STM NEWSROOM

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…

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.

On March 25, President Trump announced the first 13 appointments to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), which may contain up to 24 appointees. Most of the named advisors come from the tech world and industry, with only one university scientist, UC Santa Barbara physicist John Martinis. PCAST historically has drawn significantly from…

STM has expressed support for Congressional efforts to legislate on AI transparency, with several bills proposed to require AI developers to disclose the use of copyrighted material. The TRAIN Act grants rightsholders the ability to petition courts to subpoena developers to release generative AI training data. The CLEAR Act would require generative AI developers to disclose, available via a…

Following the call for evidence on the ERA Act open between 6 August and 10 September 2025, the EU Commission released a summary of stakeholders’ responses. A fragmented copyright landscape, the lack of standardised metadata and interoperable data infrastructures, inequities arising from APCs, dominance of English in scientific publishing, reliance on commercial publishers and restrictive contractual practices…