Briefly quoted: June 2026
A summary of recent announcements in scholarly publishing
Hello fellow journalologists,
If you’re reading this email from the other side of the pond, I wish you a very happy semiquincentennial anniversary celebration. Getting rid of the Brits was one of the best decisions you ever made.
I’m a big fan of The Rest is History podcast. This video — hosted by the New Yorker with the podcast’s hosts, Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland — is more entertaining and educational than the scholarly publishing news that follows. Perhaps watch the video instead?
If you’re still with me, as a reminder, the purpose of ‘Briefly quoted’ is to pull together, in one place, the previous month’s developments that are likely to be of interest to scholarly publishing professionals. This helps us to identify the trends and saves you valuable time.
The quotes may be brief, but the email is long. Today’s newsletter covers over 70 announcements. These are broken down into subsections, to help you to quickly find the topics that interest you the most.
Until next time,
James
Publishing integrity
Leaders in libraries and publishing launch the TrustMarc Initiative
A coalition of leaders from across the world’s libraries, publishers, and research-information community today launched the TrustMarc Initiative, an open, standards-driven framework that makes the trust behind digital content visible, verifiable, and portable — so anyone evaluating content — whether people or AI systems — can see who stands behind it, and why.
As AI accelerates the spread of content of uncertain origin, the signals people have long relied on — peer review, editorial standards, curation, institutional reputation — are scattered, hard to see, and increasingly easy to fake. TrustMarc brings those existing signals together into a single, shared, machine-readable framework.
JB: This is distinct from NISO trust markers, from FASEB’s Trust Seal, and from VeriXiv’s trust marker badges (see issue 150 for more information about those).
Nature published a series of articles this week about trust in science, including an editorial (The complex truth about trust in science) and a news feature (Have people stopped trusting science? The data tell a surprising story).
Digital Science launches Dimensions Citation Check API for self-citation risk screening
Digital Science, a leading technology company serving stakeholders across the research ecosystem, today announced Dimensions Citation Check – offering journal editors a practical, scalable tool to help safeguard research integrity.
Citation Check is an API-based editorial tool that automatically detects self-citation in manuscript submissions, evaluates each instance in context, and returns a clear risk rating to support editors’ decision-making before papers reach peer review.
River Valley Technologies enhances RVRi research integrity platform
The latest updates include checks for hidden text and LLM prompt-injection attempts, broken reference links, incorrect DOIs, publication year mismatches and citation mill indicators.
The update also includes improved retraction detection logic and enhanced reporting, including a summary dashboard and graphical representation of self-citation patterns, designed to help editors review findings more quickly and make more informed decisions.
AIP Publishing Partners with Hum to Strengthen Quality Control for AIP Conference Proceedings
Publishers face a critical challenge: delivering conference proceedings efficiently while upholding rigorous quality standards. AIP Conference Proceedings publishes at significant scale, with more than 100,000 published articles across more than 1,700 volumes. As these proceedings programs grow, publishers face a common challenge: applying consistent quality and integrity checks across submissions that originate from many conferences, organizers, editors, and review processes.
To address these challenges, AIP Publishing is partnering with Hum to bring Alchemist Review to AIP Conference Proceedings. This will add an AI-assisted quality-control layer that helps identify papers with critical scientific, integrity, and publication-readiness issues before they enter the published record.
MDPI rolls out AI-powered ethics checks across all submissions
MDPI, the open access publisher, has today announced the full deployment of its in-house AI-powered research integrity system, Ethicality. The tool is now being used to automatically screen all manuscripts submitted to the publisher.
Its roll-out marks a significant step forward in MDPI’s commitment to safeguarding the scientific record, improving efficiency, and supporting editorial decision making from initial submission through to the publication decision. Ethicality now screens in the region of 2,000 submissions from authors worldwide per day.
JB: MDPI, like other large publishers, has developed its own integrity checking tool rather than buying an off-the-shelf solution.
Integra and Silverchair Partner to Bring AI-Powered Manuscript Screening to ScholarOne
The partnership is designed to help scholarly publishers address growing editorial pressures caused by increasing submission volumes, evolving research integrity challenges, and the operational burden of manual manuscript screening. Through the integration, EditorialPilot will work seamlessly within the ScholarOne workflow, enabling editorial teams to perform automated technical, language, and integrity checks at the point of manuscript submission.
Using ScholarOne’s Relay API integration framework, EditorialPilot will provide editors with actionable screening insights directly within their existing workflow—helping journals identify potential concerns early, improve operational efficiency, and support informed editorial decision-making without disrupting established processes.
More than 10,000 manuscripts submitted to Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) journals have now been screened by Enago Reports, marking a significant milestone in the partnership focused on improving the manuscript submission experience for authors. Designed to streamline the submission process, Enago Reports automatically checks manuscripts for compliance with journal requirements, including structure, references, figures and tables, anonymisation, and other technical criteria. Authors can then correct any identified issues and re-upload their files before submission and editorial assessment.
ACS Refreshes its Guidelines to the Ethical Publication of Chemical Research
To reflect the evolving research and publishing landscape, ACS Publications has undertaken a comprehensive overhaul of the ACS Ethical Guidelines to Publication of Chemical Research. The revised guidelines clearly outline expectations for ethical conduct, covering key areas such as data integrity, image and figure preparation, authorship criteria, peer review responsibilities, citation practices, and the disclosure and use of AI and other advanced tools. Together, these updates promote consistency, clarity, and accountability throughout the publication process.
JB: I covered this in issue 150 of the Journalology newsletter.
Nature expands Registered Reports across all disciplines
Nature is expanding its Registered Reports format across all the disciplines covered by the journal, including natural, social and clinical sciences, engineering and public health. Previously, the format was limited to cognitive neuroscience and the behavioural and social sciences, and largely to confirmatory research.
