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STM is pleased to welcome two new colleagues who joined the team in spring 2026. Georgiana Svensmark-Baciu joins as Senior Manager, Public Affairs EU, based in Brussels. She brings a strong background in publishing, open science, and strategic communications, most recently at Elsevier where she led the global launch of AI products for researchers and coordinated…

On 3 April, China’s state-owned Central Television reported on CAS’s new policy ceasing funding for approximately 30 fully open access journals with article publishing charges (APCs) above US$5,000. Limitations would apply to use of academic and national funding and would not preclude authors from self-funding to publish in these journals. It is important to note…

A district Court in the Netherlands sided with the national tax authority and stated that Open Access publication costs must be charged at the higher VAT rate of 21% (rather than the lower rate of 9%, which applies to purchasing material to read). The prevalent view of national tax authorities is that the VAT regime on electronic publications…

As noted previously, OMB has reportedly been slow to release funding for federal agencies to issue grants. In addition, staff reductions across the government have increased delays in grant review and approval. This has led to a significant reduction in grant approvals and disbursements, as one can see for NSF and NIH based on public information available. Last…

On April 15, the House Science Committee’s Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight held a hearing on “The State of Scientific Publishing: Assessing Trends, Emerging Issues, and Policy Considerations.” The hearing was announced to discuss a broad set of issues related to “challenges facing the scholarly publishing ecosystem, including the integrity of peer review, conflicts of interest,…

At the Zhongguancun Forum on 27 March, Huang Qi, Director of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC), announced that ISTIC and the Zhejiang Lab have jointly developed the overall framework for a World Science Citation Database. The initiative aims to build a cross-lingual, panoramic research infrastructure.

On 26 March, the EU Commission’s publishing platform Open Research Europe officially launched at CERN, which will take over operation of the platform this autumn. Only researchers from participating countries will be eligible: Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. All of these countries have several Transformative Agreements in place.

The Trump administration has proposed significant cuts to many science agencies in its budget request for fiscal year 2027. Details on the proposals can be found in AIP’s FYI newsletter and the AAAS Budget Analysis. Note that Congress often ignores the details of a budget request, as they did with last year’s similar proposed cuts. The budget request…

After many years of tax exemption, the Chinese government has reintroduced VAT on scholarly materials at a rate of 10.8%.

On 27 March, the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS Library) announced it will cease updating and releasing its Journal Ranking from 2026, clarifying that any ranking released by other organisations has no connection to the CAS Library.