STM NEWSROOM

Through December 26, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) will be taking “input from all interested parties on Federal policy updates that aim to accelerate the American scientific enterprise, enable groundbreaking discoveries, and ensure that scientific progress and technological innovation benefit all Americans.” The Request for Information (RFI) indicates that this is part…

The impact of the federal shutdown on the US research enterprise was significant, particularly coming on the back of a year of turbulence (grant cancellations, indirect cost cuts, etc.). As noted by a researcher in AIP’s FYI report, ‘It’s not like we’re done and back to normal, because grant reviews have not happened, new batches of funding have not…

The EU Commission is considering legislative changes to the research exception from copyright and the introduction of a EU-wide Secondary Publication Right (self-archiving, potentially with zero embargo and extending to the VoR). They are analysing potential economic effects of such measures on publishers, and are collecting views through a survey through 1 December. It is very…

The European Commission is gathering stakeholder feedback on the upcoming European Research Area (ERA) Act, expected for Q3 2026, through a questionnaire open until 5 January 2026. Questions related to OA mandates and rights retention strategies are included under the section ‘Free circulation of scientific knowledge’, including the option ‘the applicable legal frameworks should be reviewed to improve legal…

The work programme of the EU Commission provides an overview of all that the institution will be working on in the coming year. For example, the ERA Act is included under ‘New initiatives’. Besides what was inserted in the programme, it is also interesting to note that, despite the evaluation of the Copyright Directive of 2019 being planned for next year,…

The Australian government decided not to proceed with a text and data mining (TDM) exception to facilitate AI training. Such a recommendation was included in an interim report by the Productivity Commission over the summer, and may still be included in the final report due in December. The Copyright & AI Reference Group (CAIRG) has also been reactivated…

Our application to the Observatory of the European Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) has been accepted! STM will join a network of IP professionals and have the opportunity to participate in and contribute to the working groups on IP in the digital world, enforcement and economics and statistics.

The SAFE Research Act (Securing American Funding and Expertise from Adversarial Research Exploitation Act of 2025) was included in the House of Representatives’ version of the Fiscal Year (FY) 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which passed the House last month. This legislation is one of the few pieces of legislation that must pass the US Congress…

Stakeholders are invited to respond to a questionnaire about key aspects that the ERA Act (planned Q3 2026) should cover. The most relevant section for STM is 3.2. on “Ensuring the free circulation of researchers and scientific knowledge”, which includes questions about barriers to access and re-use of scientific publications and (both legislative and non-legislative) ways to…

Article 50 of the AI Act establishes obligations for transparent labelling of AI-operated systems and AI-generated content. Publishers’ use of AI in the publishing process is very likely to fall under exemptions from such obligations, but translations remain a grey area and good practices are encouraged.