STM NEWSROOM

Implementation of “Schedule Policy/Career” (formerly Schedule F) is reclassifying thousands of federal roles and removing traditional civil service protections. Recent actions have shifted roughly 8,000 positions into the new category, making them effectively at‑will and potentially more exposed to political direction. Office of Personnel Management guidance specifies that employees with “substantive participation and discretionary authority…

The U.S. Office of Management and Budget’s proposal to overhaul the Uniform Guidance—recasting it as a government‑wide “Uniform Grants Regulation” (UGR)—continues to generate significant concern across the research community. The 29 May proposal would vastly reshape requirements governing the award, oversight, and termination of federal grants. Stakeholder engagement has been substantial, with the public docket already receiving tens…

On 10 June, the European Parliament’s STOA panel (on the future of science and technology) held a session highlighting AI, system-level misaligned incentives, and research culture as key factors behind the rise in research integrity issues. Several speakers encouraged a focus on the reasons motivating misconduct rather than on post-fact enforcement, although the importance of…

This week, STM is in Beijing for the PubTech Conference and STM APAC Conference, convening publishers, technologists, librarians, and researchers from across the Asia-Pacific region around openness, integrity, and inclusion. Alongside the event, STM consultants Shuai Yan and Mark Robertson, together with STM China Chapter chair Eric Na, have published a detailed report on Phase II…

The European Commission is exploring methods for reserving TDM/AI rights, with a view to making the most mature ones mandatory for AI companies to read and respect under the AI Act’s Code of Practice. A first workshop took place on 2 June, with TDMRep emerging as the protocol with the most support among rightsholders. STM…

Starting in 2027, Australia will associate to Pillar II of Horizon Europe, covering societal challenges across digital, industry and space; climate, energy and mobility; and food, bioeconomy and agriculture. Under this arrangement, Australian entities will no longer need to self-fund or rely on narrow exceptions, and will instead be treated as ‘eligible entities’ from an…

On Thursday 11 June, the Cypriot Presidency of the EU Council reached a compromise proposal for the next EU budget, in response to the Commission’s proposal. The Council’s compromise proposes a 2% cut to the Commission’s overall budget and includes a Research & Innovation allocation (€148.6 billion for Horizon Europe) that is 15% lower than the Commission’s…

In March, NIH released a ‘Framework for the NIH-Wide Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2027-2031 (FY27-FY31)’, outlining three priority areas for NIH to ‘advance its mission to support research in pursuit of fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems, and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and…

Directory of Open Access Journals and Society of China University Journals have announced a new partnership aimed at increasing the visibility and discoverability of high-quality Chinese open access journals both within China and internationally. The two organisations will continue collaborating on the DOAJ China Day events previously held in 2023 and 2025. DOAJ now indexes over 550 Chinese journals.

STM participates in a working group that the EU COM runs on AI in science, which last month published the third version of ‘Living guidelines on the responsible use of generative AI in research’.  Further thematic working groups have now been set up to consider updates on the use of AI in evaluation of proposals,…