STM NEWSROOM

With the European Accessibility Act going into effect this June, it’s time to make sure you’re in compliance. Silverchair hosted a webinar exploring what publishers can do to prepare, illustrating that true accessibility is not just about compliance — it’s about creating content that can genuinely reach and serve all potential users. Catch the replay (and transcript) here.

The third draft of the EU’s AI Code of Practice — the last one we’ll be able to provide feedback on before the final version is published by 1 May — is now available, and unfortunately, it has been severely weakened. All of the provisions were watered down and there are no new gains in this version,…

Three French publishing organisations sued Meta last month, accusing the company of parasitically using their members’ copyrighted works without permission to train its generative AI models. This marks France’s first major AI copyright dispute, and it could set important legal precedents for both French and EU case law. The lawsuit, brought before the Paris Judicial Court by the Syndicat…

Research Commissioner Zaharieva, the EU Parliament and EU countries have all confirmed their support for a stand-alone Framework Programme 10 (FP10) with an increased budget. However, the decision of whether to continue with FP10 or incorporate the R&I grants in the new Competitiveness Compass Fund hasn’t been finalised. It may depend directly on EU Commission President Von der Leyen and her…

The pace and scale of developments make it difficult to report on every change of impact in the US. Here are some key recent developments: The Senate confirmed Michael Kratsios as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Dr Jayanta Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health. This should mean that we’ll hear very soon about further…

The US narrowly averted a government shutdown this weekend with a Continuing Resolution (CR) that funds the government for the rest of the fiscal year (through 30 September 2025). While CR legislation generally keeps funding flat, the bill includes several provisions that eliminate grants and provide more authority to the administration to carry out additional…

The Trump administration has continued its attack on the federal workforce and is proposing sweeping changes to federal science funding, creating significant disruptions across the US research ecosystem that will impact scholarly publishing. Since our last newsletter, the administration has, amongst other things: Continued staff firings across the government Announced plans to cancel hundreds of…

On 19 February, the ITRE (Industry, Research and Energy) Committee voted with a strong majority on their position of the 10th Framework Programme. The EU Parliament is asking for a standalone FP10 with an increased budget of €200 billion and governance that is more expert-driven than top-down. The position mentions the need to balance openness and research security, the benefits…

The European Commission has established a living repository to support AI literacy, a requirement of the AI Act that took effect last month. AI providers and deployers have to ensure AI literacy among their staff and users, regardless of the risk level of the AI models or systems they use. The non-exhaustive but regularly updated repository is…

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) requires every e-book to have a description of its accessibility features. Confused about how to add this accessibility metadata to your publications? AIE and Fondazione LIA are offering an online training course that will get you up to speed on how to distribute and effectively display accessibility metadata throughout the publishing supply chain….