Briefly quoted: May 2026
A summary of recent announcements in scholarly publishing
Hello fellow journalologists,
This is the second time I’ve sent you a ‘Briefly quoted’ newsletter (you can read the April issue here).
As a reminder, the purpose of ‘Briefly quoted’ is to pull together, in one place, the previous month’s announcements and developments that are likely to be of interest to scholarly publishing professionals. Monitoring the news wires can be like drinking from a fire hose; there’s value, I believe, in being able to see a month’s worth of developments in one place as it’s easier to spot the trends, and to monitor opportunities and threats.
The core Journalology newsletter, by contrast, picks out the most important stories and analyses them in depth (archive here). The Jist summarises how news outlets have been covering scholarly communication (archive here).
Today’s newsletter covers over 60 announcements broken down into 14 subsections, so you can quickly find the topics that interest you the most.
Until next time,
James
Peer review and editorial process
The Numbers Behind the Noise: What Our 2026 Peer Review Report Shows
That question is where the 2026 Future of Peer Review Report begins. Before accepting a crisis narrative that benefits publishers, vendors, and funders in different and often contradictory ways, the report asks for evidence. What the report finds is more complicated, and (hopefully) more useful, than a simple alarm.
JB: I covered this report in issue 149:
New IOP Publishing tool detects duplicate peer reviews in push against reviewer fraud
Duplicate peer reviews (where the same reviewer report is sent for multiple submissions) are problematic because they fail to provide a unique and critical assessment of a manuscript, making the peer review unreliable. The most egregious examples of this are “review mills”, organisations churning out fake reviews, often to inflate citations for a paying customer. Until now, such patterns in reviewer reports have been difficult to identify, limiting publishers’ ability to take timely action. The Duplicate Review Checker (DRC) changes this by automatically flagging duplicate review activity immediately and directly to editorial teams, enabling early interventions to safeguard the integrity of peer review.
Nature is expanding Registered Reports to all the fields in which we publish
Until now, submissions for Registered Reports were considered only for confirmatory research — essentially types of study that test hypotheses — and only in cognitive neuroscience and the behavioural and social sciences. From now on, we will welcome Registered Reports across the fields in which we publish, extending beyond hypotheses-testing studies to include those that, for example, gather large amounts of data or compare scientific methods.
I’m excited to announce that as of today we are officially releasing “QED for Grants” for everyone. What started off as an extension of our existing paper review platform, grew in the last few months to an entirely new design. We’ve been working like crazy on this, and although we have more things we want to add in the (very near) future, we decided to release our AI for grants NOW, earlier than planned. It’s not perfect, no AI is, but for the first time, when I run my own grants through q.e.d Science, I feel it gets the research, finds real problems, and gives me very useful feedback that I can implement before submission.
