International mobility has long been framed as a hallmark of academic success. A postdoctoral stint in Europe, a fellowship in North America, or an exchange program in Asia is often seen as both a professional milestone and a rite of passage. The benefits are undeniable: exposure to cutting-edge facilities, immersion in new scientific cultures, and access to broader collaboration networks.

In my last blog post for Upstream, I noted that there were some potential issues with, and good alternatives to, the NIH plan to cap grant spending on article processing charges. One of my suggestions was that the NIH put its plan out for public comment so they could draw from community input in their final policy. Thankfully, the NIH did just that and the public can submit comments on the plan until 15 September 2025.

Recently, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced it will cap the amount of direct funding support that researchers can spend on paying for article processing charges, or APCs. These fees are increasingly used by publishers for their revenue streams and makes researcher contributed articles available to read for free via "gold" open access.

This blog post is an accompaniment for two recent presentations: “ Not playing at the edges, welcoming disruptive change ” and “ A Scholarly Communication landscape scan and update ” for which the slides are available . How do we make sense of the implications of current geopolitical, financial, and technological volatility?

The increasingly hostile attitude of the new U.S. government towards science and academia leaves many of us deeply concerned— if not outright alarmed. In an effort to better understand the unfolding situation and navigate its potential impacts, we provide an overview of five types of threats, each supported by links to documented sources.

[Author's Note: This is Version 2 of this Editorial Blog Post. Version 1 was openly reviewed through MetaROR and this version reflects changes made as a result of those reviews. The response to reviewers is here.] Academia is undergoing a rapid transformation characterized by exponential growth of scholarly outputs.

A few months back, Upstream editor Martin Fenner suggested that I submit my Upstream blog post titled, Drinking from the Firehose? Write More and Publish Less, for peer-review as a sort of experiment for Upstream through MetaROR. MetaROR, a relative newcomer to the scholarly communication community, provides the review and curate steps in the "publish-review-curate" model for meta-research.

The Collaborative Metadata Enrichment Taskforce (COMET) has released a Community Call to Action, inviting organizations and individuals to contribute resources (funding, expertise, metadata, and infrastructure) to support the first phase of a community-driven infrastructure for making persistent identifier (PID) metadata better and more complete.

The global scientific community is moving toward a more inclusive and open approach.In Europe, Plan S has transformed European research by mandating immediate open access to publicly funded studies, fostering greater equity and visibility for scientific work. Open Research Europe is expanding, providing a Europe-wide venue for freely accessible research.

In recent years, interoperability has become an important concept in the field of research data management.  Discussions about interoperability have taken place in published articles and numerous presentations [1] [2], and several interoperability standards have been developed [3], [4], [5].  The term has been applied, among other things, to data, metadata and research tools.

There is much to celebrate when it comes to recent developments in scholarly communication and research assessment. The scholarly communication landscape shows many promising initiatives, including a growing use of preprint services, open access repositories, and open peer review platforms, as well as an increasing interest in more equitable scholarly publishing models such as diamond open access and Subscribe to Open.