Portfolio Advanced

Portfolio Advanced

This past month saw announcements regarding the expansions of two notable portfolios. Wiley announced a significant expansion of its Advanced Portfolio of journals. The American publisher plans to launch eight new journals in 2026, with Advanced Oncology being the first. The “other new titles — including journals spanning diverse fields at the intersection of human health, neuroscience, technology, and society — will be announced soon.”

Advanced is Wiley’s proprietary brand (meaning, the publisher owns it, as opposed to it being owned by a society), and the portfolio consists of 28 titles (including the just announced Advanced Oncology). The center of gravity of the portfolio is in the physical sciences and engineering — and particularly in materials science — with a small but growing footprint in the life and health sciences.

With Advanced, Wiley has been quietly building an enviable portfolio. The brand has flown a bit under the radar relative to more prominent in-house brands like Springer Nature’s Nature or Elsevier’s Cell. This is in part due to the relatively narrow coverage of the portfolio in the past and in part due to the Journal Impact Factors (JIFs) of the Advanced titles being a bit uneven. For example, Advanced Materials boasts a JIF of 26.8, which is in the ballpark of Nature Materials(38.5). However, Advanced Photonics Research’s JIF is only 3.9; respectable, to be sure, but far from that of Nature Photonics (32.9).

The expansion of the Advanced Portfolio in the life sciences underscores the growing importance of portfolio strategy. Wiley is pursuing a path well-trodden by other publishers. The idea is to use a collection of titles with clearly defined transfer pathways to publish as many papers of a certain quality level as possible. The Nature Portfolio remains the best example of this strategy (more on this below). While the Advanced Portfolio has been around for over 35 years, it has been an underleveraged asset in Wiley’s stable.

Speaking of the Nature portfolio, Springer Nature announced the launch of a new series called “Nature Progress.” The Nature Progress journals will borrow from the Nature Communications series in pairing academic editorial boards with in-house professional editors. Editorial board members will “handle manuscripts, and in-house editors will make the final decisions regarding publication.”

The Nature Progress titles will be fully open access (OA). The first two titles in the series have already been announced: Nature Progress Oncology and Nature Progress Brain Health. However, it is unclear to us here at The Brief where in the Nature portfolio the Progress journals are intended to be situated. Springer Nature intentionally slots journals in JIF “bands” to form a pyramid. Nature is at the top, followed by the various Nature Research journals (e.g., Nature Chemistry, Nature Physics, and Nature Cancer), followed by the Nature Communications series. Scientific Reports forms the base of this pyramid. Springer Nature no doubt has a particular “slot” in the pyramid in mind for these journals, perhaps between the Communications journals and Scientific Reports.

The launch of this new series is a further articulation of the portfolio strategy that Nature has perfected. Deborah Sweet, Executive Vice President, Journals, Nature Portfolio, is quoted as saying:

We saw the need for a new Nature Portfolio series from the authors who are already submitting to us. Through their publication behaviour as well as surveys we’ve done, our authors have communicated to us that they’d appreciate having another option within the Nature Portfolio journal family.

Additionally, we noticed that there is growth in some fields that we don’t think we can support effectively within the range of journals that we currently have. The new series, Nature Progress, addresses both these needs.

In other words, Springer Nature was receiving papers that they wished to publish but for which they did not have a home.

These two new portfolio expansions ratchet up the stakes for those publishers and societies without well-developed portfolio strategies of their own. The gravity well of a large, well-constructed portfolio is a hard place to escape.

MCP-orama

We wrote in October 2025 about how manifestos are like podcasts: everyone should have one. Model Context Protocol (MCP) seems poised to join this pantheon of must-haves with two initiatives in scholarly publishing: Silverchair’s Discovery Bridge MCP and the Scite MCP. Combined with Wiley’s AI Gateway release in October 2025, that brings the total to three significant infrastructure moves in less than six months.

Before unpacking how these initiatives differ, it is perhaps worth clarifying two terms that are increasingly conflated: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and Model Context Protocol (MCP). These terms are related but are talking about different things. In RAG models, publisher content is accessed when a user submits a query to ground or refine the generated response. This is also sometimes referred to as a “query” or “inference” based model.

That retrieval can occur in two ways. In some cases, the AI system searches content that has already been licensed and ingested.

In other cases, retrieval happens dynamically through live connections to external publisher systems. When a user creates a query, the AI tool reaches out to the publisher’s systems, evaluates access rights, and retrieves content in real time. This second mode is often referred to as “rights-aware retrieval” or “query-level licensing,” by which content is either accessed under existing entitlement, or triggers payment at the moment of use. While the terms vary widely, these licensing deals can be more publisher friendly than training deals because they honor existing entitlements (e.g., institutional subscriptions) and/or they provide incremental usage-based recurring revenue. The promise (hope?) is that query-based pricing and access models might align more naturally with the episodic or problem-oriented needs of corporate R&D and applied research environments.

MCP is an open standard that enables developers to build secure, two-way connections between their data sources and AI-powered tools. It is essentially a wrapper, or extra set of instructions, for an API (application programming interface) that allows AI systems to use them. MCPs are critical plumbing that enables rights-aware retrieval or query-level licensing at scale.

But as the three MCPs in our industry show, not all MCPs are the same.

Wiley: Publisher-Controlled MCP Endpoint

Wiley launched an official MCP server in October 2025, enabling real-time retrieval of approximately three million peer-reviewed articles. This MCP is available to users of several AI platforms including Claude, AWS Marketplace, Mistral’s Le Chat, and Perplexity.

The MCP creates a direct, query-based channel for Wiley’s portfolio (the content they publish, which may also include society content published by Wiley depending on the agreements between Wiley and each society).

More ambitiously, Wiley has also built the Wiley AI Gateway, a platform that allows other publishers to use Wiley’s MCP infrastructure. The Wiley AI Gateway is positioned as an intermediary between AI tools and the broader professional publishing ecosystem, handling technical transformation, rights management, and distribution on behalf of partner publishers.

Alongside this, Wiley has created a licensing sales service, Wiley AI Knowledge Nexus, which packages owned and partner content and licenses it to institutions (primarily in the corporate sector).

Notably, Wiley supports multiple licensing models — including a bring-your-own-license for users with existing institutional access — making it one of the most flexible and complete AI content plays in the industry to date.

Silverchair: Entitlement-Preserving Bridge for Publishers

Silverchair launched its Discovery Bridge in February 2026. Its MCP is leveraged to connect end users to scholarly content directly through AI platforms including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, while maintaining institutional access controls and opening new licensing opportunities.

Discovery Bridge integrates with existing publisher entitlement systems. By connecting directly with them, this solution maintains paywall integrity and respects subscription controls, while extending content reach. It automatically excludes retracted articles, ensuring only current, validated content reaches researchers.

Beyond serving traditional academic users, the Discovery Bridge creates opportunities for publishers to develop corporate content bundles and consumption-based licensing models.

Scite: Citation-Structured Retrieval and Trust Layer

Scite’s MCP (Scite is a Research Solutions company) is structurally different from the Wiley and Silverchair approaches. It is not a publisher-controlled or publishing platform MCP. Instead, Scite extends its existing indexing and “smart citation layer” into AI tools.

The Scite MCP provides researchers with access to scholarly content and Scite’s citation metadata directly inside AI tools. Scite classifies each citation as “supporting,” “mentioning,” or “contrasting” the findings it references. The goal of Scite’s MCP is to anchor AI-generated answers in specific research findings and provide contextual signals about how findings have been received in the literature.

From a publisher standpoint, Scite operates as a technology partner, allowing publishers to control which content is included, while managing authentication and entitlements. By default, only snippets are surfaced to large language models (LLMs), protecting the version of record. Full-text access remains publisher-controlled, with users routed through standard entitlement pathways.

The Scite MCP addresses a limitation of many AI tools: while LLMs can generate summaries, they struggle to distinguish well-supported findings from contested ones, and their coverage skews toward OA content.

More MCPs

The MCP ecosystem is broader than the three connectors mentioned here and is expanding rapidly. Claude for Life Sciences, for example, lists the MCP connectors with which it integrates — including Wiley’s Scholar Gateway (the consumer name for its AI Gateway), as well as familiar sources such as PubMed and Consensus.

There also are emerging MCP servers for institutional repositories, library discovery layers, and locally hosted research databases. Some researchers and librarians are not waiting for vendors at all, they are building or modifying their own MCP servers, running them locally, and chaining them together using “vibe coding” tools. The vibe-coded MCP servers are surely only a prelude to a manifesto (and a podcast).

Briefly Noted

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) — the largest research institute in the world — is reportedly preparing to institute caps on article processing charges (APCs) paid to journals. The policy is reported to target 30 high-fee OA journals according to reporting in Science, including Nature Communications, Cell Reports, and Science Advances. CAS-affiliated researchers will still be able to publish in expensive hybrid journals but will be required to opt for the free-to-publish route.

Wiley is the latest publisher to strike a licensing deal with OpenEvidence. The deal includes the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Cochrane Clinical Answers, and 400 Wiley journals and books. As we discussed last month in The Brief (Plunge, February 2026), OpenEvidence is valued at a staggering US$12 billion.

The American Chemical Society (ACS) and IEEE have signed a three-year memorandum of understanding to collaborate on STEM advancement. The partnership will explore “opportunities for joint initiatives, including co-hosted events, expert exchanges, collaborative communications, and the development of products and services that promote innovation across chemistry, engineering and related disciplines.” The size and prominence of these two organizations make this an interesting partnership to watch.

Speaking of society partnerships, Purpose-Led Publishing (PLP), launched in 2024, is a coalition of three mission-driven publishers: AIP Publishing, American Physical Society (APS), and IOP Publishing. The coalition recently announced that they are jointly hosting a network of 23 satellite hubs around the world to expand participation in the 2026 APS Global Physics Summit. The events, both in-person and online, aim to bring physicists together by removing the logistical and financial barriers associated with travel. This is a notable example of publishers collaborating and putting the needs of the community at the forefront.

Wiley announces the launch of Research Exchange Preprints. Wiley is not new to preprints as Authorea has hosted preprints for some time. A notice on the Authorea platform suggests that Research Exchange Preprints will be replacing Authorea next month. The new platform launches with some fireworks as ChemRxiv, co-owned by several notable chemistry societies, will reportedly be moving to the new platform.

Microsoft continues its push into clinical workflows with an update to Dragon Copilot. The company says the tool (which started as a kind of medical scribe application) now pulls together patient data, organizational information, and evidence-based content (it appears to be structured summaries) from sources like UpToDate and ClinicalKey, alongside literature from publishers like Wiley (the publisher of Cochrane) — surfaced inside the tool so as not to interrupt the workflow. The interesting aspect of this deal is that it augments existing institutional licenses. To access information from UpToDate or ClinicalKey, for example, the user must have an active license to those products.

Canadian pediatrics journal Paediatrics & Child Health says the case reports it has published for 25 years are, in fact, fiction. This is a bit of a stunner as the revelation comes from a reputable society, the Canadian Paediatric Society, and is published by Oxford University Press.

This classic XKCD cartoon panel on the fragility of technology infrastructure has now been rendered in interactive format.

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The normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks. —Susan Leigh Star, The Ethnography of Infrastructure