Johns Hopkins immunologist Gigi Gronvall. One prominent member of the Academy and the editorial board is Jay Bhattacharya, who has been nominated for Director of the National Institutes of Health.

In perhaps the least surprising news of the month, cOAlition S is shutting down its Journal Comparison Service on April 30, 2025, citing disappointment that more publishers, libraries, and funders did not participate. The lack of uptake was likely due to several reasons, starting with the flawed premise upon which the service was built – the idea that publishers set prices based on adding up the costs of the various activities that go into publishing a journal article. The resulting data gathered were almost entirely meaningless as each publisher allocates costs differently, making them useless for comparison. Also, the tool required significant effort from publishers to participate, yet was likely to mostly serve as a way to fuel criticisms against its participants. In the end, the Journal Comparison Service mirrors much of cOAlition S’s other ventures – an interesting idea, poorly implemented, and then abandoned.

RELX, Elsevier’s parent company, reported strong financial results for 2024 with a 10% rise in profit. It is worth noting that in a journals market moving to OA, where revenue is largely correlated with publication output, Elsevier’s article count grew by 14% year-on-year from 2023. The rest of the market only grew by 3% during this same period. 

The first court decision over using copyrighted materials to train AI systems went in favor of the copyright holder plaintiffs, as a court ruled that using the Westlaw database to create a competing product was not fair use. While each future case will still need to be determined individually, Roy Kaufman notes that, “defendants now have a much higher burden to overcome and will need to find ways to distinguish their cases from this one.”

Wolters Kluwer CEO Nancy McKinstry announced her retirement, effective in early 2026. Stacey Caywood (current CEO of Wolters Kluwer Health) has been nominated as her successor.

We were pleased to see the inaugural Rosenblum Award for Scholarly Publishing Impact announced. Named to honor Bruce Rosenblum, the award “celebrates innovations that have transformed the scholarly publishing ecosystem.” The first recipient is the DOI (digital object identifier).

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A lot of the U.S. economy is based on scientific discoveries, and the strength of our economy now is based on past discoveries. If we stop investing in those discoveries, the long-term effects on the economy are going to be crushing. – Dr. Kimberly Cooper, University of California San Diego